Why You Should Start Building Your Online Presence Today
A few years ago, it was difficult to justify building a website and using it as an effective marketing tool for your business. Internet usage wasn’t as widely adopted as it is now, and the web had not established itself as a channel for sourcing products and services. Then as web development services got cheaper over time, many business owners decided that spending money to develop a website didn’t even require justification. It was just an affordable, one-off, sunk cost. Things got worse when more others decided to develop a website for their company simply because “every company has one nowadays”.
This year, with the looming recession (are we there yet?), many businesses will review the cost of maintaining their assets; including websites, and start asking for some accountability. The lucky ones will stumble upon the fact that a website today can become an extremely powerful weapon.
Search engines (Google in particular) has dramatically changed the purchasing pattern of the under-30s. Do you still keep a copy of the yellow-pages and thumb through it when you want to look for a service or product? The younger crowd prefers to let their fingers do the walking on their computers and mobile devices. With search engines constantly improving to deliver faster and more relevant results, this phenomenon is definitely here to stay. Unconvinced about this demographic and its purchasing power? Think about why the recent election went in Obama’s favor and what percentage of the voters fall into this category. Today, these are just kids and young adults new to workforce, but very soon, they will become the major decision makers, and guess how are they going to get their information from and where do they network?
What this means is that while the rest of your competitors are still focusing on the brick and mortar (i like to call it 3D) aspects of their business, you should start to place more emphasis on your web assets. Use online marketing channels and tools like social networks and PPC advertising to get your brand out to as many people as possible. These methods are relatively cheap and perfoming such activities can actually help to fully utilize any spare resources especially in manpower. A year of regular presence-building activities will set you far ahead of your competitor when they decide to market themselves online.