In light of this week’s Instagram outage, I thought I would elaborate on the importance of having a website for your business and share my own personal experience where I myself had the same thought process at one stage. 

When I started Eskae 3 years ago, I managed to take off through Instagram, right in the beginning it was my only platform and I managed to get a lot of organic traffic and all of my leads and bookings solely through Instagram. This was also before the “unpredictable algorithm” days. At this point I was well into my product photography and marketing business even at 1200 followers and built a reliable client base. It wasn’t until one day I had issues logging in, for an entire day and it completely dawned on me that had I lost my account (which is completely possible), I would have lost my entire existing/potential client base, my following and community that I had built up until that point and all of my work that acts as a portfolio for my business, just like that!

Before this scare, as I’d always been booked out, I become complacent about building a website as I was already so busy. This is definitely something I would advise against now. I couldn’t imagine what it would’ve been like to have had to start my account completely from scratch at that stage. 

Points to take away from this:

• Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.
• Take charge of your online presence. While Instagram is a valuable tool, having a website empowers you to diversify your marketing channels, establish authority, and future-proof your business.
• While Instagram is a fantastic marketing tool, it's crucial to have a website that serves as the backbone of your business.

- Sophia Kouts, Founder + Creative Director of Eskae Creative