So you’ve come online to see how you can get your business on the web, but before you do so you’d like to know the benefits of marketing your business on the internet, and why so many local businesses are now turning to the internet to grab a slice of the pie.
1. To Make A Presence
Roughly 1.97 BILLION people (as of June 2010) now have access to the internet. Can your business really afford to ignore a market so large. I’m sure your competitors aren’t.
2. To Make Your Products Accessible To Everyone
Nowadays if you can’t provide customers with a way to shop online without physically having to come in and buy your products, they’ll simply go elsewhere to someone who does provide the service. That’s a lot of money you’re leaving on the table simply due to not having a presence online (the majority now shop online).
3. Quicker Updates
A lot of times product or business information will change before it even goes out to the customers, which then means you have a ton of expensinve worthless paperwork that can serve no purpose but to doodle on. With an Internet Store it’s as simple as updating a few little details behind the scenes and have the information appear almost instantaneously for the customer. There is no paper in existence that can match that type of flexibility!
4. More Exposure, Less Costs
I’m sure as savvy business owners you’re all aware of the costs involved in owning, running and supplying an offline business, and that’s not including the costs of marketing offline either! With a website you simply pay a one time fee for a website design and a management system (which are now a dime a dozen), and then the small fee for your webhosting on a monthly or annual basis. Some business owners have even removed themselves completely from the offline world to save costs and work exclusively online only (think Amazon.com).
Best of all, with a bit of search engine optimization you can be listed on search engine listings such as Google and Yahoo for key local terms to further increase exposure online, and if that’s too much work and you’d rather see quicker results, you can pay on a small pay per click basis to be listed on the side of Google, Yahoo or Bing in their featured listings (costs can be as little as a few cents per click!).
The next few reasons speak for themselves, and as such will not have a description under them:
5. Create a 24hr Service
The Internet operates 24/7 365 days of the year providing information and service to your customers without you having to be there.
6. Availability of Pictures, sounds and film files
Using Multi-media to promote your business and attract customers is easy to achieve on the web at a fraction of the cost of TV or Radio advertising
7. To Reach A More Targetted Demographic
You can laser target your demographic market using advertising vehicles such as facebook, plenty of fish and google
8. To Answer Frequently Asked Questions
Feedback and questions cna be posted online to help your customers and enable you to improve your service and products
9. Allow Easier Customer Feedback
10. To Better Serve Your Local Market
Being online means you can serve anyone either nationally, or worldwide. But what if there are enough local internet users in your area to make it worth your while? For example, New York, London, and Boston to name a few. All 3 have local internet users to the tune of millions.
Do your research check competitors and high quality sites for ideas on how to build your internet presence.
