Getting Canadian businesses online, one website at a time

Marketing is both the science of understanding who your audience is and the art of conveying your value to them. When audiences go digital, either due to behavioural evolution, or due to the pandemic-induced preventive measures, businesses need to make that transition in a hurry to remain viable.

As the CEO of a company that serves thousands of small businesses across Canada, and as a board member of organizations that impact the lives of millions of Canadians every day, I make it my business to keep my finger on the pulse of the nation. This article is a portrait of what I see, and a window into what we (who love marketing) can all do to step into a stronger, healthier, and more prosperous Canada.

Great marketing needs great products

Going into 2020, Canadian small businesses faced a host of challenges such as the shift in consumer behaviour to digital discovery, services, and payments. This was coupled with increasing challenges in competing with deep-pocketed corporations that dominated the airwaves, demographic changes and rising operational costs. All of this was before COVID-19 hit these shores, making the move to digital an immediate necessity, and throwing a number of curveballs that made simply keeping the doors open tough.

Taking a step back, it was in January 2020 that my team put the finishing touches on our newest product, LiteSite - a one-page hosted website builder that includes a professional email address and HTTPS website security. Our vision for this product was to make it incredibly easy and fast for freelancers, small businesses, and start-ups to get their first website up and running. We iterated over months to ensure that LiteSite does precisely this – a professional website that can be ready to publish in under 60 minutes, with absolutely no need for coding skills.

Many small businesses register their domain names, but often struggle to invest the time (and technical knowhow) required to carefully plan their websites, maintain, and promote their digital presence. LiteSite is a product that solved these challenges that frequently deter small businesses and helped them get off the ground with a website and email.

Great marketing is based on values

At Webnames, our commitment to values is a central driver behind most of our decisions – whether it is the quality of customer service, our decision to store all our data within Canada, the charities we fundraise for, and the causes we support. Brands chasing values can work very well, but it can as easily backfire, if the brand does not put its resources to use for the causes it claims to promote.

When the pandemic hit daily life in Canada, many small businesses started running the risk of getting left behind. In-person retail transactions were curtailed by provincial health restrictions and the rather limited digital footprint in the form of a social media page or account is not sufficient to generate leads or sales online.

That’s when we decided to make a free LiteSite website and .CA domain available to thousands of small businesses, freelancers, women entrepreneurs, indigenous businesses, not-for-profits and students across Canada.

Under this program, we are proud to have helped restaurants, roofing companies, jewelers, painters and many more small and micro-businesses. LiteSite has been useful to students and other jobseekers looking to get hired and to women founders looking to hire, getting them all to build their first website and use professional email, for free.

Great marketing is great user experience

We designed this program to work with as little friction as possible: no strings attached to the offer, no sneaky auto-added upsell, no credit card required in the purchase flow. At the end of the 1-year mark, if the beneficiary wants to keep the domain or the website or the email, they can choose to renew at a reasonable CAD$50.

Extending the theme of simplicity, the LiteSite website builder is easy and effective at helping customers add all the basic elements a starter website needs – be it contact forms, an embedded map with your office address, photos of your artwork, links to your social media page or an embedded video that showcases your skills.

Great Marketing is about finding great advocates

Yes, we’re getting thousands of Canadian organizations online – but we hardly did it alone. The overwhelming credit goes to our amazing partners in business groups, indigenous groups, media and more. It is these organizations and several other advocates and well-wishers on social media that we thank for our success so far.

Women’s Enterprise Centre, New Ventures BC, City of Coquitlam and BusinessLink Alberta hosted us for fun webinars to help people plan and launch their websites. Futurpreneur, UBC, CAPU, FWE, YELL Canada, Surrey Board of Trade, First Nations Tech Council and many others helped us get the word out to their networks. While DailyHive and bulletins from Chambers of Commerce across the country helped us gain even more steam.

Great Marketing is about getting it just right

Just as a marketing campaign can waste too much money due to over-exposure or have a logo loom too big on a banner (my marketing manager disagrees, but I am inclined to go with my designer 😊), it is critical to get the frequency, size and complexity just right for your circumstance.

Some may ask, how far can a 1-page website take you? When we started ideating for this project, I was blown away by the amazing pages that designers around the world had built using just one single page. I must also give a shout out to OnePageLove which was an inspiration to our designers and product team. A 20-page website may sound like a wonderful idea, until the user realizes that it can be a nightmare to regularly manage and update.

Outcomes

Several amazing users have created highly effective one-page websites using our website builder. On LiteSite, we have already seen some fantastic websites, including one by a teenager for a venture named JustForKicks, which organizes soccer camps and programs. For many, this is their first ever website and it serves as a sandbox to test the potential of a website as a channel for their personal or business interests.

Once they are confident in the value they can derive from a website and in their ability to build and maintain it, we are sure that they will upgrade to a full-fledged site, perhaps on our WordPress website builder.

As we close in on the 9-month mark of this campaign, we have earned over a million impressions across all channels, seen a ton of traffic to our website and earned the goodwill of many Canadians and most importantly - helped small businesses and individuals start their journey to success on the internet, at a particularly challenging time.

Digital is increasingly a central pillar of marketing, and that begins with making websites more accessible and easier to build, for everyone. LiteSite gives Canadian small businesses an easy solution and Webnames’ offer of a free .CA domain and LiteSite for key sections of our society helps them take that first step online, at no cost.

Want to help us promote this program to an even wider audience? Please contact Webnames by email: marketing@webnames.ca

Note: The offer of a free 1-page website and .CA domain is open only to select segments of Canadians on a first come first served basis, until June 30, 2021. If you have questions, please contact Webnames by email: marketing@webnames.ca

Written by Cybele Negris, CEO & Co-Founder of Webnames.ca