Summary: Right now, someone’s looking for a product or service you offer and your website might just save the day.
Why build a website for your business in 2024 when everyone is on social media?
For many businesses, the debate isn’t whether to do website or social media. The goal is to find th sweet spot between the two platforms (generally speaking) and make them work together to achieve your aim.
Other types of businesses such as influencers or freelancers might be just fine running well on social media. If your audience is on X, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, why “waste” your time setting up your own website? These guys already provide a platform, why not ride on it? It all just depends on the type of business you run.
When Only Social Media Won’t Work
I can identify one problem for businesses that shouldn’t rely solely on social media for their growth:
Your message could be diluted or demoted by the prevailing mood on social media.
First, you should have control over your message such that you can minimize noise and misrepresentation in communicating your value to your audience.
Asides control, you need to have a stable medium online where you can build and strengthen trust with your customers.
Not to take any more time, let’s see some of the benefits you can gain when your website is alive and well online.
5 Reasons You Should Build a Website for Your Business in 2024
Here are five reasons you should still build a website for your business in 2024.
1. Your website is a unique space for your brand & business
Your website is your own unique space, your platform, a home base for your business and brand.
In the ever shifting world of online media, your message could sometimes get diluted or mixed up within the context of social media.
But your website can remain a stable source of information for your audience. You can tell your unique story in a structured way.
To put it another way, your website acts as your online headquarters, while your social media channels act as branches or marketing outlets where first contact may be made with your products or services.
2. People find and visit websites when they search online
Your website announces your presence on search engines, Google, Bing, and others.
Yes, Google also displays results from social media, but the top results usually favour websites.
Furthermore, having your website found in relevant search engine results helps people solve for different things: some are looking for a product or service while others want to verify or validate information.
You build a good reputation, in essence, trust. And people buy trust.
Of course, some dubious people also go at great lengths to create good, structured websites but typically wouldn’t. It’s far easier to create a social handle than a website.
More on trust in the next point.
3. Your website helps build trust with your audience
Building a website for your business earns you trust. People respect your effort at building a website; you’re perceived as a serious business or brand. You’re seen as authentic.
This happens because your website often provides more information about you, your products or services, all within a context you can control, without any spillover or transfer of another platform’s reputation.
For instance, some folks have left Twitter because of cyber-bullying instances, while others stay off social media to remain focused on their daily tasks.
Where fraud and cynicism abounds, this trust helps your audience make better decisions to engage with you.
4. You can Better Identify & Understand Your Audience
You can identify and understand your audience better using analytics integrated with your website (yes, you got me. I do have a bias for websites because you can also understand your audience using social media audience analytics).
You can achieve this when you integrate your website with analytics software like Google Analytics to gain these insights.
You can drill down to the location, what keywords or search phrases brought visitors in, the type of device used, and the time of the day.
Your website analytics will also tell you which page(s) have the most visits, how long visitors stayed on the pages before moving on, and so on.
All of these used properly will help you better understand and serve your audience well which, by the way, is the heart of business.
5. Your website amplifies your marketing, sales, & revenue
Obvious, isn’t it? Your website plays an important role in your marketing. It provides information and resources for consumption or sales. And by extension leads to increased revenue for your business.
You should use your website to geberate leads, and build email lists to engage customers, and open up opportunities for new or repeat sales.
MailChimp, SendInBlue, and Aweber are examples of email marketing solutions you can use.
You can also ramp up your sales by setting up your website with sales and payment capabilities.
Woocommerce and Shopify are two popular e-commerce technologies while Paystack and Flutterwave are two payment options used by many merchants.
So to wrap this up:
Do you need to build a website for your business?
- You need a website for your business if you want to have control over your own online space.
- You need to have a stable source of information for your audience.
- You want to run an e-commerce store showing all your products and services.
Who might not need a website?
- You don’t need a website if your audience is exclusively on social media.
- You don’t want the extra effort or expense in maintaining a website.
- You’re happy to publish your writing on social media and other publishing sites like Medium.
While some may consider websites relics of an outgoing era, the advantages of creating and maintaining a website for your marketing are worth the effort.
Like the Scriptures say, you should do the one without ignoring the other: build a website for your business and complement with relevant social media channels.
Hope you got some useful information from this post. We’ll be happy to hear from you. Send us a message to discuss your website plans today.
Reference: https://www.neonhive.co.nz/blog/are-websites-still-relevant
