Why Your Offline Business Needs an Online Presence
May 19, 2009
If you have a storefront business, commonly called a brick-and-mortar business, you may not see any reason to jump onto the online bandwagon. Your customers buy your services and products in person by coming to your place of business, and you’ve never had any trouble finding new customers. Besides, you don’t necessarily want to sell anything online.
What’s the point of having a website?
Brick-and-mortar businesses can’t ignore their online presence in favor of their storefronts. There are some serious benefits to an online presence that you may not be aware of – and almost all of them bring in more business for you in the real world off the web.
Your Customers Need to Find You
If you have a solid clientele, you may not be concerned about finding new customers. The trouble is that your new customers are they’re pretty concerned about finding you.
The number-one way people find businesses in their area today is through an online search. Increasingly, people turn to search engines like Google for the names of businesses that sell what they want. They search for addresses, phone numbers, store hours, and more.
If your business isn’t showing up when potential customers start searching for what you sell, you’re losing those customers to the competition. They say you can’t miss what you never had, but we say that’s just not true.
Here’s a story to underline the need for online presence:
One of our partners needed a new cabinet for a particular corner of her house. She went online and searched for furniture stores, finding three in her area. None of the businesses offered exactly what she wanted, so she finally settled on something she didn’t love.
A week later, a friend of hers took our client to a store she’d passed half a dozen times but never entered. In that store was just the cabinet she would have wanted – but she no longer needed one. If our client had found that store in her initial search online, that store would have gotten her money instead of the competitor.
Don’t let this be you. Make sure your customers know where you are, what you sell, and why you’re worth doing business with. When you get tons of new business, you’ll wonder why you missed out on having a website for so long.
You’ll Raise Your Legitimacy
It’s completely biased, but a common assumption these days is that if you don’t have an online presence, you’re not a legitimate business. If your competition has a website and you don’t, your competition is seen as a more established, credible business than you are – all for want of a www. URL and a simple design.
Your online presence also affords you a certain measure of simple customer service, which contributes to your legitimacy. People love being able to find out the hours their favorite store is open and have their basic questions answered via a simple web search.
It’s easier for both of you, and you’ve just provided your potential client with excellent customer service without ever raising a finger.
You’ll Increase Your Sales
It’s not necessary to build a complete online store. A basic profile page often does very well to boost sales and credibility.
That said, if you have one or two items that you know sell very well in your brick-and-mortar store, you can increase sales exponentially by offering these items for sale online.
One little restaurant we know sells an amazing spice tea on their menu. It was so popular they began bagging it and selling it to their customers, which worked brilliantly. When they began selling the same tea on their website, their sales increased fivefold.
Five times as many sales, all for making a simple online store that only sold one item. The restaurant now earns a hefty revenue on that tea, which helps fund improvements and renovations for the restaurant.
Think about it. What if you sold five times as many of a single popular item just because you sell it online? How would you improve your physical storefront with that revenue? How many new customers would these improvements bring to your business?
Having an online presence isn’t nearly as expensive as you might believe, either. Contact us today to discuss getting a website started for a price you can easily afford – and that pays for itself quickly by encouraging new customers to walk into your real-world business door.