Online Marketing 101: You Don’t Need a Website

Let me rephrase that: You don’t necessarily need a website. However, if you want your business to survive this depression, recession or economic downturn, you i need to be marketing yourself online.

I would love to tell every business owner I talk to that he needs a database-driven, content-management-based website, and that he should pay me five figures to build it. But it just isn’t so.

And I remember telling a number of business owners just a few years ago that they didn’t need to be on the web. And it was true then.

It was less than ten years ago that my Mom said: When a new Yellow Pages is delivered, put your old one in the trunk of your car. That way, if your car breaks down, or if you want to find something while you’re on the road, you can look it up and call from your cellphone. It was great advice. And I did it for the next five years. I even used that Yellow Pages in the trunk once or twice.

Now, I can’t even remember the last time a new Yellow Pages directory—or even one of its rivals—was delivered to my home, or when I last looked for anything in it.

Fact is, the world has changed:

• People aren’t using phone books much you any more—even the people who used to. And young people? Forget it.
• People aren’t buying or reading newspapers as much any more.
• That ad in the circular is unlikely to reach a potential customer at the moment she decides that what you sell is exactly what she needs.

And here’s the big one: If your business has been around for a while, there probably already IS information about you online, or there soon will be, and you have two choices:

• Get ahead of it and make it work for you.
• Let other people define your business for you.

When I need or want something, I fire up a web browser and search for businesses nearby that have what I want and need.

I’m not alone. Many 20- and 30-somethings don’t have a landline telephone, so they don’t get a Yellow Pages. They search. They look for listings, reviews, menus, pictures.

You want them to find you, and you want what they find to make them decide to come buy from you.

So while a web site might be nice—and is even a good thing for most businesses to have—it’s not essential. What matters is that when people search for what you sell, they find you. If you have a storefront, you want them to find:

• Your address, your phone number and your hours, and better, a map
• A description of your business—your products and services
• Some pictures of your storefront, your product or service, or your staff
• Reviews from mostly satisfied customers

In short, you want them to find enough information about your business for them to feel confident about getting in their car or hopping on a bus and coming to your location—or at least enough to pick up the phone and call.

What you need for that to happen is someone who knows the local and national online directories that matter, someone who knows how to get your business to come up prominently when people search locally for what you sell, someone who can help you plan how to put the information online that will help potential customers come to you rather than a competitor or ordering online.

That might include a content-management-driven website. It might include a simple brochure website. It might include an email marketing campaign to your current customers. It might include leveraging free online directories and Web 2.0 services lie YouTube, Flickr and Twitter. Let me help you figure out which combination of things is right to help your business survive and thrive.