Building and running a small business can be tough—especially in the digital age.
While technology has certainly helped to flood the market with competition, it’s also granted plenty of small businesses with access to professional level tools that help them establish themselves in ways previously unachievable without significant investment—like building a website.
Once reserved only for those who could afford a quality web developer—or those willing to be at the mercy of an often amatuer-looking do-it-yourself approach—websites are now easier to build than ever thanks to the availability of intuitive drag and drop page builders.
Instead of having to learn how to code, understand complex design concepts, and create all of your own elements, nearly all of the work is done for you—all you need to do is exactly what it sounds like: drag the elements into place, drop them in, and off you go.
Of course, there are plenty of benefits drag and drop page builders provide small businesses beyond just ease and simplicity. So with that said, let’s dive into the key reasons why.
Reason 1: Drag and drop page builders allow small businesses access to the most important marketing tool available: a website
While we’ll get into some of the details later, one of the biggest and most important reasons drag and drop builders are good for small business entails accessibility.
Although there’s a small range of dissenting opinions, it’s hard to deny that a website is a company’s most valuable, useful, and high-visibility marketing tool available. It allows you to provide information to your prospects and customers, can easily combine images, text, and videos, links to other assets, provides a digital storefront, can be easily shared, and so much more.
Previously, the barrier to entry was a healthy pocketbook or at least some level of skill, and it kept a lot of really great small businesses from reaching the entirety of their market and audience. Now, with drag and drop page builders costing only a small subscription fee or even offering one-off or a la carte services—or simply being free at that—it’s more affordable than ever to establish a minimum viable product, enter the market, and harness it as a basis for growth.
Reason 2: Drag and drop page builders are a good use of resources
One of the biggest limitations most small businesses face is a lack of resources. Whether that’s a lack of peoplepower, time, money, knowledge, anything in between, or a combination of several, it can be difficult to grow when it requires additional, and often, unexpected costs, contractors, or even employees just to reach a baseline.
Realistically, it’s not uncommon to avoid sinking a ton of time and money into a website. After all, 66% of businesses—not even just small businesses—spend less than $10,000 on their website, and even on the low end, even just $1,000 to $2,000 is a hefty sticker for most smaller operations. The cost of a web designer alone costs an average of $75 per hour, and that can add up quickly if you need a comprehensive website, let alone frequent updates or changes to be made.
By contrast, it really only takes a few hours, and often less, for most people to get the basic hang of a drag and drop editor and be able to use it well enough to assemble professional, customer-facing pages that are aesthetically pleasing and functional. From there, whoever you end up tasking the project with will likely only get more skilled and efficient with their building process, making your use of resources even better over time.
Reason 3: Drag and drop page builders provide better oversight
Regardless of whom you task with taking on the responsibility of learning drag and drop builders—or making it a more universal skill within your workforce—keeping the process in-house is a massive benefit in terms of project management.
When you outsource work to an external contractor or team, there are limitations to how involved you can be during the project’s development. More often than not, the process usually ends up structured as a back and forth arrangement: you tell them what you need, they provide a general outline and some details, you approve and ask for changes, they refine their draft again, you approve, then they implement, and the final product is delivered.
While this has historically been a relatively effective arrangement for professional collaboration, it also leaves a lot of room for error. Any information that’s misinterpreted often doesn’t fully manifest until the final project is delivered. As well, making changes after the fact usually entails additional financial or temporal costs, which are commodities most small businesses are short on to begin with.
By keeping the process in-house, there’s a good chance that the team member who takes on the responsibility has a good understanding of the product or service, branding, voice, and general style. What’s more is that having them in-house means you can also leverage pre-established communication and feedback systems and communicate changes throughout the design process quicker and more effectively versus having to wait for prearranged milestones to be completed before circling back with changes.
Reason 4: Drag and drop page builders facilitate skill set growth
Regardless of who you task with the responsibility of learning how to use a drag and drop page builder, rest assured it will help them grow their skill set in a multitude of ways, almost all of which will help your business in the long run.
To put it into perspective, consider what you need to understand while learning the process in general. To learn how to use the builder as a whole, you have to understand how all of the tools and modules in the builder function, from choosing graphic elements and layouts to adjusting alignment and even learning how to get the text and images to work cohesively.
Once learned, not only will this help you build pages faster—providing an even better use of resources—but it will also grant you the ability to translate that process to your sales and marketing emails as well. After all, the two tend to go hand in hand, and both can be built via drag and drop.
In the context of your workforce, this will either allow you to have more control over two key sales and marketing tools or provide serious skill building opportunities for those whom you choose to put in the driver’s seat. It could even help you identify which employees have the capacity to learn and take on more or varying degrees of responsibilities, move into different roles, or even teach others to do the same, so more of your workforce is more widely trained.
Reason 5: Drag and drop page builders provide a professional, polished look that’s good for business—and the market
Beyond simply being a good use of resources, drag and drop builders allow small businesses with fewer resources to stay competitive.
Just a few years ago, it was apparent who had the capacity to pay for a nice looking website and who didn’t. Even earlier versions of the build-it-yourself web services all too often had the digital equivalent of seams that could be spotted from a mile away. Between those and the outright obvious examples, these sites often skewed the actual quality of the product, service, or business itself. More often than not, users regularly believed that a business’s website was a digital representation of their offering—regardless of whether the quality actually reflected it.
Like it or not, first impressions are important. For many small businesses, their website might be the first time any prospect first takes notice of them, and if it looks unprofessional, it could cost them all future business from that prospect—especially considering it only takes a website visitor mere milliseconds to determine whether or not they like your site and/or choose to leave or stay.
By providing visitors with a helpful, intuitive, and aesthetically pleasing site, small businesses can not only generate more business and better serve their customers, but help further reduce the gap that exists between those with a good product and service and those that have a nice website.
Reason 6: Drag and drop page builders allow for more controllable, staged development
Small businesses are small for a reason, and there are plenty of reasons why. However, one common reason is that they’re in early stages of development or growth. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it does tend to inspire pause for many businesses, leaving them wondering when they should develop a website, let alone if and when they can afford to.
Considering that most traditional websites take a minimum of 14 weeks to design, develop, and implement, let alone the costs incurred along the way, it’s just not a viable option for many growing businesses that undergo many early-stage changes.
However, drag and drop page builders allow small businesses to start at the ground floor and work their way up as they see fit. Instead of trying to anticipate everything they’ll need and shipping that off to a web developer, they can even just take it one page at a time—and garner some traffic along the way.
By taking this approach, businesses can start with as little as a single page with contact information, basics of the offerings, establish their branding, and plenty more. From there, they can scale up based on the directions they want to expand, and when, all without breaking the bank or overtaxing their team. Plus, taking a staged approach also allows plenty of time to analyze performance, get feedback, and refine design elements, information, and anything else you choose to include.
In the end, there’s much more control over timing, cost, content, and general management, all of which allows business owners to grow their business as they see fit, instead of being at the mercy of a development team that requires significant investment.
Summary
As you can see, there are plenty of reasons why drag and drop page builders are not only good for small businesses, but an ideal approach to either revamping a website or building one from scratch. With considerable advantages in cost, time, and management, as well as the potential opportunities they can create for development for yourself and/or your team members, there are few better solutions to help you develop one of your greatest sales and marketing tools—and grow your business in the process.
