In 2023 the global e-commerce market is expected to total $6.3 trillion in valuation, with $1.1 trillion of that market share in the U.S. alone.
With these astounding figures, the importance of having a website for your brand may seem obvious. Still, the underlying reasons for having a company website are more expansive than you might think.
All About the Branding, Baby
What Will we Cover?
In this article, we will review the following:
The underlying benefits of having a website for your brand such as:
- Increased visibility
- A forum to build relationships with customers
- Streamlined Business Processes
From these key elements, you should see the importance of having a website for your brand and be able to implement them in digital marketing plan.
Let’s dig right in!
Underlying Importance of Having a Website: Trust
Before your brand is well-established, your primary goal should be to build trust between you and your target audience. One of the ways to do this is by creating a user-friendly website that drives traffic using modern digital marketing practices. Here are some ways this platform can help your company as a whole.
Increased visibility
A website lets a much larger audience see your brand than it would otherwise. It gives you the right platform to reach potential customers who have yet to hear about you and your brand.
From a more technical standpoint, you can increase company visibility using SEO and other digital marketing strategies to position your company on one of the first pages for search engine results. This technical aspect of digital marketing drives traffic to your site and gives you tremendous credibility.
As a marketer, when I see a company on the first few pages of Google SERPs (search engine results page), it tells me that the company cares enough about its product to practice and maintain a comprehensive SEO strategy.
These strategies typically take a fair amount of time and money to implement, so any company worth exploring should end up on at least the top 10 Google SERPs!
(There’s so much to learn about SEO that this article couldn’t fit it all. Check out this blog post on Building a Comprehensive SEO Strategy!)
A Forum to Build Relationships with Customers
The same Forbes article we mentioned earlier also says that 96.9 million people in the United States shop on social media, and is expected to increase by 18%.
This statistic indicates that social media is a red-hot sector of e-commerce that is going nowhere soon and should be a primary focus for customer engagement.
Many people question the importance of having a website when they can focus on social media engagement and creating a community around their social media persona.
While this should certainly be a goal for any burgeoning brand, this is only one aspect of a multi-faceted brand development strategy and content allocation.
What Does a Brand Development Strategy Mean for Me?
Ultimately, this development strategy returns to our original argument for the importance of a website. You need to build credibility and trust with your online target audience.
Unfortunately, social media is rife with bots and other impersonators that build distrust with people on social media.
One article suggests that Twitter is at least 5% of fake user accounts run on some software or another. This figure indicates at least 16.5 million Twitter bots are ready to mislead the general public and build distrust among your target audience.
When you have a properly built website, you can quickly eliminate these concerns for your customers before they question your legitimacy.
(It takes you and a full-service creative team to build a comprehensive brand development strategy. You can learn more about it in our brand development post!!)
Streamlined Communication and Business Processes
From an operational business perspective, the importance of having a website cannot be overstated.
Businesses can streamline everything with a seamless user interface and a fully functional website. As long as the components on the site work as they should, you will cut costs using fewer human hours and outdated practices.
Even simply having a contact form for your customers to fill out and reach you can eliminate the majority of customer service calls ultimately, giving you time and resources to take care of the customer’s issues rather than wasting time trying to deal with the problem while the client is on the phone.
A well-built website makes these communication and business processes much less painful.
(If you need help figuring out where to start, check out our brand guide template article to see a portion of our workflow. That way, you’re ready no matter what direction you choose!)
Last piece of Advice from your full-service creative team
All of these details about the importance of having a website are moot if you have a solid team around you to implement each element of your brand development strategy properly.
Our full-service creative team stays current on all the digital marketing strategy trends and uses high-end A.I. software to enhance the capabilities of our service.
Don’t go crazy trying to get your brand off the ground. Instead, get Unhinged!
References:
Baluch, A. (2023, February 16). 38 e-commerce statistics of 2023. Forbes. Retrieved February 27, 2023, from https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/ecommerce-statistics/
Enginess. (n.d.). How web design affects customer trust | enginess insights. Retrieved February 28, 2023, from https://www.enginess.io/insights/How-Web-Design-Affects-Customer-Trust
Riserbato, R. (2021, October 27). 10 benefits of consistent, high-quality content marketing. HubSpot Blog. Retrieved February 28, 2023, from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/benefits-high-quality-content-consistency-brand
Timothy, M. (2022, August 3). How many bots are on Twitter and does it matter? MUO. Retrieved February 28, 2023, from https://www.makeuseof.com/how-many-bots-on-twitter/
