After having spent a lot of time building websites that don't do anything for my clients, I went and talked to a bunch of prospects in different industries about the usefulness of a website. Instead of trying to sell them yet another project, I wanted to hear what they had to say.
I discovered that a website is actually a pretty bad deal most of the time.
When I was targeting local businesses like restaurants, gyms, and night clubs, I found that it's enough to have the business listed in Google Places. A website can be used for SEO, but 99% of the time, Google My Business listings show up before the actual organic search results, which makes SEO futile.
What if the restaurant wanted to capture leads? By simply setting up their Facebook page, they can use the Messenger feature to capture leads and do their marketing that way. With a website, they would have to mess around with forms, email addresses, and email automation software. Many people don't even like email and they only have an email to sign in on their Google or Apple account.
Then you have service businesses like photographers. With Instagram, they can share all their work and do their marketing very easily. No need for a website.
These people also mentioned how good word of mouth marketing is. You basically get better clients than if you do digital marketing. Which is why they don't find the need to invest on a website.
So, for the purpose of lead generation and raising awareness, social media is enough. Now let's talk about ecommerce.
These days, you can easily setup a Shopify store but apparently, the average conversion rate is only 1.6%. For the average small business, selling on Ebay or Amazon is much more attractive.
Also, I don't know about you guys, but my country is so small that it's simply easier to take the bus and go buy the product physically than enter your credit card information (we don't even have Stripe here) on a website and wait 3 days to get it.
For small businesses, anything more than a simple website on Squarespace/Wix/Wordpress.com is pretty much a waste of resources.
After this research, I realized that it's the following businesses that actually need websites:
This is only an observation that I made and I could be wrong. What do you guys think?
I discovered that a website is actually a pretty bad deal most of the time.
When I was targeting local businesses like restaurants, gyms, and night clubs, I found that it's enough to have the business listed in Google Places. A website can be used for SEO, but 99% of the time, Google My Business listings show up before the actual organic search results, which makes SEO futile.
What if the restaurant wanted to capture leads? By simply setting up their Facebook page, they can use the Messenger feature to capture leads and do their marketing that way. With a website, they would have to mess around with forms, email addresses, and email automation software. Many people don't even like email and they only have an email to sign in on their Google or Apple account.
Then you have service businesses like photographers. With Instagram, they can share all their work and do their marketing very easily. No need for a website.
These people also mentioned how good word of mouth marketing is. You basically get better clients than if you do digital marketing. Which is why they don't find the need to invest on a website.
So, for the purpose of lead generation and raising awareness, social media is enough. Now let's talk about ecommerce.
These days, you can easily setup a Shopify store but apparently, the average conversion rate is only 1.6%. For the average small business, selling on Ebay or Amazon is much more attractive.
Also, I don't know about you guys, but my country is so small that it's simply easier to take the bus and go buy the product physically than enter your credit card information (we don't even have Stripe here) on a website and wait 3 days to get it.
For small businesses, anything more than a simple website on Squarespace/Wix/Wordpress.com is pretty much a waste of resources.
After this research, I realized that it's the following businesses that actually need websites:
- Medium/Large companies who need a website for the branding.
- Medium/Large companies who share a lot of content.
- Medium/Large companies in high competition markets who want to utilize all sorts of sales funnels.
- Any business that sells a digital product like ebook or saas.
This is only an observation that I made and I could be wrong. What do you guys think?
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