Does Your Website Need a Raise?
The average sales professional in a Kelowna business typically earns between $60-80,000 per year. In exchange for their paycheck, the salesperson is responsible for telling the story of the company and ultimately creating revenue-generating transactions. Most business owners consider this salary expense simply a cost of doing business. A well designed corporate website has the ability to do the same things, yet in Kelowna we frequently see business owners choke on their cold glass of water when they hear how much they need to spend on web design and development.
3 Types of Website Design
When looking to have a new website developed, most Okanagan businesses are going to find themselves around one of three prices: under $3000, $5000 to $10,000, and $10,000+. The big question is what type of website design does your money buy you at each of those price levels?
Websites as a Digital Brochure
For the most part, the primary role of websites developed under $3,000 is to simply act as your company's digital brochure. Websites of this type generally consist of several information pages about who you are, what service or products that you offer and how to contact you. Most of these websites are built from templates and as such have a fairly generic feel to them but a good web developer can still customize them enough to bring out your company's personality. If you simply want to display your corporate information, websites developed in this price range are quite satisfactory. Do-it-yourself blogging platforms fall into this category too, and building a free or cheap site with Google's Blogger.com or using the popular Wordpress platform is a good idea if you plan on adding regular content to your website. Hint: adding regular content is a great way to climb up the search engine results pages and increase your online inquiries!
Websites as a Sales Tool
If you are looking to have your website do more than just act as a digital brochure and actually generate an ROI, then you need to spend some money on web design. Websites developed in the $5000 - $10,000 range become a useful tool in your sales team arsenal. These custom designed websites engage your customers with dynamic content, such as videos and slide shows, but also have the means of facilitating a two-way dialogue with the customer. In this price range, tools to capture customer inquiries, sell products, download info, and provide member-only areas to come into play. Websites of this type are able to act as a tool for qualifying an unlimited number of prospective clients on any given day thus helping make the best use of your sales team's valuable time.
Websites as Part of Your Sales Team
If you really want your website to be a full-on member of your sales team and actually handle the entire sales process, from pitch to closing transaction, then you are typically going to pay $10,000 and up for web design and web development in Kelowna. When you consider that e-commerce sites such as these have the ability to assume a large amount of the workload handled by human salespeople, it doesn't take long for your business to see a positive ROI from your website. Even if your company does not need your website to be a full-on e-commerce solution, it still needs it to be an integral part of your branding and marketing strategy which in the end, results in increased revenue.
The stickier that you make your website by creating a feature-rich environment with frequently updated content, the greater your chance of converting visitors into clients. As such it's quite common these days to see the web design costs reaching well over the $20,000 mark. Custom sites are powerful sales machines for companies that sell products as well as companies that sell services. If a $50,000 website generates leads that result in $10,000/month, is the website still expensive? You may pay salespeople more than $50,000 per year and expect the same results. In this light, the "expensive" website is suddenly a bargain. We're not saying replace your sales staff with a website, but we are saying that perhaps your website needs a serious raise!
You Get What You Pay For
Our advice to businesses in Kelowna that have a strong marketing or active sales component is to view your website as an employee. If you paid your sales team minimum wage, do you think they would generate the results that you expect? Just like a salesperson, you get what you pay for. Want a super employee that works 24 hours a day and only complains once or twice a year when the internet dies or power goes out? Yes, your website probably needs a raise.