Small Business Marketing / / 3 minutes of reading

For you to be successful with digital marketing as a small business, you still have to start with your small business website. Certainly, it is possible to make waves without. Social media sites give you free (except for the time commitment) and easy access to potentially reach a lot of people.

But for customers to trust you, they’re going to search for you. They’re going to find your website. And it had at least better be reasonably up-to-date and — preferably — help you drive business.

My stance for small businesses is that nothing in marketing is worth investing in if it doesn’t bring you business. So a small business website has to have a simple purpose first: drive leads. So I ask you small business owners out there, does your website drive leads?

Sure, your website probably has your contact information. It might have a list of your products, services, locations and even bios or pictures of your team. But does it make people volunteer their contact information to be further marketed to? Does it drive people to a purchase point where they can convert right there?

If you’re being honest, about 95 percent of you will say “no” to those questions. The simple fact of the matter is, of the small businesses that even have websites, very few use them with the primary goal of driving leads.

“But Jason, that’s the whole point of the website. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t exist,” you might say.

Yes, but do you get emails or spreadsheets from your website daily listing new customer prospects and their contact information for you to follow up on? Do you get phone calls every day from people saying, “I found your website and it said to call?”

No, you don’t. So your small business website’s generic goal might be to drive business, but you did not build it to do so.

So I challenge you to either start over or strip your website down. It needs the following things:

  1. A home page that presents your primary product or service and a compelling reason to want to buy it
  2. A form to fill out, including personal contact information, to learn more information
  3. A piece of content that delivers that more information
  4. A mechanism to notify you when someone has filled out the form so you can move their contact information into your lead file

If your small business website doesn’t have those four things first, stop and build them. If your website has something besides those four things as its primary pages of content, get rid of everything but.

We’ll explore how to do all this in the coming weeks. For now, just take a long, hard look at your small business website and honestly decide whether or not you need an overhaul.

Need more one-on-one help? Book some time with me now!

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