Do You Have a Website up Yet?
I asked this question to the owner of a new café in town while I enjoyed an espresso and some smooth, swanky music.
We were discussing the fact that the only reason I knew the place existed was because I’d walked past the storefront window and had gotten curious about what was inside.
"No." His face twisted in an uncomfortable grimace of shame. "I wanted one, but… we’ll be announcing in the local newspaper," he perked hopefully. "Soon. We haven’t really done anything yet…"
I notice this problem all the time with brick-and-mortar businesses – lawyer offices, boutiques, clothing stores, restaurants… Owners pour their money into traditional advertising and ignore the internet, or they treat it like an afterthought. They don’t think a website is useful, and they’re all about direct marketing in the ways they know best.
Newspaper ads. Fliers. Brochures. Word of mouth.
And maaaaaybe, if they’re really avant-garde, they had their sister’s 19-year-old son build an amateur website or perhaps one of those nasty $20/mth jobs from the Yellow Pages or web hosting company.
Yeah. Mistake. Big one. Huge.
I see the same mistake happening all the time with new freelancers coming to the internet. Writers, designers, marketers, consultants… No site. No blog. Just some email and uncomfortable squirming. And they wonder why they aren’t getting business.
The problem is that people used to the "real world" or who have physical businesses just don’t know about the power of using the internet as a marketing tool. And even when I explain how much more business they could get out of having a website (or even better, a blog) and get them all excited about it, they don’t have the first clue what to do, or how to do it.
That’s where we can help, putting together a simple online strategy to help brick and mortar business get more customers, and keep them.