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Best Practices

6 Alternative Marketing Strategies for Web Hosts in 2020

By Mandy Tang | 4 minute read

Whether you’re launching a new web hosting business or already have one, it is important to reevaluate your marketing strategy often to stand out in a highly competitive market. 

With the pandemic happening, and with so many people staying at home, there’s no better time than now to polish your business and attract customers that are finally looking to create a place of their own on the web.

In this post, we’ll help you attract new customers and grow your business with these marketing strategy ideas.

1. Determine your brand’s identity and your audience

If you’re trying to make “everybody” your customers, you might be losing more than gaining.  You can fix this by narrowing your target market down by creating a niche audience.  Start by thinking of what types of customers you’d like to work with and try to get in their head to understand their needs and pains.  By doing this, your message will be clearer and more compelling for your customers.

2. Invest in Ads

Using ads might not be something you want to get into right away, but if you’re just starting out, your organic traffic might take a while to build.  In this case, short term investments in ads can be beneficial. 

Social media ads are a great way to get started and are easy to setup.  If you have a Facebook page for your business already, go to Facebook Business Manager and you can start creating ads right away.

Other places you can look into advertising your services is on forums like Reddit or even forums that tailor specifically to your niche.

3. Add value

How are you standing out from your competitors?  One way to stand out is to be creative and package a product that’s highly valued for your customers.  Find services that are not yet offered by your competitors or are doing poorly.  For example, do you provide a secure service so that your customers won’t ever need to worry about a spam attack?

A service like MailChannels Outbound Filtering,  a cloud-based SMTP relay service that identifies and blocks spammers, ensures reliable email delivery while adding value for your customers and keeping your business running smoothly. 

4. Collaborate with others 

Social media is a great tool to utilize when you don’t have the capital to spend on paid advertising yet.  This is where you can get creative and start connecting with people on social media that can eventually become customers in your niche.

Look for opportunities with other businesses in your niche that you can collaborate with and do a co-branding campaign where you can promote each other and other communication channels.  This will allow you to reach a similar and bigger audience in your niche with your marketing efforts.

5. Get reviews

Lots of savvy customers will do their research before making a purchase.  Do you have any reviews on your site or other sites?  A great way to gather reviews is to collect them on a website like TrustPilot.  This site allows you to generate automatic email invites to get reviews from your customers.  Having reviews on a 3rd party site can make your business look more credible, giving your potential customers more confidence in your brand.

Another way to collect and display your reviews, is on Google, by creating a Google Business profile.

6. The power of existing customers

This is probably one of the easiest and most effective ways to grow your business, which is, to ask your satisfied customers for a referral.  It is known that it costs five times more to acquire new customers, so if you can leverage the power of your current customers, you’ll be able to grow quickly without spending too much on marketing.

To get started, you can track customers’ satisfaction with in-app surveys with SurveyMonkey or email surveys with Google Sheets.  Next, think of a strategy to incentivize customers to refer your services when the great reviews start to roll in.  This can be creating a referral program, where you can give them monetary rewards or credits towards their next bill or purchase.  There are lots of referral software available like Ambassador to help you track your referral program.

We hope this post gave you some actionable insights to add to your marketing strategy.  There is no limit to how creative you can get with your marketing strategy.  The most important thing is to know your audience and double-down on what’s working for you!

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