What makes you to choose your web host? Its “big name” of a popular company, well-know in the web hosting business or just an offer that looks like great one. I can make a bet that popular hosting brands get majority of the prospective customers.
But at the same time most hosts still don’t care about establishing a reputable business name. Especially smaller hosting companies. They are focused in advertising their hosting plans that “come” with fantastic disc space and bandwidth quotas. But everybody does it. As a result most new companies are trying to compete on the market only by watching “the best time” to offer 100 GB disc space for Shared hosting account fro $5/month.
Web Hosting Label
Working hard to promote your web hosting label is always better business goal than to marketing just a web hosting plan. Users can not make the difference between all the offers they see. At the same time they always recognize a popular business name. It is still very important a web host to be able not just to promote its name but to prove its reliability. Having a popular brand however is the most important thing that would help a small web host to grow.
A good example for successful branding a web hosts name is Bluehost. This is not a hidden advertising or a compliment to company’s CEO Matt Heaton who I barely know. It’s true. I’ve met an attorney-at-law last month in NY and we discussed different business topics while having a dinner. After I explained what do I do and offered him my help to choose a web host he said he already signed up for 2 years with Bluehost. There are many examples like this one. You can find many people to tell you such a story for Powweb, Lunarpages, Apollo, Webintellects and many more hosting companies.
I paid attention on Bluehost because their domain is registered in November 2002. That means for less than 4 year this company has succeeded to establish their name in the hosting market and to become popular among hundred thousands of people. Bluehost say on their home page they host 120,000 domains. I don’t know whether they have the same number of hosting customers and if they are happy or not. All I’m saying is that everyone who works hard to create a good business brand will benefit a lot.
How To Create a Popular Brand
First thing to start with is to set a clear objective. That will help a company to target the right customers and to build a good service plan. “Who do you want to have as a customer?” is a question that shall be answered at the beginning. It will give you a good direction. If you want to attract web designers you should ask them what do they want, to make a research and to implement tools and service policy that can help them to manage and sell their projects.
Targeting Small Business class customers requires a different approach. The web host that wants to server SMB is better to focus on features such as fax-to-email or to provide exchange server or similar service that enables groupware software.
It is very different when you want to work with personal or family websites. Than you need to provide very low cost service.
Once you decide who to address then you need to find how to reach your target customer group. using marketing and advertising consultant is a good idea and it always worth to spend some money to get good advice. I suggest you to read some papers before start working with someone. This way you would be able to participate to website marketing campaign and to add knowledge for the future.
Marketing technique that always help is to start producing news and events that might attract attention from local or popular industry media. Be sure you use online PR services and agencies to deliver your messages to local communities and to important news channels.
Other things that help is to participate to forum discussions, to use e-mail marketing (not to spam) services and to encourage your customers to be active in promoting their own websites. Having popular site hosted with you is always a good sign for your future customers.