Build a Web Hosting Brand that Sells
Web hosts must never undervalue their image. Image and brand power are absolutely critical to business, as customers often don’t have any other way to initially gauge the value of a web host. Mike McEwan covers a series of things to help create brand recognition in the hosting industry.Needless to say, there is a lot to be said for any business’s corporate image. Companies like Microsoft and McDonalds rely heavily on their brands helping to sell products. But to you, the web host or reseller, image is ten times more important. The cliché is especially true for you: image is everything.
Microsoft has built their image from strong (or weak, depending on who you ask) software packages that everyone uses at some point. They are so popular that almost everyone who is considering a Microsoft product has already used one. They know the power and ubiquity of the company. McDonalds has built brand recognition through gimmicky television commercials, placing millions of stores all over the world, and pumping the smell of grease and burning fat out to streets of hungry drivers. Obviously, none of this is part of the web hosting world.
To boil things down to the simplest form, all that prospective hosting clients see of your company as a little html and a little Photoshop. You are a webpage, not a human being or a physical store. Web services like hosting are intangible compared to other kinds of services. Users don’t get to see the service in shrink wrap, and they often don’t get free trials. Customers rely on appearances and reputation to discern which companies will keep their web pages online. If your site looks unprofessional or does not provide what browsers expect, you have lost them already.
Part of the trouble for web hosts who have not built brand recognition is that there is such a high market saturation of hosts. Customers have a million choices, and it can confuse them. Some users care most about the bottom line, and they will experiment with lesser known hosts to get better deals. However, many just want a promise of stability and performance, and they tend to gravitate to the several hosts that have formed a strong brand.
There are a few notable things you can do to assure you are on your way to winning clients. Let’s take a look at a few.
Build a Web Hosting Brand that Sells – Internet Brand Recognition Basics
Image is your hosting company’s identity. Some customers have a hard time telling the differences between different brands of web hosting, you need to help them. Make your business both distinctive and easily found.
First, it’s business sense that your company should not be a “web host.” There are hundreds of identical web hosts providing vanilla, generic service. Competing with a generic business model is extraordinarily difficult compared to specializing in a profitable or untapped market. Be a “dedicated web host” or provide “affordable hosting” or “hosting for college students” or even the “best host for ecommerce.” You should have defined a demographic before you even start. If you don’t stand for anything you can’t be recognized for anything.
This demographic will help you define other important parts of your business, give it personality. If you’re building a hosting business for college students, you will know to form the site’s layout and graphics with youthful or fun themes. Your site could be designed around images of students socializing or partying, if you want to go the route of looking like a social center. For ecommerce hosting, pick something entrepreneurs want to see. You could photograph somebody reclining in an office chair next to a giant safe. Cheesy, yes, but it makes a point.
This personality has probably given you ideas for a logo already. Just brainstorming about specific your market segment can stir up a lot of images for a logo. The trouble is picking one. Make sure the logo will appeal to people you are trying to attract.
Avoid basic logos that are a jumble of triangles and circles. As tempting as geometry might be, use something more memorable and that has more personality. Many find animals helpful in designing logos. Since the visitor to your site cannot see you in person, the logo is what identifies and defines you. Hopefully, it can provide a level of trust to the browser. After you have fashioned something or hah a graphic designer Photoshop you an eye-catching image, be sure it is displayed prominently on the top of all your pages and in all your ads. Repetition forms your image.
Your logo is distinctive and will form an image for people to trust, but you also want them to know who else they can trust through your business. Use brand association to show what other recognizable companies are working with you or that you are using. For example, if the hosting company uses or specializes in Microsoft technologies, be sure that visitors to your website can see that visually. Microsoft’s logo on your page will help to make you look trustworthy. Perhaps your business hosts a significant client. Provided they let you, put their logo on your site declaring that you are the proud to host their site.
Your company could also benefit from a tagline or slogan. Sure, your slogan will never be as famous and recognized as “Just do it,” but it helps to define your attitude. You logo probably can’t portray everything you want to be recognized for, and a short piece of text can help here. Keep it short and simple, and make sure it helps to build on your website’s personality. This should also be used on all your pages, not to mention your ads.
Build a Web Hosting Brand that Sells – Advertise, Duh!
If you already have a web page with personality and a demographic, you need to push that image outside just the webpage. Advertise. There are so many ways to do this, and only some are really effective for a host.
Not long ago, a web host proved that nothing sells anything quite like a video of a woman falling out of her shirt. Television commercials are a new territory that hosts have just begun stepping into. GoDaddy spent an incredible $2.4 million to air a 30 second commercial during the Superbowl this year. Their ad featured a bubbly girl with a shirt that just couldn’t quite stay on. GoDaddy shoved weird humor and a pretty girl into their ad, showing plenty of distiction from other web hosts. They also assumed right that printing their name and logo across the girl’s chest would help guys to remember them. You can see this effective Superbowl ad on GoDaddy’s page of TV advertisements.
Unlike earlier websites that advertised during the Superbowl and quickly died afterwards (like Lifeminders.com who advertised in 2000), GoDaddy said the money for the ad was a savings that didn’t need to be recovered. People still criticized them for advertising so expensively when they could have put that money into many more ads that cost less, or even given away free hosting for a period of time.
Getting high rank in search engine result pages can draw a lot of traffic. Potential customers may search for broad terms like “web host,” but when you pick keywords to optimize for keep in mind those popular terms are hard to rank highly for. Pick keywords that speak about your location or demographic. Some might search “Miami web host” or “US web host” to know their host is not going to be on the other side of the word. And of course, “ecommerce web hosting” and “business hosting company” may be other good choices if that’s your specialty.
Do not be alarmed if after a few weeks you have made no progress on the search engines. Sometimes it can take months between the time search engine spiders find your site to the time they begin listing it in their search results. This is the sandbox effect. To facilitate being indexed, you can submit to the search engines that allow people to submit their pages freely. Google, for example, lets people submit whole sitemaps.
There’s much more to optimizing than picking these keywords and submitting to search engines. You may consider hiring a specialist to do the work, or try going to sites like SEO Chat and learning the search engine optimization trade yourself.
It also doesn’t hurt to get listed in host directories such as Find Web Hosts and HostDirs. An open directory such as DMOZ might not get you a lot of traffic on its own, but it may help you rank a little better on search engines.
A short-term solution that has become very popular is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns. This is best used in the sandbox period before you show up in the normal search results. For a long term solution, PPC is very expensive and does not bring the amount of visitors that simply ranking highly can do. It is also becoming less effective and more expensive because so many hosts choose to advertise this way. Common host searches on Google and Yahoo! bring up many sponsored links, and it can be a challenge standing out in the crowd.
For PPC, look at multiple advertising venues. Google has an two different options you can use. Yahoo also has sponsored search. Also, don’t discount trying a smaller company like Ask. If you do choose PPC, do not advertise on only one service. Any one PPC company reaches at a maximum 35% of the search market. Using Google and Yahoo! together will get the best exposure you can really expect. And remember that optimizing for search is a long term goal, while PPC is expensive by comparison.
Build a Web Hosting Brand that Sells – Customer Satisfaction and Your Search Engine Image
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of a company is how satisfied their customers are. Good support is worth more to customers than promises of unlimited bandwidth or webspace. After all web design and advertising is done, it is this that forms a strong brand and reputation.
Word of mouth has a heavy impact on buying decisions. It’s perhaps the strongest thing to convince a person to use or avoid a host when the person doesn’t have experience with the company. It speak volumes that people can get cheap unlimited hosting for around $1 a month, but they often choose to use established companies with reputations of helpful support staffs. This is something to be taken very seriously.
In an interview with HostSearch.com, Brent Oxley (President of Hostgator) says:
“One unhappy customer is worth the weight of 1,000 satisfied customers in terms of how they can affect future business, so we strive to keep as many people happy as we can. We may receive 500 letters of praise in a month, but it is that one letter of dissatisfaction that keeps us up at night wondering how we can make things better. While it may never be possible to please 100% of our customers, we are going to run this business as if it is an attainable goal and will strive each month to inch closer to that mark.”
Most web hosts rely on email support. This is impersonal and only widens the gap between your intangible product and the clients. Make your company’s personality stand out by providing a variety of support options, including instant messaging and especially phone support. Give the support phone number to everyone so they can test the support before ordering. Obviously, make sure the phone is picked up quickly and preferably by a human being.
Finally, don’t passively let word spread about your company; facilitate it. Obviously, people will use search engines to research your business. You need to use search engines to track how people are talking about your company. Hopefully your feedback will all be positive, but act to resolve outstanding complaints. Finding a very angry customer and publicly issuing a $100 refund will cost far less than losing all the potential customers who find his complaints (not to mention, it can work as a bit of advertising for your company). As a side note, I’ve seen companies address complaints on websites by arguing their position and saying the problem will be resolved for future customers; even this does not go over very well (often looks a little sleazy) without issuing a refund or formal apology to the person who had a problem.
Also, load the search engines with information that makes your business look good. Don’t be afraid to have the CEO do an interview with a web hosting news site. You could also offer 6 months of service free to one of these sites for them to review your service. Having positive reviews across the internet will be great for Google and Yahoo! browsers to find when they type in your name. It’s especially important that these are found on third party sites so the potential customer feels more that the article is honest.
This information should help give your web hosting or reseller business a direction. No one aspect of this process is most important, so try to weight them all with extreme importance. Good luck finding your customers.
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Build a Web Hosting Brand that Sells