Digital Marketing For Your Hosting Company

Digital marketing is important for any online business, including your hosting company. However, sometimes online businesses spend a lot of money on digital marketing, without receiving the desired impact. The truth is that digital marketing takes a lot of time and focus.

Today we will go through what you need to know as a hosting provider to get the best out of your digital marketing strategy.

Services

As a hosting provider, you probably offer hosting-related services such as domain registration, shared hosting, VPS, and/or dedicated servers. It’s important to focus on what you do best and what’s the most profitable.

Especially if you’re in the early stages of becoming a hosting provider, you need to choose the hosting services that will bring you the biggest chunk of monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Whilst selling domain registrations is an easy thing to do, it isn’t the most profitable service. You can even have revenue loss if you don’t sell big amounts of domain names.

When choosing which services you will focus on, you’ll also have to keep your customer base in mind. For example, shared hosting customers are a lot different from cloud customers.  

Digital marketing sources

There are many different digital marketing sources you can choose from. In this part, we will show you how they work and how you can manage them.

Paid advertising

Paid advertising (PPC) is a great way to gain focused traffic quickly. However, you do need a budget in order to do paid advertising.

A lot of businesses use Google Ads. Before you start using Google Ads, you will have to do some homework:

• It would help if you decided on your target audience.
• You have to research where your audience is on the Internet. Are they on social media or on specific forums?
• How does your target audience search? Do they use specific keywords?
• Where is your target audience based? What are the countries, regions, or cities where they are located? 
• What budget do you need? You can imagine that to target the US you need a lot more funding than when you target New York City.
• What are your competitors doing?

Another great option is Bing Ads. The great thing about Bing Advertising is that it also connects to search engines like DuckDuckGo. These alternative search engines often have different users. 

The most important thing when doing paid advertising is to monitor your campaigns and check the Return on Investment (ROI). For example, if you spend €500 on paid advertising and get €300 worth or subscription out of it, this can be a good thing. The reason for this is that in the hosting business, customers tend to stay for a longer time. If this is the case, the investment will pay off over time.

Publishing content

Each message coming from your online business should have a goal. Like PCC, you will need to do some homework to create valuable and genuine content. 

Think about:

• What is your goal?
• Which keywords do you want to target?
• What do your customers want to read about?
• What do you want to share with your customers? This can for example be knowledge, news, or new developments.

When creating content, it’s important to provide a good story that can be indexed. Your goal should be to get on the first page of search engines

Press releases

Press releases are a great way to increase brand awareness if they are aligned with your company and readers’ interests. By posting regularly, you will be able to build a connection with different media outlets. They will be able to know what to expect from your press releases and incorporate them into their articles pipeline.

Influencer marketing

A great way to develop your brand further is influencer marketing. Whilst there are many platforms for influencer marketing, YouTube is probably the most relevant for the hosting industry. When making an influencer marketing plan, it is important to know that it’s time-consuming and will not give you a guaranteed direct impact (unless you’re aiming for bigger channels). You can reach influencers through their blogs and social media profiles.

Final thoughts

Digital marketing is a non-stop process and there are a lot of different strategies. What works for one hosting company, doesn’t necessarily work for your business. Therefore, you should always measure to see if your marketing strategy is working the way you want. If one strategy doesn’t work, edit it or move on to the next.