When you first started your service business, you were mostly worried about getting clients and keeping your costs low. Right?
One of the great things about starting a done-for-you service business is that you can start your own business with little to no overhead.
Keeping costs low and business simple often means a lot of business owners start with creating social media accounts and don’t prioritize getting a website.
Why is that a problem?
In today’s episode, I’m going to show you why this is the number one mistake I see service providers make in the first couple of years of their business.
When you first started your service business, you were mostly worried about getting clients and keeping your costs low. Right?
One of the great things about starting a done-for-you service business is that you can start your own business with little to no overhead.
Keeping costs low and business simple often means a lot of business owners start with creating social media accounts and don’t prioritize getting a website.
Why is that a problem?
In today’s episode, I’m going to show you why this is the number one mistake I see service providers make in the first couple of years of their business.
When you launched your service provider business, you are probably mostly worried about getting clients and keeping your costs low after all. One of the great things about starting a done for you service business is that you can start your own business and be an entrepreneur with little to know overhead. What does that typically mean for your marketing? Honestly, what I see a lot of service providers doing is they start with creating just social media accounts and they don't prioritizing having a website. Why is that a problem? Let's find out you're listening to the captain coder podcast each week. I take you through actionable strategies that can help you grow your online business. I'm your host, Mauricea vans, skyr, AKA captain coder. Let's just start talking about why you don't wanna rely on social media with the most obvious answer. Now, do you remember when Facebook and Instagram went down hours or more? Last October? Now my personal and business feeds were full of panic, small business owners who rely heavily on social media to grow their business and communicate with other customers. What ended up happening is a lot of small businesses and a lot of big businesses had to move their main conversation to TikTok, to LinkedIn, to Twitter, places that they didn't necessarily even pray, prioritizing, engaging with their content and even still, what is the problem with that? What is the big issue? The big problem with a business, putting all of their eggs in the social media basket. You have zero control of that platform. It's not just about if Facebook or Instagram go down for seven hours and you have to get creative. It's the fact that you can't control how your content gets seen. I want you guys to think about whenever you create a post on Instagram or when you create a post for Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter, TikTok, wherever you're posting. Does it look exactly how you'd like it to look? Now, Instagram is talking about changing our feed completely more to match TikTok and to move into the reals obsession by making the feed be full screen. How many of us created content for Instagram in a square? So how is that going to translate when Instagram does this test and takes us to full screen, we don't know. And here's the thing. We have no control over what Instagram chooses to do. You can't control your brand standards. You can't control in what order your posts get seen and how people interact with you or your content. Now you may be wondering, okay, so if we can't do social media, what do we do now? This is one thing. When I teach classes at WITA state, the number one thing my students get hung up on is social media. They think that social media is the, be all end all for a digital marketing plan, but that's not even close to being the case. Do you know what is having a business website customized for your business gives you control over your brand story. It gives you control over how your story is represented and how it's laid out. It gives you multiple ways to connect with and communicate with your target audience. Now, there's a reason why the website is the actual foundation to a businesses marketing, because it literally is the only piece that you can have full control over. Let's take a second to talk about that foundational piece. Why do I constantly tell people that a website is the foundation for your Mar businesses marketing? Well, honestly, think of your website as your office online. It used to be that if somebody wanted to work with you, they had to come to your storefront to your office space. Your website is that virtually, especially when you're running an online business and you work out of your home, you don't have a physical location to really connect with people in the way that we used to in the old days. But that's the great thing about being online is that website is viewable by anybody in the world. The problem is not all social media platforms are available anywhere in the world. Now, of course, let's not get into internet regulation across the globe, but your website has more chance of being seen by people wherever they are. It gives them the ability to connect with you in a way that nothing else really can. And it also gives you that full control over your brand story and everything that goes into your company. Now, why it's the foundation? The real reason I want you to think about the last time you posted something on social media and you had a call to action for someone to work with you, what did you tell them to do? If you wanted someone to sign up your email list, where did you tell them to go? Chances are, you're sending people to your website all of the time, but are you treating it like it's the destination that it really should be if you haven't even opened up your own website in several months. And if you've made changes to your business and your service offerings, and you're only talking about it on social media, you can be causing yourself a lot of problems. The thing is is that your website is the foundation to your business, but you have to use it as such. Otherwise it can't help you. And that's where I have so many clients come to me and they say, well, I don't get anything outta my website. Well, of course you neglect your website. You don't talk about the things that you say you do in your business, on your website. You're not showcasing people, how you can help them through your website. You're spending all of this time creating reels that you have no control over who sees it, but yet you're not putting similar content across your website. Just food for thought. Now let's talk about another key factor in all this, because I could talk about how your website is your a website, just it builds trust. When you rely only on Instagram and other social media platforms, you're gonna have, uh, people who come with you with a little bit of concern just in the back of their minds, that they're actually going to get what they paid for social media pages. Remember, you can throw up an Instagram account relatively quickly and you can also take it down really quickly and you can take money without having to guarantee anything and have people having no recourse, no way to get back in touch with you because your Instagram account is now just gone without a website, you might be preventing your target audience from They can be left. Wondering if you're actually a real business, will you be sticking around to deliver on the product or service that you claim you're going to deliver on? Will you take their money and run? And can you, can you prove the results that you're claiming you can help them achieve? You can showcase a lot of great things on social media. Don't get me wrong. But when you have a website and especially a website that is a true foundational home for your business, it shows that you have invested into your business. It proves that you've taken at least some time and a little bit of funding to provide a better experience for your customers. Now, with a website, like I talked about, you have to ensure that you're answering questions. You're working on building trust with who your business is, and you're using a custom domain name, all very simple things that show that you believe in your business enough to invest a little bit in it. First. Now I'm not saying that when a business is first getting started, that just having an Instagram page is totally a bad thing, but it's certainly better to not rely on social media. Only for very long. One of the biggest arguments I am seeing on Instagram right now are coaches telling people that you don't need a website, but when you start reading these arguments, because you can't take money on Instagram and you can't take money on TikTok, a lot of these coaches start saying, oh yeah, you can just need social media. But then what they end up telling you is that, well, okay, you also need a landing page or you need a funnel. And they use these two words and they neglect to tell you that those are both websites. Even if all you have is a single page and they call it a landing page that is still a website. There is a reason that you have to have this. You have to have a control, a corner of the internet that you can completely control. When you rely on social media, you run the risk of not being able to talk to your customers. If something goes wrong with that platform, it's the same thing. The coaches talk to you about. They teach you to take people to a landing page or a funnel or a Lincoln bio, and use all of these, you know, hodgepodge tech pieces together. Because even they know that without some kind of platform outside of social media, you run the risk of not being able to keep in touch with your target audience, with a website. You can have multiple ways for a customer to reach you. Now, what are those ways? How can a website give you multiple touchpoint with your customers on one landing page? Let's look at a few of my favorites. Now, when I talk about websites and customer communication, I think every business needs to, at the very least have a contact form on their website that sends an email notification when they get emails. However, I also highly recommend that you have some sort of phone number listed, okay, this is not my favorite thing. And I kind of hate that. I do this myself, cuz unfortunately for us introverts, the majority of people still prefer to be able to pick up a phone and call, believe me, I actually in like last semester was going to blindside my students and tell'em, Hey, nobody wants to call anymore. I was wrong. The data showed me that something like 70% of people still want a phone number. They still wanna be able to call you or at the very least they want that to be an option. So get a Google voice number for free, get, you know, some kind of free number that routes to your cell phone. You don't wanna necessarily wanna put your cell phone on the internet, but get a Google voice number and have it route to your phone so that you can control when you receive those calls and take, you know, and keep your boundaries. But you wanna give somebody the ability to reach out to you. Now, if you provide. A service where you have customers that might need to answer might need quick answers. You can imagine that as a web developer who hosts websites, I often will get emergency texts from clients. So you might wanna consider adding some kind of live chat plugin to your website. Now you don't have to be available at all times to answer those questions immediately, but it can help your audience have a new way to feel like they're getting help quickly. One thing that I see a lot of businesses neglect is an FAQ page. An FAQ page can be incredibly powerful because it can allow you to quickly answer the majority of your prospects questions without them having to reach out for more information to you directly. It saves both of you time and frustration. Now when Facebook and Instagram went down last October, I knew a lot of small business owners that lost their ability to be contacted at all. You don't wanna let that happen to you instead. You wanna make sure that you're providing several ways for your customers to reach out and communicate with you. And the great thing is is you can have multiple through your website. Something else that a lot of the coaches and gurus who tell you that you don't need a website kind of neglect to let you know Google likes websites. In fact, Google's not really gonna find you unless you have a website. When you have just social media, when you have some kind of platform that a third party, 100% controls, um, there's almost no way for your business to be found, especially if you build it largely on Instagram or Facebook. Yes. Google somewhat indexes, social media content, but its ability to properly index that content is restricted by the social media platforms themselves. Facebook. For instance, you can't actually view anything unless you have a Facebook profile. So you're cutting out people in your target market who don't wanna be on Facebook. Instagram is all public. So is TikTok. If you don't have accounts, but Google doesn't index those the same way they do with websites. If you wanna get found organically through searches, there's almost no way to do that without a website. Now, Google is a long term strategy. I know a lot of businesses that have successfully started their business on social media and they basically just verify that they have a business model that will work that's that's good. That's one thing. But if you want your business to last long term, you have to have your own website. So that you can build an audience through Google and reach people that are not on social media platforms. Now I know that you're sitting over here saying, well, everybody's on social media. It's not true. Not everybody is. And honestly there are lots of days that I wish that they could be off of social media. So you have to keep that in mind that you wanna be incredibly discoverable. So you're not missing out on anybody. And the only way to do that is to have more touchpoints and a place of the internet that is your home, which is your website. Now are you noticing a pattern in what we've been talking about here with your own website. It provides you multiple communication platforms and you have more control over your own marketing and how it's presented. You're not constrained by how many characters you can affected by an algorithm and how much reach you can get and whether or not you've chosen to post a reel in the last couple of weeks, you're not limited to the design aesthetics of the app you're using. And you're way less affected when the world's largest social media platforms crash for seven hours or more now with your own website, your business gets to be 100% in control of the look of the branding. The way that you tell your brand story and how you connect with potential customers, you get to choose how your customers can communicate back with you too. So yes, you can. 100% build a business on a social media platform, but you're doing it on rented space. It is not your space. It is theirs. Don't take that risk with your business and how you get clients. It's not worth it. Long term, a website will be your best investment. Thank you all for tuning into our show this week to catch more captain coder, you can subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now, if you have any questions or you wanna learn more about digital marketing and how it can help grow your online business, follow us on instagram@captaincoderorvisitusonlineatcapcoder.com. Can't wait to talk to you all again next week.