EN日本語
WEB2

[A Common Question] What Should You Spend the Most Money On When Running a Website?

Article illustration: A Budget to Build It—but What About Reaching People?

From ACIDHOUSE, INC., this is Tetsuya Ashida.

Small business owners who have websites sometimes ask me this question.

Small business owner
I run a website, but honestly I do not have a huge budget.
What should I spend the most money on?

In this article, I answer that question.

Are You Making This Mistake?

It is…

Spending on production and updates while trying to skimp on promotion

This is really common.

“If you build a website, it will appear in search engines for free and customers will come automatically”—this urban legend seems alive and well, and appears to influence people's thinking beneath the surface.

Perhaps that was true nearly 20 years ago when the web was not used so much for business, but with competitors crowding search engines and keyword ads today, customers will not come simply because you built a website.

Getting customers to act is your lifeblood, so when you consider the web as a business, promotion is where you should invest.

Additional note
Promotion brings acquiring new customers to mind, but first you should encourage existing customers to use your website more actively. See the following article.

The Website-Building Process

To think this through, let's broadly unpack the process of building a website, although it varies by project.

  1. Planning
  2. Creating wireframes
  3. Creating designs
  4. Coding
  5. Integrating the CMS
  6. Testing
  7. Going live
Brief additional explanations
  • Wireframe: a document describing a web page's skeleton and components before design.
  • Coding: very simple programming in languages such as HTML and CSS to structure web pages and display them in a browser.
  • CMS: a tool for managing a website through a browser. It can update pages, change site layouts, and add dynamic features. WordPress is a representative example.

All You Need Is a Browser, and Production Costs Can Be Dramatically Lower

Looking at the website-building process above, you may have thought each step required specialists, whether external partners or an internal team—and therefore a lot of money.

But that is no longer the case.

In fact, many tools now let you create professional-quality designs and websites without specialized skills. Moreover, annual costs are an order of magnitude lower.

In other words, taken to its extreme, you can now build a website using only a browser at dramatically lower cost.

*For the tools, see these articles.

[No Web Production Company Needed?] How Small Businesses Can Make High-Quality LPs (Landing Pages) Cheaply [No Skills Required] March 3, 2019

[No Designer Needed?] Handy Web Design Tools for Small and Medium Businesses [Mostly Free, Too] February 20, 2019

Incidentally, “planning” is probably unnecessary too.

Planning here means deciding what kind of site or design to create, but the tools mentioned above come with abundant templates.

A website's purpose is, of course, to sell, so simply apply a web design that sells.

Customer response is everything, so the essence is not what kind of site or design to create, but how to change the site or design over time.

In other words, the necessary process is improvement, rather than planning.

Focus on Copywriting and Advertising

Something absolutely essential is absent from the website-building process above.

It is the copywriting on your website.
Strictly speaking, copywriting is not website construction, but…

The web is merely a medium connecting customers with service providers.

In other words, copywriting is “a salesperson written on the screen”. Every company spends time and money on salespeople, who directly affect revenue. Copywriting should be the same.

Next, focus on advertising.

Advertising is copywriting aimed at potential customers, so the same applies. Just as you spend money to hire a salesperson, you should spend money on advertising.

As an aside, companies often cut advertising budgets in a downturn, but that is no different from cutting the compensation of a salesperson who can sell.

The Ideal Budget Ranking

  1. Advertising and writing
  2. Owned media, including video and social media
  3. Tools for production
  4. Infrastructure, such as servers

*Staff and partners are also “investment targets”, so do not skimp when asking for their help.

*Owned media used to aim at attracting customers through SEO, but intensifying SEO competition has made results harder to achieve.

Now, rather than treating it as customer acquisition, providing information to potential customers (giving) is a better use.

Tools and infrastructure rank lower because they are becoming cheaper relative to their specifications and quality. Just to be clear, that does not mean it is okay to skimp on them.

Invest actively in the entire web business, with a heavier emphasis on promotion

That is the approach I recommend.

*Please also read the following articles on advertising.

[Must-Set] Use Display Ads to Reach "Worried Customers" and "Someday Customers" [Body Blows] March 6, 2019

[The Essentials] The One Method to Master for Acquiring New Customers [Still the Answer in 2019] February 17, 2019

[The Essentials] Where Should You Start with Online Customer Acquisition? [Existing Customers First] February 16, 2019