Have you just started a new business? If so, you are probably feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment. That’s perfectly normal.
Every entrepreneur goes through the early struggles where it seems like you have to make a hundred major decisions every single day.
It also doesn’t help that the online business meta feels like it changes when you least expect it to. One such situation that we will focus on today is the need for a business website.
With customers spending so much time on social media, it begs the question of whether a dedicated website is even needed anymore.
If you haven’t yet made a website or a social media page, read on.
Why Are Some Businesses Going All In With Social Media?
At the heart of it, it’s purely a numbers game. The masses are already on social media.
This isn’t the old internet, where people explored, and moved around online often. Today, most people have a few go-to sites that they spend their internet time on.
According to DemandSage, Instagram has over 2.4 billion monthly active users. That’s a huge base of potential customers that you can find ways to reach out to.
Instagram, X, news websites, Amazon, and YouTube—outside of such platforms, there really isn’t much of an untapped market of people.
Thus, businesses wonder, “Why try to get the customer to come to me when I can be where the customer is?”
This mindset does have some truth, and it’s also backed up by the fact that social media platforms are also catering to businesses as well.
There are special business accounts that allow for direct advertising within the platform and similar pro-business features.
Businesses can directly engage with customers, use memes, and other methods to win customer approval and build a customer base.
That said, while the treatment they get on social media is nice, it is only part of the picture.
Why Websites Are Still Necessary
When you are just starting out, running exclusively on social media makes sense.
After all, why spend the time and effort into running an online profile when social media does the trick?
Well, problems start to arise when your business grows and you realize that there are a number of restrictions and guidelines on social media.
Each social media platform tends to have content policies that may sometimes cause the business to have its posts removed.
You are also unable to control aesthetics and have to work within the sandbox of the platform, which isn’t exactly ideal for brand image.
Then, even though paid advertising sounds great, it is intended to make a profit for the platform first, and you will be overpaying when compared to advertising for your own website.
If you feel like starting a website is a hassle, you probably haven’t seen AI-assisted website builders like Hocoos.
They make it possible to build a brand-new website from scratch within a few minutes.
The benefits of using your own website as a business are definitely worth looking into as well. Let’s look at three.
A. You Have Complete Control
Control seems like something sinister, but it becomes critical when you consider the number of businesses that have been de-platformed.
This can happen if your business has politics that happen to be controversial in the current political climate.
It can happen when your products are considered inappropriate for the platform’s audience, etc.
When you run your own website, you decide what you want to sell and how you present it.
B. You Get to Take Advantage of SEO Content and Boost Visibility
This can be effective to such an extent that it becomes its own form of marketing.
If your business sells vaping products, for instance, you can create a blog section and create SEO-optimized articles and posts.
If you play this game well, you even have a chance at becoming an information hub and an unofficial authority source about vaping.
Hire a few experts to write your articles, and you are on an even better path.
C. The E-commerce Integration is Far Superior
At the end of the day, the main reason for running a business is the products and services you are trying to sell.
If you manage to focus on everything else but fail in this area, you need to get your priorities right.
Thankfully, running your own website allows for a solid online store. E-commerce is an industry that’s worth $6.3 trillion right now, and anything you can do to maximize your success in it is worth the effort.
Payment gateways and security also happen only through vendors that you have vetted beforehand.
In conclusion, you can certainly run a business exclusively on social media, but you might run into limitations soon.
Thus, websites make a lot of sense considering how easy they are to set up and maintain these days.
The fact that websites help provide customer data and analytics which can further improve your customer engagement is a bonus.
