Any hosting company needs a robust marketing strategy to succeed in the highly competitive niche market of web hosting. It is observed that many owners of web hosting companies invest heavily in procurement of equipment and are left with a meager budget for marketing efforts.
Factors that impact performance of web hosting companies
Lack of a focused marketing strategy and excessive investment in infrastructure are cited as the most notable pitfalls that lead to failure of many web hosting companies.
One of the most sought after yet ineffective method of marketing is that of cold-calling. This method is also called as outbound marketing and involves sending mails and making calls by doing offline as well as online search for approaching customers.
This method of marketing is commonly pursued by smaller companies. Here is every chance that the company would get blacklisted for resorting to spamming activities. Cold calling is often met with cold shoulders.
Direct calls to decision makers are met with very little success and the rate of success in such marketing activities is usually not more than a mere five percent. Small web hosting companies spend most of the financial resources in purchase and colocation of servers, thereby failing to earmark a fair amount of budget for implementation of marketing strategies.
Empower hosting with affiliate marketing programs
In modern business scenario, web hosts need to attach greater significance to marketing activities and make provision of optimum budget to carry out well chalked-out online marketing strategies.
Many small web hosts try to pitch their companies against major hosting organizations and fail to identify their exact competitors. If you are trying to emulate giant web hosting companies, then you are going to exhaust all your financial resources in building infrastructure. One also needs to understand the marketing efforts of these companies.
It is a common observation that many small webhosting companies ignore development of an affiliate program. Affiliate program is an important component of web hosting enterprise’s marketing plan. The power of affiliates should never be underestimated. Almost every branded hosting company is leveraging affiliate programs by paying commission to those who are selling these programs.
Power of bloggers
Influence of bloggers in the hosting industry is well established. It is not very easy to convince bloggers about promoting hosting solutions from small companies. We need to appreciate that influential bloggers are concerned about reputation of the blog which strongly depends on quality and performance of web hosting services they are promoting through their blogs.
In order to convince these bloggers about quality of hosting, one can make a lucrative trial offers by providing sufficient time. In majority of cases bloggers can be convinced about quality of hosting service in terms of uptime and availability of cutting edge infrastructure. This is due to the fact that many small hosting companies pay a great attention to infrastructure development.
Once you are able to impress upon the quality aspects of your web hosting, then it would be not be difficult to turn them to your side with offers for better commissions.
Establish quality parameters through review sites
Online reviews can significantly contribute to establish a sound reputation and better conversion of potential customers because a good proportion of customers rely on reviews to select a web hosting service provider. Great reviews improve your sales prospects and negative reviews can reduce the chances of product purchase to nil.
You need to search for respected review sites that are sure to influence decision making process of your prospective clients. You can send them requests to write reviews by providing domains as well as servers to second your claims. It is advised to enter into a deal with the reputable review sites because you need to provide what they require for gaining desired visibility.
Encourage purchases with coupons
Online shoppers are accustomed to promotional offers such as codes and coupons. It is recommended to encourage your clients by offering additional discounts through coupons. You can enter into agreement with online coupon sites for adding your coupons. It is advisable not to repeat coupons on same sites and use different sites for placing coupons.
It is also possible to attract potential customers by providing them with giveaways. It can be in the form of WordPress hosting or free offer of Virtual Private Server. You need to be careful in selecting individuals for offering giveaways.
Targeting site visitors
There are many possible outcomes whenever a person visits your hosting site and leaves without any purchase. The two significant probabilities are leaving website either by visiting its home page or by visiting product page. The retargeting of such customers can be performed by targeting ads through websites that are in association with Google Ad program.
It is easy to expand a hosting company in terms of employees and infrastructure by building a substantial customer base. Growth in customer acquisition is only possible by religiously following multi-pronged marketing strategy. While it is good to have a sound knowledge about the business, one can only succeed in the business with help of a perfect strategy for online marketing.