Businesses and Online Presence. YES/NO/LATER
Is it possible for a business to make great strides in this present age and time without having a Website or any form of online presence? Well, is it possible to boil a stone and eat for dinner? Honestly, I am pretty sure a few of us tried it when we were much younger.
Anyways, that is just by the way. Nowadays, people don’t call a Business or Company to ask what they have, they rather know and see you have something before calling to confirm it is available. So the more information you have online the better.
Common Fallacies of business owners are as follows;
- My Business is small now, I don’t need any form of online presence, when I get big I will invest in it.
- I can use my personal email to communicate with my clients
- It is not important right now when I establish I will do it
- I don’t have money for it now, when I have the money I will invest
- I was told that if I have a website and online presence, my customer presence will double in the first 2 months
- I don’t have a laptop to be checking my mails, my documents.
I will like to correct the listed above fallacies. Firstly, the notion that my business is small now that I don’t need any form of online presence at the moment and its only when I grow big I will need it, well it is a basically a fairy tale, becoming known online requires long, careful thoughts and procedures and it is definitely not a one day achievement. So you don’t have to wait till you are a mighty corporation before you decide to have an online presence.
Secondly, using a personal email to communicate with clients is a Business No No. The saying goes do not mix business with pleasure. Successful businesses must utilize that principle. It is wrong to use personal mails to send business mails. Take for example; if you were s job seeker and you are told to send your CV to a yahoo.com or gmail.com email address, I am pretty sure you will feel very skeptical. That is how most potential clients will see your business.
Thirdly, it is not important right now, when I establish I will do it. Being successful online is not a one day achievement, it takes time to build. So you don’t have to wait till you are big enough before launching. It is easier for you and your online presence to grow and expand simultaneously.
The most common phrase business owners use has to be I don’t have money now. This in itself is highly ironic, because these business owners spend a fortune of communications with clients and the cost index is higher than those with online presence. Cost index here simply means how much you spend to the total number of people you reach. For example, if you are a businessman and you use NGN2,000 a week to call 5 people in a week, in a year you would have spent NGN104, 000 talking with less than 260 people because some of the calls will be follow up calls. This figure is different from someone who uses NGN50, 000 for a simple website and pays NGN30, 000 for media adverts and the balance for calls to reach thousands of people.
In addition, clients believe that having a website means that automatically that their client base doubles. This however it is not the case. Yes, getting a website will increase you crowd reach but a little extra has to be done to turn them from just visitors into clients, keeping them entertained. As you already know the internet is a very big place and the market is already competitive enough, so for you to be better than a rival, you have to do more.
Finally, people have this mentality that if you don’t have a computer system, you cannot check your official mails, create word documents, excel files and PDFs, and now guess again, Google came up with a solution where you can use to check your email on your smartphone, also create documents, get a document management system, build an intranet, make calls and videos and design your calendar to get emails and text alerts of scheduled meeting and reminders with 30GB of storage online. All these are bundled in one solution is called Google apps for business and it only cost 50 dollars per email. For more information about this, click here.
I end this post with this; the world is changing, you either get with the program or get left behind. God bless.
