How investing in your website increases the value of your business

It's critical that you understand this: by transforming your website from the equivalent of an online brochure to a strategic part of your business, you can not only increase revenues and/or decrease costs, but also make your business more valuable and desirable to a potential buyer.

Your website could literally be the tiebreaker in selling your business and setting you up for the future.

Questions to ask yourself:

1. Is the website an integral part of the business, or is it hanging out all by itself?
2. Are you generating leads from the website?
3. Do you know who is visiting your website, which pages they're visiting, how long they're on each page, and the order in which they navigate the pages?
4. Can you personalize the contents of your site to the visitor?
5. Can you talk directly to the visitor based on their behavioral history and customize your offer to their needs?
6. Do you have targeted landing pages for specific services or offers? If so, what is the conversion rate like? How might you improve it?
7. Have you developed traffic funnels to help move prospective customers from awareness to conversion?
8. Does your website include ways to pre-qualify visitors so your sales staff can concentrate their time on those most likely to become customers rather than wasting time on tire kickers?
9. Do you know the ROI of your marketing campaigns?
10. Do you have a built-in way of knowing if a visitor came as the result of a specific marketing campaign, even if it was newspaper or radio?
11. Does your site have any intraorganizational features that help employees do their jobs better or help you administer the organization more efficiently?
12. Have you developed a social media following that helps communicate your message?
13. Do you have a way to share customer testimonials with prospects?
14. If your business offers free wifi, are you collecting data from users to help analyze your customer base and develop targeted marketing campaigns?

I could go on and on, but if you're like the average business owner there's a good chance that you don't even know what some of the questions mean, much less how to turn the answer from a No into a Yes. Imagine how much more profitable or easier to manage your business might be if you could answer Yes to the majority of them.

Now put yourself in the position of someone who is looking to buy a business like yours. Let's assume the buyer has narrowed it down to two businesses of interest, that both businesses are pretty much equal in size, profitability, location, and everything else that is important to the buyer. Now assume that the interested buyer asks each business the list of questions above, and one can answer Yes to most while the other has a blank look or a list of No's.

It isn't hard to imagine which business the person would decide to buy. As a matter of fact, they would have to be either stupid or incompetent to select the second one. You see, when you have systems and processes in place that make it easier for someone else to take over your business, it makes it easier to sell at a higher value.

Invest in your future by investing now in your website and digital marketing, and you'll benefit while you own the business as well as when it comes time to sell. Don't do it, and I promise you'll eventually regret it.