Are you on a tight budget but still want to invest in your business’s digital presence? Having a website or social media can help boost your business by increasing traffic and customers, but it can also cost you serious money.
So you’re in a this-or-that situation again? A day in the life of an entrepreneur, right? And if digital marketing is not your forte, this article will help you decide on the best course of action for your business.
1. Your Business Needs to Have an Omnipresence
If you want to invest in your business’s digital marketing efforts, do it all the way. Besides, it has a cumulative positive impact on your business. That’s the good thing about taking the first step of creating a digital presence for your brand.
The moment you hit the publish button, the content will run its traction on its own. No monitoring is needed nor additional cost on your side. It will appear in any search result, provided that you have optimized your content.
That’s why if you’re only choosing social media, you are only limiting your brand’s exposure to that platform. No matter how many platforms you post your content, as long as it’s on the same field, it still has its blind spot.
Whereas, the fantastic thing about having a website is that you can create other channels to engage your loyal customer and nurture your leads. The most used web features used are as follows:
- Landing Page
- Squeeze Page
- Newsletter
- Blog Section
- Forum Space
- Web Exclusive Offer
- Live Chat Support
These features are packed with a lot of benefits that are not available on social media platforms. And every feature has specific functionality that targets specific goals. You can even customize each feature to reflect your brand’s image.
Take a blog section as an example. You can cross-link it to other media outlets or websites in your specific field; thus, adding another value to your brand and digital presence mileage. And the more links are used by other sites; the more your website will rank in search engines’ results.
Of course, there’s a somewhat similar function in social media, such as hashtags and tagging a user. But then again, this is only limited to that platform. The moment your target audience uses a platform other than social media, then their market share will be delegated to your competitors.
2. Welcome More Diverse Group of Target Audience
You may have already caught on to the latest consumer behavior nowadays on using mobile devices instead of computers to buy products or contract services. However, this is only highly reflective of younger generations.
Older demographics tend to use what they are most familiar with, and websites have long been around before social media. The website is still their go-to platform from the navigation or just plain being stubborn to adapt to changing times.
Even though most people prefer mobile devices, others don’t have a social media presence and may be out of the loop of your industry’s news on that platform. Therefore, it’s always better to welcome such customers by having a website to help them with whatever they need in business with you.
3. Position Your Brand in the Local Market
Have you ever checked your books lately and audited where your profits came from? The chances are high that it comes from your local place, especially during the pandemic, as the government imposes travel restrictions on different federal states.
Logistics may be at an all-time high demand, but you also need to consider that some of your customers may not have the time or patience to wait for their actual product. So the shorter distance your place of business is, the more they’ll likely patronize your business.
With social media, your announcement or advertisement will be washed down by your competitors, or worse, by a poser account. They have a more liberal restriction with people putting up a business or handle as it’s free, and there are a lot of resources available that can be copied and claimed as their own.
That’s why professional digital marketers view social media as just a marketing tool and redirecting every traffic they have to your website. You may have already noticed why every caption they published has a link after their call-to-action liner.
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4. Customer Portal to Your Business
After being redirected to your website, the customer gets the opportunity to know more about your brand rather than snippets of your products and services on the social media platform. You can dedicate a whole page to every product or service that you have.
Through this, they need not have to ask you for more information about every concern they have as the website can sustain long-form text and high-quality graphics. You can showcase all of these on your website and help to persuade your audience to buy from you.
Besides selling, you can also introduce your brand to them—your company values and the people behind making your business a success. It may seem superficial at the surface, but more and more people want to know more about who or what they’re dealing with.
They don’t want to support or be associated with predatory businesses or enable illegal activities. And with cancel culture ever rampant today, they can boycott your brand even with a slighted negative issue.
And don’t underestimate the power of just one disappointed customer, as their horrible experience can spread like wildfire. In addition, they can entice other customers into joining their cause in boycotting your business altogether.
But you can still appease with an ardent effort and document your effort through your website. It can have more prolonged exposure, especially when linked to other publications than social media, wherein feeds get buried quickly with new posts.
5. Builds Reputation in Online Space
It’s not just exclusive for a few established brands anymore. Back when it costs a fortune to have a space in newspapers or airtime in televisions and radios, big brands have an expensive budget to augment their presence to be a household name.
But that’s not the case anymore. Search engine ranking now holds that place of being a highly coveted spot because the higher you rank, the more reputable you’re viewed by your customers.
Of course, there are clever techniques employed to land in a top spot, such as contracting a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service. But even without it, you can slowly build your brand’s reputation in the online space by creating a continuous content stream.
And the more niche you go, the more you will rank higher and position your brand as having authority in your field. But then again, you don’t have to do it all, especially if your copywriting skill is not that good or you want to focus on other aspects of your business.
Trekking the digital space can be intimidating, but it’s going to be easy when you have a reliable team by your side. Don’t hesitate to delegate tasks beyond your expertise, as it will consume a lot of time on your end.
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6. Lenient Restrictions and Total Control on Content
Have you ever tried posting content on social media only to be notified that the administrator has restricted it from being published as it has not followed their “community standards” or prevailing policy?
Such is the case when you are only using social media as a platform for your business. It will limit your posting capabilities as the platform provider sets the standards. Publish anything you want about your business by having your very own website.
You can add pages as you see fit and post any content type, such as images and videos. The only limitation is your creativity and imagination. You need not have to retouch photos or censored target keywords like you do on social media.
For example, you can turn raving testimonials into a feature article in your blog section. It’s a clever PR move as it can be a recurring content theme and be distributed to other platforms that you have signed up for your business.
7. Gain Insight From Customer’s Web Experience
Given that both platforms offer data analytics and monitoring, website analytics has more robust capabilities. Not only can it track your consumer behavior, but it can also assess their future decision and suggest what technique to use.
It may seem abstract at first, but every shift in numbers and line reflects any weak points your business has. It can be with pricing, value proposition, or unpersuasive web content in general. All these can be remedied when you have a plug-in installed on your website.
You don’t have to do all the laborious web audits yourself to optimize its performance because there are apps and tools to do that all for you, depending on your current needs and demands. Also, the more analytical plug-ins that you install, the more helpful insight you’ll gain.
There are even third-party apps that you can also install to shadow your competitor’s activities. For example, it can crawl target keywords they used, media outlets they’ve published their content, website technical aspects, and more data.
And if you’re having trouble with dwindling customers, there are many customer retention strategies and optimization techniques that can be employed to address this issue immediately. There is just so much a website can do to level up your business to the next level.
What Do You Need First: Website or Social Media?
And now it all boils down to this: if your budget is your primary concern, then create a social media account first. It can help you get your feet wet for a far more challenging field on the website. But don’t brush off the idea of having your business website.
Remember, social media is just a marketing tool. It can help you widen your engagement and reach potential customers, but you still need to convert your visitors into customers. And this is more easily done with a website in tow.
With both platforms on your side, you can turn the tide on your side. Your social media account can help increase your website’s traffic while you can close that deal on your website. And if you want to get started with your business goals today, better hire a full-service digital marketing agency like ours.
We are located in Huntington Beach, Orange County, California, and we aim to prop passion entrepreneurs in the online space. So you don’t have to shop around for all your digital marketing needs because we’ve got it all covered!
Why choose between Website Development and Social Media Marketing when you can have both. Contact us today, and we’ll do the rest for you!
