When small businesses approach us at LovelyPixels and ask where they should spend their marketing dollars, we’ll always ask first and foremost about their website (unless they’re a brand new company and still need branding pulled together).

Why? Imagine spending hundreds of dollars on advertisements to send people to a site you aren’t proud of. Or, perhaps you’re sending people to a site that’s nice, but doesn’t have the potential to convert many of those visitors into paying leads. You’ll look back on that spending and think – ”What if I had a great website put in place when I did that advertising?”

Now, imagine spending thousands of dollars – or hundreds of thousands – on advertising and you have zero data showing if it was effective in generating new businesses. We don’t imagine it at LovelyPixels because we’ve seen this kind of waste happen to many companies before, especially small businesses. When it does happen, it can be easy to blame the people who – for example – sold you the ads. They’ll report to you and say “we had 5,500 clicks on your marketing email” but you’ll be empty handed with leads. What if you can converted just 0.1% of them? Just one tenth of one percent? Well, you’d have 5 new paying customers – that’s what.

And depending on how much you invested in the advertising, and how much you make off of your average customer, those 5 leads may have more than paid for your initial investment.