Is Website Still Relevant for Business?
Brands need to reach out to as many customers as possible in the digital age, so we see rapid growth in communicating through other means such as social media feeds, apps, vlogs and more. With all these channels available in the market, is the website still relevant?
The short answer to this is YES.
The website remains the official communication channel of a brand so whether you are a start-up or an established brand, customers will still ultimately head over to your official website to get the most current and accurate information about you.
A well-designed website is as essential as having a name card — it represents you, digitally and brands with websites appear to be more credible in most cases. While social media channels such as Facebook or Twitter yield high engagement, they should not replace your website. Here is why:
Social media comes with limitations
A website can easily be customised according to your brand identity or business needs, whereas social media comes with a set of rules (and presentation format) which limit how much you can do to market your products and services.
The content you post on social media does not belong to you (or at least not entirely). Whichever channels you are using to reach out to your users, they have the right to remove your content at any time and there is no way for you to migrate them out of their environment. While it is good for awareness, it is certainly not wise to use it as your content depository.
Website contents are more discoverable by search engines compared to social media content — which you certainly do not want to miss out when someone is trying to look you up on Google or Bing. If you are a user like me who browses through social media feed too quickly, looking for a past feed can be a real hassle, and you will eventually give up and forget about it.
A website tells you more about your customers
Thanks to Google Analytics and other AI tools available for subscription, getting to know your user’s behaviour is much easier compared to what you gain from social media channels. Spending on maximising your website’s potential offers a better return on investment. By understanding how your users are consuming your website’s information, you get a better sense of how to improve your next digital marketing strategy.
A well-designed website takes away unnecessary customer support as well. Most users prefer self-service options whenever possible so keeping your information accessible and searchable is an essential part of good customer service.
The trouble with the website, however, is the amount of work involved to manage your content across multiple engagement channels. How can we make the same set of content available and shared across the many channels you are using (social media, app and perhaps even other IoTs)? Innovative brands may have considered moving into asset management platforms or headless CMS but not many are successful in the transition because the approach of managing content is often too technical for business owners or non-developer to comprehend.
Content sharing should be intuitive and easy to setup, so our team has recently embarked on designing a new way to manage digital content. For a start, we want to make digital content (or website in this case) available for AI Chatbot to use as its knowledge base through XYAN. One of the main challenges to achieving this goal is to make website content ‘understandable’ by AI to produce meaningful answers and output.
XYAN is currently in Beta version and will soon release its latest version by the first quarter of the year. We hope this article helps you in deciding if investing in a good website is worthwhile.
Feel free to reach out to us at sales@ximnet.com.my if you would like to bring this topic further with us.
XIMNET is a digital solutions provider with two decades of track records specialising in web application development, AI Chatbot and system integration.
XIMNET is launching a brand new way of building AI Chatbot with XYAN. Get in touch with us to find out more.