Why your Business needs a web site.

There are quite a large number of businesses here in Clonmel,  Tipperary and around Ireland that still have not got around to building  a company web site. Which,  while its understandable in the current economic climate that companies are reluctant to part with hard earned cash,  for something that they may not fully understand, see on a par with a phone book listing, don’t see any reason to bother and or all of the above.  Similar i might baulk at my mechanic telling me i need a part for my car, which seems to run fine at the moment, to offset a more costly repair down the road, pun intended of course.

To begin with we will do a hypothetical experiment, this experiment while hypothetical, will be based on complete factual information as of time of writing. This experiment will focus on two companies offering the same product on a national level. We will use kitchen cabinet design  as the product and service of both companies. We will call these companies,

• “Online Kitchens” and “Offline Kitchens”  their respective names show where they come in this experiment, i.e ”Online Kitchens” has  a web site ”Offline Kitchens” does not have a web site.

Okay now we will give each company a profile, and target audience,

•  selling and installing kitchen cabinets throughout Ireland, their prime target audience is obviously people interested in having  a kitchen supplied and or installed. OK they will have a traditional ad spend budget, we will look in to  this type of advertising when we come to offline kitchens, for online kitchens we will focus on customer generation via the web and its effectiveness. First its important to see some hard facts;

• There are over 2.4 million Internet users here in Ireland and growing daily.

• Irish shoppers spent an estimated EUR2.1 billion last year on credit card purchases over the Internet.

• Many shoppers believe they get better value for money by buying online,

• The UK e-retail sector grew at its highest rate in two years during May, with sales up 22 percent compared to the same month last year.

• Search is on of the most widely used functions online.

• 54% of Irish consumers research offline purchases online first.

OK now back to our new company online kitchens, Lets mine some online data related to that niche, in Ireland in June 2010, this was the Google search volume for some search terms related to their niche. “custom kitchen cabinets”  = 1000 approx search vloume in Ireland for June, “discount kitchen cabinets”  = 1000 approx search volume  in Ireland for June, “buy kitchen cabinets”= 1000 approx search volume  in Ireland for June,  ”modular kitchen cabinets”  = 1000 approx search volume  in Ireland for June. Think about that for a minute 4 keyword searches here in Ireland that accounted for 4000 people online looking for sites related to these keywords, note there would be alot more  keyword generated searches by people looking for kitchens but for the purpose of this example we will keep it to four phrases. That’s four thousand potential customers already looking  for online kitchens  in June around Ireland.

So how can online kitchens tap that market?.

Honest answer, very quickly  and easily, A simple pay per click ad campaign would have your kitchen ad display to searchers within 15 minutes, and as the name pay per click suggests, you only pay when some actually clicks your ad and visits your web site.  Think about that in terms of lead generation. Your cost per click  {cpc} will depend on a number of factors see http://www.pixel-splash.com/blog/pay-per-click/, however i would imagine your cpc to be anywhere form 10 cent to a euro. That’s quite cheap for a  very hot  customer sales lead. Now i could write a whole blogs wrote of information on generating qualified customer’s online but you may of aged a year by the time you finish reading :}, but i think you can see that even by scratching the surface,  what benefits there are  to having a web site online, here in Clonmel,  Tipperary or indeed anywhere in Ireland.You can also look at http://www.pixel-splash.com/blog/search-engine-optimisation/ for methods on improving your organic search visibility.

So what about offline kitchens?

Don’t worry i haven’t forgotten despite the length of the post :}.  So whats available to to offline kitchens other than the obvious store front, local yellow pages etc that online kitchens is sure to have, We have the traditional advertising mediums to access. OK lets have a look at three well used mediums,

1. National newspaper,
2. Local news paper,
3. Local Radio,

• National newspaper ad. Upside good brand awareness possible high exposure to customers, downside costs, unknown as to how much of your target demographic is being reached by the ad and unknown return on investment.
• Local newspaper ad.  Good branding in your locality, downside , snippet of conversation which a i had with a local newspaper ad executive, ” leaving for pastures greener, sick and tired of clients ripping me a new one over the amount of new customers in store versus the amount spent on the ad campaign, which where hard sold to these clients on fresh air promises.” For obvious reasons i wont be naming names, also as above unknown as to how much of your target demographic is being reached by the ad and unknown return on investment.
• Local radio, you will typically be charged per 1000 listeners and will vary from station to station. Upside good local branding, can be cost effective,  Downside limited target demographic information and without sounding repetitive, unknown return on investment.

Conclusion, while I’m not saying there are not effective offline advertising media, and it can ad to your business, think about it online kitchens already use offline media effectively but also has access to the online market, where your roi is completely trackable and costs are very low, versus offline kitchens who rely on the traditional offline ad mediums, i just have one question for you, which kitchen company do you think has the edge?.

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