When I first started working on the internet, the web browser didn’t even exist. It was all dial-in bulletin board services (BBS) and more. I remember reading an article on one of these BBS’s when I was young about this new thing coming — the World Wide Web. It sounded amazing. When websites first landed, they were all text based and pretty simplistic. Today, the internet runs much of our lives. We can connect from just about anywhere in the palm of our hand at hundreds of times the speeds that existed just 20 years ago.
The internet, online marketing, and related technologies are changing faster than most people can keep pace with. The question is, how do you grow a business in an environment that’s changing so quickly. On one hand, it’s easier than ever to promote a business online with simple website builders, online ad tools, and DIY guides, but the sheer number of options can drown you in time you don’t have.
Responsive websites that scale to multiple screen sizes didn’t even exist a few years back, social media and related ad vehicles are really still in their infancy, and the Google search engine is just now a teenager.
We believe one of the keys to success with growing a business online is to start small and keep it simple. Many times when people approach having a new website created, they try to think up everything they’d ever want it to be. The problem is that by the time you build the perfect website, it’s already outdated. The best thing to do is to separate your list of features and needs into MUST haves and WOULD BE NICE. Get to the launch of the website as quickly as possible and continue to make improvements month over month. We call this “Growth Driven Design” — the idea is that instead of having a new website built over many months and then waiting years to redo it, launch the minimal viable product as soon as possible and keep making improvements.
The beauty of a website is that it’s organic — well, not really, but it allows for natural development. Unlike print materials that are unchangeable once printed, when you launch a website, you can make a change just a few minutes later. That’s what makes building a website such a huge value for your business.
Growing a business online requires constant change to keep up, but don’t let that scare you. One of the best things you can do is to have a team in place as a partnership to help keep things improving. That’s one of the big changes we’ve made to help us keep growing with our clients over the last few years. Instead of just designing a site and waiting for it to be redone years later, we want to help review the site each month to see what’s actually working and what’s not in order to make adjustments accordingly.
If you’d like help growing your business online, we’d love to chat about how one of our digital marketing partnerships might work well to help you manage the changes ahead. Contact us today!
