There are many reasons to create a Web site and take your business online. You can use your site to reduce your marketing
costs to geographically diverse locations, to open new markets and sales channels, or to enhance customer service. You can also use it to extend your current business into an entirely different product line, or to project a professional image.
Reduce your marketing costs - You are able to reach a customer base that would have never known about you or your business. An audience that you could never reach with other medium - and if you could, do you have the available advertising dollars it would cost your business to use traditional media and marketing methods?
Open new markets and sales channels - Communicate by email with businesses, associates, clients and friends quickly, easily, and inexpensively. Provide prospective customers with information they need to know right now to get them interested in your products and services. Provide an email address where simple questions and concerns may be quickly answered by clicking the reply button on a feedback form. Unlike spending excess time writing a letter or spending wasteful time on the phone, questions can be answered in just a couple of sentences.
Enhance customer service - Many prospective new and referred customers will be able to look you up online. You will have a site with lots of information for their perusal to help them make easy decisions without wasting much of your staff's time. This is a great place to show before and after pictures of projects, any written research, any information on new technology, provide frequently asked questions and answers (the same questions you and your staff are presently, repeatedly, answering over and over).
Project a professional image - and provide a personal and company profile. Tell all about your credentials, business services, involvement with various organizations, recognize your employees, etc. Make your business information available. Tell your potential clients about your business and why they should do business with you. Contact with your web site should be a natural continuation of dealing with your company on person.
The rapid growth and acceptance of the Internet is driving massive changes in the way the world does business. While it creates tremendous new opportunities, the Internet also presents daunting challenges.
Rapidly changing technologies combined with an increasingly competitive business environment and information overload is enough to create headaches for any business. There is an urgency to create an Internet presence that differentiates your business from your competitors.
