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Challenges facing small businesses on the web
If you’re a small business, getting your head around the web isn’t really that easy. Chances are that most of your energy and time is currently focused on making your own particular business work optimally, and growing your customer base.
The internet is evolving rapidly, and many small businesses face some of the following issues when embarking on improving their online presence:
1) Budgetary, let’s face it, investing in the internet can feel like a bottomless pit if you’re not careful. If you’re not that familiar with what’s needed to get a decent online presence, you could be spending too much by buying expensive custom solutions that are no better than much cheaper and sometimes free services. On the other hand, go too cheap and expect everything for free, and your online presence may look a real mess. There’s nothing less credible than a business website that looks like it hasn’t been updated for several months and in some cases years.
2) Tech support, this can be a major problem. Chances are if you’re attempting to do innovative and interesting things on the web, at some point you’re going to need to run into needing some tech support. Hiring a full time techie isn’t always such a good idea as it’s another salary count on the payroll, and you don’t want the poor techie to be twiddling his thumbs most of the day or playing Angry Birds instead of contributing to your business performance. There are types of tech support that are inexpensive, but at the end of the day you do need to know that somewhere there’s a techie you can contact who can help you if you’re stuck in a jam.
3) Planning, most successful online activities are carefully planned, and don’t just happen. When you’re a small business, finding time to plan isn’t always that easy. Making time to plan your online presence can be essential.
4) Being interesting, the problem with finding inexpensive off the shelf solutions to your marketing problems is that they’re often not very interesting. Your website looks like a typical template site, which means it looks like a thousand others your customer has seen before, and it’s hardly engaging.
5) Mobile, these days if you aren’t planning for mobile, you’re not really understanding where the web is at. Make sure that all you digital plans involve doing something with mobile.
6) Lacking lead generation capability online, a lot of small businesses have a simple brochure type website, a small twitter account, a lame looking Facebook page, and they reckon they’re online and it’s going to make a difference. The problem with this approach is that one can hardly expect the web to serve as a serious lead generation opportunity if what one has to show about your business is pretty unimpressive.
7) Broadcasting not engaging, this is a problem that even many large companies face, as it’s so easy to get back into the bad habit of broadcasting what you want to say rather than really engaging with your customer.
8) Blindly leading the way, this happens all too often, because if you aren’t collecting and using decent quality analytics, then what are you doing on the internet and where are you heading.