Every single day, the Internet sees an incomprehensible amount of traffic. Any question that you have can be answered in seconds with a few keystrokes on a computer. With more and more people turning to the web for their answers, it only makes sense that businesses are focusing more of their efforts there, too. Your business is designed to be the solution to some problem, after all, so presenting yourself well online is a great idea to bolster your business’s reputation. That’s why today, we’re talking through the 5 biggest reasons that you should invest in a professional website.

Reach a Wider Audience

Having a physical storefront for your business is great, but there are a few flaws that always  come up when dealing with a building. You’ll have to close at some point to allow employees to go home, there will be electrical and plumbing bills to pay, and customers will have to actually be in that building with you to actually interact with your business. Moving online, however, presents an opportunity to change that. With a website, you no longer have to close your doors for the night; the internet is up and running 24/7, which means that you are maximizing the potential time that customers can visit your company. Additionally, you can reach a significantly larger geographic area than a physical store could, because you don’t actually need to make a sale face to face when dealing online. Take Amazon, for example. Before Amazon became a massive success, a customer that wanted to make a purchase has to go to a store or a mall, which involves driving and more work on their end. Additionally, a mall in Indiana would never be able to sell to customers that weren’t in Indiana at the time. With a website, however, our business that is located in Iowa is able to service customers across the United States and even the globe, all thanks to our usage of a professionally built website. This is a tremendous benefit, as reaching a wider audience means that we are interacting with more potential customers and can increase our profit margins. But once we’ve reached the wider audience, how do we use a website to draw them in?

Interact with Your Audience in New Ways

Once a customer visits your website, the challenge is just beginning. You may have gotten them on the hook, but now you have to utilize your website to reel them in and turn them into a supporter of your company. The best way to do that is by building your website with customer interaction in mind. There are countless ways to do this, and your business’s opportunities and ideas will always vary, but at the end of the day, the goal has to be to make the customer feel comfortable and interested in your products or services.

There are a few different strategies that we recommend using for interacting with customers. One of the most successful and useful tools that a company site can include is a blog. Blogs are helpful in numerous ways. First, they help to increase Search Engine Optimization, which is a topic that has been covered multiple times in previous blog posts. Another huge benefit of blogs, however, is their ability to interact with and entertain visitors. If you create a blog that can attract the attention of a visitor to your site, then you are inviting them to stay and look around. An effective blog can keep customers coming back again and again, looking for the next update or piece of advice. From there, the task of turning them into a customer is much easier, as you’ve started to build a rapport with the customer. And as we all know, our business’s goal is always to increase our sales.

Boost Sales

Now that we’ve reached a wider range of customers and drawn them into our site, it’s time to make the sale and build our profits. Having an online presence can boost sales tremendously thanks to the ease of online shopping. When in a physical store, there are pitfalls that can arise and hamper our ability to make a sale. A certain good may run out, making it unable to be displayed or purchased. A customer may feel more frugal with their physical money, making them less likely to follow through with a purchase. Or maybe a customer has no way of transporting a larger purchase home with them, limiting their options for what they buy from you. 

All of these problems can arise in any single transaction that takes place in your store, but luckily, having a digital marketplace can alleviate all of these concerns. As long as you use high quality pictures of your goods or services, then a customer will know exactly what they’re buying. Inventory doesn’t affect online sales nearly as much as it does physical ones, which helps to remove some of the stress of stocking items constantly. Additionally, online shoppers tend to make more purchases with less consideration, which will help you earn more of those “in-the-moment” purchases that can really boost profits. Finally, with the proper arrangements made for delivering goods, customers should have no problem pulling the trigger on larger purchases, which helps you to sell some of that inventory that can really take up space in your storage. Overall, being online allows you to boost your sales considerably by reaching a wider audience, pulling their attention in and interacting with them, and finally convincing them to make the purchase thanks to the ease of the internet. But a website can do more than just make sales for your business.

Build Your Brand‍

Your business is more than just a ledger of sales. You have a brand identity that is unique to your company, and this identity is hugely important to bringing in customers and keeping them. Branding is a topic that we will never stop talking about in these blog posts, because it will always prove to be one of the most important aspects of your business. But how can your website help you to build your brand identity? Well, think about how your physical storefront has design features that relate to your brand identity. You may have your walls painted the color of your logo. You may play music that complements your business’s identity. Whatever design you’ve made in your physical building, it will prove even easier and more effective to do so online.

Your website should be an integral part of your business. From the second that a visitor lands on your website, they should start to understand your business and grow familiar with it. Stay consistent with your branding, invite your customers to learn more, and you’ll see that they’ll appreciate the effort. That last sentence may seem confusing at first, but let’s break it down and really understand exactly how our websites show our branding. We want to always stay consistent. Every page of our website should follow the same theme, using the same color scheme, and keeping navigation buttons and menus in the same place. This will help keep customers comfortable, which we want. The more comfortable they are with our brand, the better our relationship with them will be in the long run. Now that the customer is comfortable and is growing familiar with us, we want to show them exactly what our brand is. What sets us apart from others? Include any written content or pictures that you’d use in a promotional image early in the website. This will help your visitor to learn exactly who you are as a business, which will once again strengthen your brand identity and your relation to a customer. Building your brand identity and sharing it with the world is exactly what websites are built for, and your business will appreciate the massive boost that comes with a strong online presence.

So now that we know why we need a website, how do we go about creating one? Well, we here at Digifox Studios don’t just write blogs about web design. Our web development team is always looking for their next project, whether that be a complete website remodeling or a simple graphic design project. Whatever your digital needs are, we can help you take care of it. Our blog post 5 Ways We Can Work Together lists some of our most common packages, and if you have a project in mind, simply click the “Start a Project” button at the top of the page to get started with us!