Picture the scene. You’re keen to find out more about a product so you google it, and the search results bring up various mentions … but there doesn’t seem to be any online links to the company that produces it. After a few more tries, you give up with a shrug.
The fact is that without a website, a business doesn’t exist – or, as Descartes might have it: “I link therefore I am.” It’s a concept that Stuart Prescott, the co-founder of a freeze-dried fruit brand, 5th Season, understands implicitly: “It’s expected that a business should have a website; if they didn’t, you might not trust them,” he says.
With a background in product development and marketing for the likes of Pepsi and Kettle Chips, Prescott knows what it takes to make a successful brand. “If you look at the small businesses that have got big – Graze, Huel, Grenade – they were online-only for a number of years,” he says. “What that meant is that they had a really great relationship with their consumers, so as soon as they went into Tesco, for example, or another retailer, they were a huge success.”
Launching your business online also allows you to test and learn more affordably than if you were to open a bricks-and-mortar store. “The plan was always to set up online initially,” says Andy Walker, who launched Gingerbread Bakery in February, just as pandemic preparations were ramping up. Featuring personalised notes and packaging, Walker’s brownies and other baked goods make handy long-distance gifts, so the timing has actually panned out OK. (Not that you can please everybody: “Someone did complain to me yesterday about being called Gingerbread Bakery even though we don’t sell any gingerbread yet,” he says.) Customers enter their message directly on to the website and Walker fires up the oven to order.
An IT software developer by trade, Walker resisted the temptation to personally engineer every facet of his site. “I know how much work generally goes into e-commerce so I knew it could be a long-winded process, and that’s why I started to look at off-the-shelf solutions. I don’t want to be writing code. I could – I could spend eight or nine hours a day developing my own website – but that’s not what I wanted to do, I wanted to bake brownies.”
Unlike 5th Season, which brought in an external company to create its website, Walker researched the self-build options and decided to go for GoDaddy.
“It just seemed the most logical to me. It could do everything that I needed without it being too technical. This was ‘click and do’,” he says.
By using GoDaddy’s Websites + Marketing, which has been made free during the Covid-19 pandemic, Walker benefits from a whole suite of tools, including search engine optimisation (SEO), email marketing, blog analytics and social media stats. This keeps him incredibly close to his business performance, whether he’s seeking to identify best-sellers or regular customers.
So far, so successful – but what if you’re selling a service, not a product? And what if that service is all about bringing people together, at a time when no one could leave their house? As the country closed in on itself in March, Lizzy Eaton, the founder of an events agency, Oddity Events, began sharing virtual hints and tips via her business blog. This grew into a series of weekly webinars and, to her surprise, created new business leads too.
“I didn’t think I would be selling any of my services during this time, but because of my blog and my website I have been able to,” says Eaton. Off the back of her online marketing – which, like Walker, she runs through GoDaddy Websites + Marketing – she was approached by a brand consultancy firm who wanted to run a virtual event.
For Eaton, digital will remain a core part of her business even as restrictions are lifted. “You can integrate online to make your events more sustainable by, for example, not flying in speakers from across the world, or you can have all of your assets on a website rather than printing out reams of paper,” she says.
“Even in normal times, I speak a lot to clients about how we can make our events more inclusive,” she says. “I talk about it in terms of physical inclusion for people with disabilities, and cultural inclusion. For me, the digital aspect of events and event design is actually more inclusive than some physical events.”
Eaton says she is currently writing a proposal for a project in 2022 and she’s already thinking of ways to make it “a hybrid event” with both physical and digital elements.
So, what would these entrepreneurs say to small business owners who haven’t got a website yet? Eaton, who sees her website as the shopfront for her events business, is emphatic: “Just go for it and don’t be scared, because the beauty of online is that you can change things.”
Walker at Gingerbread Bakery plans to do just that, firstly by growing his online customer base and perhaps following up with a shop or cafe one day, too. And who knows, by then he may even sell gingerbread.
GoDaddy launched the #OpenWeStand initiative offering a number of free tools, widgets, resources and blogposts at OpenWeStand.org to help small businesses keep their digital doors open while their physical doors are closed. Over 50 companies have joined the cause, including Slack, Salesforce, PayPal, and more
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