6 Marketing Tips to Help Cloud Service Providers and Hosting Companies Grow Their Brand Value
In 2021 we are facing a growing number of companies, even whole industries, adopting digital transformation strategies to optimize production, save costs, or simply to stay in business. Industry 4.0, IoT, and AI are not terms of the future anymore. Investments in Cloud, cyber security, and smart technologies are growing at faster pace than ever to bring maximum efficiency and productivity for tech companies, e-commerce businesses, factories, etc.
What does it mean for cloud and web hosting providers? It definitely means a growing market potential but more furious competition, as well. Aside from the recent-time consolidations, there are huge companies from many years on the market like OVH, Leaseweb, SiteGround, Digital Ocean, which are hard to compete with. And you have the hyperscalers – AWS, Google Cloud. So it is really hard to make a successful hosting/cloud business nowadays. In such an environment any provider must build a strong brand to support the marketing and selling of its service. Here are 6 proven tips that would help:
1. Strengthen Social Media Presence
Users have their own life on the Web far beyond being clients of your business. They spend time on browsing, learning, entertaining, and mainly on visiting social media. In fact, 50.1% of the time spent on mobile devices is done using social media apps, TechJury reports. And if you want to create a brand and build relations with your clients, you must be there. From one side, you should try to “steal” as much as possible from these 50.1 percent. On the other hand, you should be easy to connect with by existing and potential clients.
Тhe latest statistics show that Facebook continues to be the winning social media platform with more than 2.8 billion active users.
The major and must have social media platforms for your business would be:
- Facebook (60% of all social media users are on Facebook)
- LinkedIn (55 job applications submitted per second!)
- Instagram (130 million monthly clicks on commercial posts)
- Twitter (63& of all users are aged between 35-65)
However, before spending time building a brand on any social media platform it is important to determine where our audience is being active.
Nice to have social media platforms:
- Youtube (also known as the second largest search engine after Google)
- Pinterest (⅓ of all users use it to follow companies)
- Snapchat (2nd most popular mobile app)
- TikTok (the average time spent per day on the app is 52 minutes)
- Reddit (50% of the users are from the U.S)
Source – https://tech.co/
Remember: Do not focus on selling on social media. People would not go on Instagram to buy web hosting and would hardly purchase cloud solutions “on a good deal” while watching Tik-Tok videos. Try to engage them, instead. Users visit social media mainly to read news, view photos, watch videos, entertain and network. Act as a human and show them your brand personality rather than your offers. Tell them what stands behind great web hosting solutions, present your team members, share your company culture, be fun and informative on industry-related topics and share your expertise. Then you will notice how users engage with your posts, get used to talking to you and when it comes to web hosting you will be the top-of-mind choice.
Also remember: Although social media may be the best way to engage and communicate with customers, businesses should not fall into the trap of providing support through social media. They can use certain integrations, but the real support should come only through the dedicated ticket system. We would recommend you use social media tracking tools/brand mention monitoring tools.
2. Provide Excellent Customer Support and Quality Communication
It is all about acting professional when it comes to customer support and communication. If someone has chosen you, it means they trust you to be their business partner and to provide flawless hosting solution and professional service. In times when technological advance and equipment are just a temporary advantage, client experience is what will bring you long-term benefits and higher customer lifetime value.
Remember: 24/7/365 customer support is not an extra anymore, when talking about hosting and cloud providers.Don’t forget that it is crucial to have your contact information well-positioned on your website for users to easily find it. expect support to be available at any time to make sure their websites, systems and web platforms are being taken care of and are online with no interruption. On top of this, you need to make sure that clients could reach up to you by multiple channels and could get expert and qualified care or consulting. Why is this important for your brand? Because happy clients recommend and talk about experience, but so do unhappy ones. And because word-of-mouth is much more powerful than your marketing and branding tools.
3. Showcase Your Work and Successful Projects
Clients would not trust promises, but results, instead. Your brand and hosting service will be much more credible if you share some of your past achievements and results. Users will see that you have a good offer on Cloud hosting or Web hosting and that you complement it with additional extras. But they will always doubt if you are ready to respond to their specific needs, business environment, clients or way of work.
Remember: There is nothing more powerful that could turn a prospect into a lead than a case study or examples of real solutions to similar problems that they have. For example, if you know that many of your clients host e-commerce platforms, you could prepare a case study and target it to other e-commerce businesses as a proof of your experience. Display such examples on your website and share them on all your social media profiles and other channels. Promoting clients’ satisfaction and the quality of your services is crucial for your brand. After all they are your brand ambassadors and you should be able to utilize it and turn it into your favor.
4. Make Your Website User-Friendly
Your website is the most important channel for your web hosting business. It is most likely that you clients would go there to check your hosting parameters, prices, solutions, features and equipment, and ultimately, to make a purchase. Your task is to ease the process by making your website user-friendly, simple to use and fast to load to provide exceptional customer journey.
Remember: Focus on usability. Everything should be exactly where users expect it to be. Do not put too much for a fancy design which they do not understand.
5. Focus on Website Content
If this is somehow important for your SEO, for your users it is crucial. Make sure to provide a good explanation of what you offer and avoid the trap of going too technical. You are speaking to people who want to know what you do, how much it costs and why they should trust you and not your competitors. The faster and easier you answer them, the better for your brand and business.
Remember: Do not write for search engines. Write for people. Abundance of keywords in your texts would not put you among the top results on Google. Search engines algorithms are intelligent enough to judge if a user is interested in and engaged with what you show them.
Even though it can be difficult in the beginning, if you would like to get in the game and make an impact for your business, we would recommend researching some of the most popular SEO tools and start using them.
- Google Search Console
- Ahrefs
- Moz Pro
- Majestic
- SEMrush
SEO is critical to a brand’s web pages. After all, users trust the search engines. Aside from better visibility for your brand, you will be able to better understand the web environment and your competition.
6. Offer Predictable and Easy to Understand Pricing
It is not a one-time sale that you are chasing. Instead, you will be looking for loyal customers with high lifetime value. This goes through being very transparent and predictable on pricing your offerings. People should know why a web hosting plan has a given price and why adding more storage space could cost an additional amount of money.
Remember: Being loyal and transparent doesn’t mean to stay with the same price for the same services forever. Instead try to upsell your clients with additional features and offerings that bring higher value for their business and end users.
Do you still think that standing out from the crowd of hosting companies is “rocket science”? We believe it is just the opposite. By implementing these 6 simple steps you will for sure make a big step towards building a sustainable brand that will increase the value of your hosting and cloud solutions.
