Following our collection of posts about website marketing and hosting (check our previous posts about website marketing for hosting providers and about SEO as an opportunity), we continue our journey. Today we are going take a very illustrative approach to how hosting providers can help SMBs and what the best strategies to achieve this are.
On the one side, we have SMBs that visit hosting providers because they need a website.
But why do SMB owners need a website?
Besides not looking like laggards among their friends (or bragging about their brand new website), it seems pretty obvious that what they need is to grow their business. And as in any online environment, the formula for success is Attract-Convert-Retain:
So, essentially, the first step for SMBs is the need to Attract customers to their business through their websites (remember the lead generation objective we talked in our previous post).
Then, they need to convert these visits into customers, either by having an e-commerce site or sensible lead nurturing strategy.
And finally, what they require is to retain their customers, as we all know that retaining a customer is much cheaper than obtaining a new one.
What do SMBs need to achieve these objectives?
First, if they are creating a website, they need it to be indexed in Google, which is the first basic requirement to start receiving qualified visits to a website.
How can you help? You can offer Search Engine submission when a client is purchasing a domain. marketgoo offers this capability for free in its Free SEO Starter Pack.
Second, once they have a website what they want are more visits to their site. One of the best and most cost efficient ways to achieve this is SEO. To achieve this, they need an optimized website, that ensures they have a good website back-end as well as generate optimized content for search engines. However, an educational approach is required at this point, as many SMBs still don’t understand what is SEO about and how they can optimize their site for search engines.
How can you help? marketgoo’s Free Instant Website report allows any website owner to be aware of the problems a site may have (load times, meta tags, titles, etc.), and gives an indication of which areas need improvement.
Finally, once the site owner understands how important is the visibility of a website to achieve visits, and has been able to assess the current situation of his website; it’s time to offer him with tools that help him optimize the website, increase the popularity, increase the social media presence, track competitors, etc.
How can you help? At this point is where marketgoo set off tools make the most sense, and when they are really effective in improving a customers website effectiveness.
How can you effectively promote these services?
The most effective method of promoting marketing products as a hoster is bundling them with some of your main products such as hosting solutions. For instance, for a user that is purchasing a domain with your company, you could offer a website submission tool to search engines, so his website is already indexed when he publishes his first content.
Another positive thing you can do as a hoster to improve the knowledge and interest of your customers in the marketing area is to create blog posts, that give advice and teach about different topics. it will be useful both for yourself to be better positioned as a hoster that provides good marketing service but it also will make your customers more successful and satisfied.
