the benefits
Understanding the benefits that a website and digital management systems can bring is critical. It's the only way to justify the costs and keep focus on the vision.
A Shop Window, a Good Experience and ‘Branding’
Your website is a shop window and a mark of the entrepreneurial intent and credibility of your business. A good website draws people in and becomes one of the 'marketing rule of three positive reinforcements'. That is, it takes three different positive exposures before a potential customer is likely to take notice of your business – your website is one of those three reinforcements.
Ease of use and what we call ‘click-through’ is vitally important. This is the experience of visitors clicking through your site with easy menus, services and products laid out well, and then a good clean shopping cart experience. Bear in mind that around 75% of hits on small business sites are from mobiles, so the mobile experience is paramount.
Your website is the core of your brand-building strategy. Branding now plays a part in even the smallest of businesses, so logos and colour schemes are important, but so too is style and presentation.
Adding collateral to your business
if you want to sell your business as a going concern, having a good website that’s highly functional with good management and admin tools, that also demonstrates good sales and marketing results (all the stats are right there in your WIX system) can be an important part of building your exit plan.
Improving admin efficiency
Within the WIX ecosystem, management and automation can be set up that streamlines tasks from sales, shipping and managing courses, to following up client leads and issuing customer invoices. There’s a lot that can be set up that saves a great deal of time.
Increasing sales
Whether it's direct sales through your website, or the sale of goods (in your physical premises) that people have seen on your site, plus things like online bookings or signups to services or courses, an effective website can become the lead revenue stream into your business.
Enhancing online presence
Things like blogs and email campaigns cross connect with your social media – they can be directly reposted from WIX to your socials. And adding links to your social posts, that link to features on your website, strengthens the credibility of your messaging significantly.
Increasing footfall
If your business centres around a physical premises where footfall directly impacts sales, then a website can significantly increase that footfall. By designing a site with appealing images, displaying reviews, publishing events, plus links to and from things like Trip Advisor, can all have a significant impact on footfall.
Adding credibility
You can have your website address on business cards and flyers. But more importantly, things like your google listing and Instagram pages look a lot more serious if the website button links to a proper website. People often look for that link and skip across to your site to judge how established and reliable a business you are.
Balancing Cost Against Benefit
One of the most important things to do before embarking on a website project is assessing the startup and ongoing costs, and balancing those costs against the likely business benefits.
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For a simple business solution the costs in the first year are approx £900, and subsequent years approx £720 per year. For a mid-size solution, costs are in the region of £3,300 in the first year and subsequently approx £2,600 annually. And for a full visual and complexity (level C/3) solution, cost is around £4,800 initially and £3,000 yearly.
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Smaller businesses should be able to quantify and judge the balance of investment for level A/1 solutions with relative ease – the success of a simple landing page that promotes the business can be judged by counting the referrals that the website generates.
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Clients requiring more complex solutions should fully assess the costs that a significant project will entail. It's vitally important that a proper analysis is carried out to assess affordability and that planned returns on the investment are likely to be realised.
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Clients can start at a lower visual and complexity level and stay at that level for a period of time whilst securing successful revenue streams, both through the website and other aspects of the business. Once the business model has been de-risked and established, the solution can then be expanded to a higher level with a much better understanding of likely success.
Key Benefits
When we start a project with a client, we always go through the benefits in detail. We look at the key benefits that are likely to be gained, both as an opportunity but also to set realistic expectations of timescales and effort required to achieve them.
Every business is different, so we seek out the applicable benefits and make sure that we stay focused on them. We don't just talk about how a website is going to look (it has to look good, that's a given), but how we are going to achieve the projected benefits.
Below are some of the key benefits that are essential to aim for.