Why Do I Need A Website?

In this post by the design team at Plymouth Web Design, we’ll look at Why Do I Need A Website?

As small business owners and entrepreneurs, we’re living in a pretty amazing time right now.

Never before has there been so many free social tools at our disposal to get the word out about our business, building connections and relationships and turning random internet strangers into our clients and customers who actually pay us for what we do.

But with all these social media sites and gurus talking about all the possibilities that come with them, the lines are getting blurrier and blurrier every day.

I’ve had business owners ask me: ‘If I have social media and do a really good job with it, why do I need a website’?

And the only way to answer that is with a definitive ‘Yes, you do need a website, because social media and websites have two very different and essential functions.’

One could never replace the other, so in this blog post Why Do I Need A Website? we will explain these roles so that you know what you need in a website and what you should be doing on social media to create that ultimate online experience and presence that actually attracts and converts those internet strangers into our paying customers and a healthy thriving business.

So here’s why social media isn’t something you want to build your business on entirely on its own: So you create amazing content and as a result, you build up a following, but the problem is you don’t ever have full and total access to those people.

For example, if you had a thousand followers on Instagram and you were to post something, guess how many of those people would ever see your post in the feed? It’s about a hundred, and that’s about double what you can expect to get on Facebook.

So you can see the problem here. You’re doing a lot of work to gain very limited access to those audiences that you work so hard to build.

So are we saying that you shouldn’t be focusing at all on social media? Well, that really depends on the nature of your business and your ideal clients to be honest.

If your business lends itself to giving out advice, tips or even inspiration in the form of ideas or visual inspiration then we do think a good social strategy is worth your time, because the best part of social media is the opportunity to be found.

So if you post the kinds of things that your future clients would be interested in and then you use the right hashtags and the right keywords to help them find your stuff, it’s a great first step in the process.

So what’s the next step? It’s the answer to your question Why Do I Need A Website? Because you need to get them to your website, where you can much more closely control the messaging and that flow of information that really starts to build more of a case for why they’d want to work with you or buy from you, because here’s the thing when it comes to social posts: They’re all kind of scattered, they’re kind of stand-alone. They don’t necessarily build on one another.

And they can’t because you can’t count on anyone seeing all your posts, let alone seeing them in the right order, but what you can do here is put out your great content and use clear ‘calls to action’ to get them to your website to read your latest blog post, download your lead magnet to get their email, schedule an appointment or just buy what you’re selling.

You’ll want to do that in about one-third of your social media posts, so it’s important to still play by the rules of whatever platform you’re using.

If you want them to actually promote your posts and show your posts to as many eyeballs as possible and the rules include that they want you to keep people on the platform for as long as possible, so that’s why you don’t want to entice clicks off of the social media site on every single post.

But when you do, we highly recommend using it to entice people to opt-in for your lead magnet so that you can start building your email list.