Since 2020, more people than ever realized that they didn’t value their jobs and had lower job satisfaction, so they left en masse. Yet, despite the number of people leaving their jobs, the unemployment rate is around 3.3%.
This trend was coined the “Great Resignation,” and recent polling shows that over 40% of current employees are considering leaving their jobs.
Yet, the question remains, where have all the workers gone with the low unemployment rate?
Some have started new careers, switched jobs, or taken on new positions elsewhere. Others have started new businesses, websites, and blogs.
In fact, over 72% of small businesses have a website, so being online is a significant element of running a business these days.
The Power Of Your Website
The value of a website is that it can be a way to increase brand exposure and help you make additional offers to potential clients.
The benefits of a good website can;
- Increase brand exposure
- Enhance brand reputation
- Attract new customers
- Provide added layers to your marketing efforts
- Create local lead generation opportunities
- Help customers “find” your business
- Improves customer relations
- Save money on physical locations, storage, and labor
- Online content helps build a better brand reputation
- Advertise deals and discounts
- Announce employment opportunities
- Add online revenue to your business growth potential
- Allows you to capture visitors’ information for future marketing and targeting purposes
- Educate people about your brand and products
- Build a community
Additionally, a well-developed website can utilize the power of AI, or Artificial Intelligence, to track visitors’ tendencies and interests on your site, allowing you to optimize it based on your visitors’ interactions on your pages.
Chatbots Are Taking over Customer Service
Also, with advanced AI, you can implement chatbots that will take care of Q&A and interact with visitors in an improved customer service role that will reduce labor costs.
For small businesses, that means your visitors can interact with your brand at any time of the day or night, and you won’t need to have 24-hour, on-the-clock payroll, saving you a ton in labor costs.
Chatbots are Ai tools that you program to respond to key phrases and terms with selected answers. These chatbots can help your website visitors to navigate pages and find interesting blog posts and products that match their interests.
Even though people have largely resumed the normalcy of their lives, the impact of the pandemic did accelerate and disrupt a few things.
First, the increased reliance on remote and virtual work has only accelerated what was once a tiny trend among cutting-edge businesses. And two, with the dependence and usage of messaging apps, the acceptance of remote communications through a chatbot has become standardized.
As more and more people have become used to interacting with AI and chatbots, small businesses are better served once they adopt them in their online presence, like websites and social media.
Many small businesses and entrepreneurs have discovered that setting up a website can be easy, but setting up one effectively is a bit more challenging.
Market research shows that a good website enhances the visitor and, thus, customer experience. But a slow, unattractive website can actually turn people away from your brand altogether.
Some quick facts about poorly designed websites;
- 38% of people will turn away from a poorly designed website
- Nearly 40% of people judge a business by its website
- Conversions drop by 20% for slow-loading sites
- Poor user experience causes nearly 50% of visitors to go to a competitor’s site
- Over half of all e-commerce is conducted on mobile
- Consistent branding can increase conversions by 33%
All these facts demand that your website be top-notch for lead generation and brand reputation. In addition, as you grow your business, your website and online presence need to be top-of-the-line. Otherwise, you could see less foot traffic and a drying up of online traffic, killing your bottom line.
Building the website you deserve can take a ton of time and a significant amount of know-how, especially when you begin to incorporate advanced Machine Learning (ML) and AI. So it’s better suited to leave those things to the professionals.
You can find web developers online, you can Google for a web development company, or you can go through and do all the plug-ins and features yourself and hope for the best.
The best part about hiring your website needs a web development company is that they can customize your pages to build better brand consistency within each page, which, as mentioned earlier, significantly increases conversions online.
As more and more people explore their entrepreneurial side, what separates successful businesses from those that fail are luck, hard work, and great strategies to implement their growth. Building a great-looking website can do a lot of the heavy lifting needed and increase brand reputation along the way.