A website is the best marketing asset for any business. It functions as a brand promoter, product and service advertiser, customer service representative, and sales associate; it travels the world and never sleeps.
Ask yourself these two questions:
- What would be your performance expectations of the individual, responsible for collaborating across multi-functional environments while leading all strategic initiatives of your business?
- What would be the salary requirement for such a valuable asset to your company?
It may surprise you that the minimum standard recommendation is to spend only 10% of your business gross yearly revenues on all marketing, which includes budgeting for a website.
A business website is an investment. Focusing your efforts to optimize its performance will result in maximum returns. Consider this, small businesses with websites yield high revenues, "averaging $1.07 million more per year in sales versus small businesses that are not online."
How much will web design cost for your business ?
To start, let's break web design into two separate categories; building a website and promoting a website. Building a website includes: Developing a new website; Redesign an existing website; Creating online applications for a website; Making upgrades or modifications to a website. After the completion of a website build promoting the site begins. Promotion of a website is vital. If no one knows a website exists, it will not be successful. For the various steps and strategies that go into optimizing a website for the best return review our Step By Step Guide to Web Design.
What does this have to do with your question of how much to spend? Depending on the age and size of your business, you will benefit from allocating more funds to either web development or marketing strategies.
For the small business - Businesses generating $500K to $1M a year. A continual website improvement process is needed to remain competitive. I recommend investing $3K to $6K monthly, which would include website projects and promotion. The complete marketing strategy should involve adding new pages and applications to improve the user experience. In addition to all the bells and whistle to optimize performance for the maximum profits: Creating marketing assets, capturing and nurturing leads, tracking conversions, blogging, SEO, PPC, and social media.
Why is a complete marketing strategy relevant to your company? A good ROI when executing a successful marketing campaign is 5:1. Meaning, companies can receive a $5 return for every $1 spent (a 20% increase). Of course, other factors can impact outcomes.
While there is no set amount of money to invest in a website, using this information will assist in better estimation of web design expenses.
