How do they stack up?
Most businesses, whether small, medium or large, will be familiar with the cost of traditional print media. Coupled with that is the awareness of the limitations of this media - distribution costs, limited lifecycle, static content, geographic distribution constraints, etc. Consider the following example:
Let's say you print 5,000 single page black and white leaflets to advertise a special you're having on widgets. For $0.10 per copy, you can get these leaflets printed, inserted with other flyers in your local newspaper and distributed. Your total investment is $500.00. Let's assume that only 60% of those leaflets actually make it into the hands of potential customers (since not everyone gets the newspaper and of those that do, not everyone looks carefully through the flyers.) That puts your cost-per-impression at $0.166 because you spent $500 to reach 3,000 people.
Now, say you took that same investment and instead built a website with it. After having your new domain name added to your business cards, storefront signs and through the magic of search engines and word of mouth, your new website has 3,000 unique visitors in the first two months and visitorship grows by 10% each subsequent month. So, after two months, the cost-per-impression is $0.166 - exactly the same as the leaflet from above. But, consider this: after three months you've had 3,300 visitors with no additional costs. So, your cost-per-impression just dropped to $0.151; after four months and 3,630 visitors, it's $0.137, and so on and so on. One year and 7,781 visitors later, and your cost-per-impression has dropped to only $0.064.
Some astute readers will realize that it took a year to achieve those savings. Was it worth it to wait that long? Consider as well the other limitations of the leaflet method: your flyers were mixed in with others making them hard to distinguish, they were only distributed locally, limiting your audience only to those who bought the paper or had one delivered, and once printed, the information in your leaflet couldn't be kept up to date with new information. In contrast, over the year your website was up, the odds are very good that the visitors to your site were there because they wanted to be there - they had searched for your company or products and so were, in a sense, a pre-qualified lead. Furthermore, you could revise and update the content on your website for very little (or no) additional cost. This meant that visitors were more likely to return to your site because they realized that there was always something new to see (unlike your flyer whose April specials were outdated within two weeks of it being printed!)
Still think your business doesn't really need a website?