This may be the case. And I’m glad to see you’re making the right strides in having an online presence for your business. You’ve got the business idea, you offer a brilliant service or products and you’ve realised that online marketing is a superb resource for reaching a huge potential customer base. You’ve had your HR Manager’s graphic design student son or daughter to knock you up a basic site with your company logo, contact details and a brief outline of what you do, from their bedroom. And that’s it…the enquiries should come flying in thick and fast, right? And all it’s cost you is a crate of beer.
It is rare for most SME’s to think they have the necessary budget to invest in a strong website or marketing in general for that matter. We are all aware that large businesses and organisations are conducting business on a scale that we can only dream about. (Although one day, the Happy Bunch are all convinced that Mr Saatchi and co will be quaking in their boots when Happy Creative is famous for global campaigns..!) However, what we do know better than most at this current moment in time is the small business.
We understand that small business owners are striving to survive and grow during these incredibly tough times and we know how hard it can be. As with our clients, we depend in some respects on potential clients finding our website, liking what they see, and getting in touch to see how we can help them. Because of our understanding of this, we take our clients’ goals and needs very seriously, and know that they are entrusting us with something extremely important when they come to us for website design and development.
It is a common misconception amongst decision makers when thinking about setting up a website that you will simply put up a site and that’s it. Imagine it in this respect: A shop owner does not build up their store, stock it full of their products and then leave it at that, never to re-stock the shelves. Having your business online, whether it is solely an internet company, or a ‘shop window’ that is purely informational, a website needs to be in a constant state of development in order to have a chance of climbing up the search engines. This can be achieved by uploading regular and fresh content, adding news or blog articles that are industry related, new resources for your customers and interesting features such as Social Media updates to make your website useful to visitors. Therefore, your site should technically always be maintained, which means you need a quality web designer to ensure that this will be possible from the outset.
So, we go back to my original point – why shouldn’t you just have a ‘build it yourself’ or ‘off the shelf’ website?
To put it simply, the main reason is search engine rankings. These basic websites are ok if your aim is to simply have an online presence to outline your company if a user types in your exact URL. Anything other than that and it’s a complete waste of time. There are countless programmes and ways of creating these websites and they are cheap as chips (although having bought a chippy tea the other night, even chips aren’t that cheap anymore!). Anyway, the point is that these sites act like they are cheap. They are mass-produced, and therefore you end up with a site that not only doesn’t fit your needs, but which has also not been created to meet the needs of varying customers or the search engines. Without the search engines, you will inevitably not create the traffic you need which leads to a lack of genuine enquiries.
And this is where the problems get even worse. Website owners then look to SEO or PPC support, and end up paying three or four times the amount of the original website PER MONTH to try and encourage higher search engine rankings.
At Happy Creative, we hear about this a lot of from potential new clients, and more often than not, will have to recommend scrapping the template site and starting afresh with a bespoke site, custom built for the exact needs of your small business.
However, there are also an incredible amount of small businesses out there that have little or no web presence whatsoever, which, as a digital marketer, I find astonishing. I can’t recommend enough starting the ball rolling by creating an online platform for your business, and making sure you get it right from the start. Whatever your business is, you should be spending your time working on that business. Investing in quality marketing, rather than trying to save on it by doing it yourself is proven to be better and much more cost-effective in the long run. Don’t be tempted by ‘build it yourself’ websites when it comes to something as important as your online presence.
If you’re reading as far as this, then thank you for bearing with me on this. Taking all of the above into consideration, our best advice for SME’s is to at least meet with a proven web design and/or marketing agency to discuss the options available to you, before you simply pay for a website that ‘looks ok and has your details on it’.
For a reasonable investment, you will end up with a professional, appealing, custom-built website that has been tailored specifically for both your business as well as your customers, and will also be designed and built to cater for up-to-date SEO protocols. And if a Content Management System (CMS) is the route that would work best for your business, you will be able to keep your website regularly updated with content, news, announcements, products and social media, and therefore not have to rely on a web designer to make changes for you at additional costs.
Creating websites and digital marketing for small businesses without a doubt requires a completely different approach than designing for large organisations. At Happy, our process involves face to face meetings with our client, discussing the requirements, talking through the brief and creating a piece of online work that really works in terms of getting results on your bottom line. All things considered, the internet is growing at a frightening rate, and whatever your business, you will find yourself competing with countless numbers of other websites all offering virtually the same thing. Feeling lost in the crowd should not be the sense you get from your website; rather it should be what it does for your customers that makes it shine out amongst a sea of others.
As with everything we do, our digital clients are Happy ones, and we love the recommendations we get. We hope that we get the chance to discuss any website queries you may have, and possibly have the opportunity of helping your business grow, so one day you might be as big as you imagined.
Simon Brooke is a Director at Happy Creative, a full service marketing agency based in Blackpool, Lancashire. To learn more or contact us, please email simon@happy-creative.co.uk , Tweet @happy_creative or call 01253 446933. www.happy-creative.co.uk
