Reseller hosting is an effective way to diversify your income, or even launch an entirely new business. However, your competitors know it too. Today, this is a crowded and fiercely competitive industry.
Thankfully, with the right marketing, you can connect with a vast potential audience and rapidly grow your customer base. By following some straightforward marketing techniques, you can get your reseller hosting business off to a strong start and give your new venture the best possible chance of success.
In this article, we’ll share a whopping 13 ways to market your web hosting business. We’ll cover everything from social media to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), email campaigns, and branding. Let’s get started!
What Reseller Hosting Is (And Why You Might Want to Become a Reseller)
As a hosting reseller, you purchase a hosting package from an established provider. You pay a fixed fee for this server space, and then resell these services for a profit.
For an established business, reseller hosting can be a valuable way to diversify your income. This kind of diversification can help protect your business against fluctuations in the market.
It can also be a way to sell more to your current customers. Most modern businesses require web hosting. This means that if you have an existing customer base, you’ll likely already have an audience for your hosting services.
If someone requires web hosting, they’ll likely feel more comfortable opting for a company that they have an existing relationship with, rather than taking a gamble on an unknown third party. By offering hosting services to your clients, you can remove their fear of the unknown, and provide a better customer experience.
Additionally, purchasing hosting from an established provider can help eliminate many of the costs associated with launching a new service, or even starting an entirely new business. This makes reseller hosting a good fit for startups and small businesses, which typically work on tighter budgets.
Once your reseller hosting business is up and running, you can also save on operating costs. It’s your provider’s responsibility to maintain its servers and update or replace its equipment as required. In this way, you can benefit from efficient, up-to-date software and hardware, without having to pay any of the associated maintenance fees.
Why It’s Important to Market Your Web Hosting Business
Marketing is a huge part of any business, regardless of size or industry. If you’re going to attract new customers, they need to know what you have to offer. Marketing can help you reach these consumers and educate them about your products and services.
The customer journey often starts far before the first purchase. Through consistent marketing, you can build a relationship with your future shoppers. This often involves publishing helpful, insightful content such as blog posts or video tutorials. Marketing might also involve engaging directly with potential customers. For example, you might respond to questions they post on social media or community forums.
Marketing your business is also key to building and maintaining your company’s reputation. By continuously publishing useful content and engaging with your target audience in a helpful, positive way, you can create a great first impression. This can increase your appeal to potential customers and give you an edge over the competition.
While it’s tempting to focus on new audiences, marketing can help you retain your existing customer base. Just because someone has previously made a purchase with your company doesn’t automatically mean they’ll remain loyal forever.
By continuously communicating with your clients, you’ll remain at the forefront of their minds, which encourages brand loyalty. You can also ensure that your customers are aware of your latest products and services, as well as any events you’re running such as sales and discounts.
13 Ways to Market Your Web Hosting Business
Marketing is an important tool for attracting new customers and growing your business. An effective marketing strategy is essential for running a successful web hosting company, so let’s help you spread the word! Here are 13 ways to market your web hosting business.
1. Identify What Makes Your Business Unique
A Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is a statement that helps distinguish your brand, products, or services from the competition. By creating an effective USP, you can clearly communicate the tangible reasons a potential customer should choose your business over your closest competitors.
For the best results, you should focus on identifying measurable benefits that are meaningful to your target audience. For example, a USP might be the fact that you’re over 50 percent cheaper than your competitors, or that you offer a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.
Get the USP right, and you’ll instantly increase your appeal to new customers and drive sales. By identifying it early, you ensure that it features throughout your marketing activities, which will help you create a more persuasive and coherent marketing strategy.
2. Decide on Your Target Audience
To market your web hosting business successfully, you need to know exactly who you’re marketing to. By identifying your ideal customer, you ensure that all your marketing activities are focused on that specific customer. This might involve using certain keywords, optimizing your blog content to drive conversions, or running targeted ads.
Many successful hosting resellers target a niche audience, such as restaurants in your local area, remote workers, or pet sitters looking to create their first website. By focusing on a specific audience, you can market your web hosting business in a way that speaks to the deep needs of your chosen niche.
When deciding who to target, it’s important to find a niche that’s large enough to sustain your business. Here, it may help to use a tool such as Google Trends:
As a niche hosting provider, your potential revenue may be smaller. However, you’re not struggling to be heard above the big hosting companies. This means your marketing costs should be lower – and that's great news for your Return On Investment (ROI)!
3. Create a Strong Brand
Branding is the process of establishing a clear, consistent company identity that sets you apart from the competition. With careful branding, your marketing can make a more memorable impression on your target audience. This can sometimes motivate the potential customer to explore your products and services immediately.
In other scenarios, the consumer might not have an immediate need for your offerings. However, by making a memorable first impression, you can increase the chances of them revisiting your company when they do have a need.
Consistent, clear branding also puts the customer at ease by continuously reinforcing what they can expect from your business. To achieve this consistency, it’s important that all your products and services reflect your company branding. As a hosting reseller, this includes the tools that customers use to access your services.
At Hosting.com, we provide extensive white-labeling functionality. As a hosting reseller, you can use these tools to re-brand all of our Hosting.com products and services:
It’s also important to note that some people have negative misconceptions regarding resellers. By creating a strong, coherent brand, you can obscure your identity as a hosting reseller – and let the quality of your products, services, and marketing speak for themselves.
4. Do Your (Keyword) Research
Keyword research is the process of identifying the words and phrases that your target audience are searching for. These keywords can then form the basis of your marketing activities, particularly your targeted advertisements and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies.
Ideally, you should search for keywords that strongly relate to your business and target audience, but have very low competition. This can help keep your marketing costs low, and deliver a healthy ROI. You can perform keyword research using a tool such as Google AdWords.
Although Google Ads is one of the most popular advertising platforms, there are other platforms you may want to consider as well. With over 1.69 billion Facebook users worldwide in 2019, we recommend checking out the Facebook Ads platform:
In addition to providing access to a huge audience, this platform offers the Facebook Pixel. This is a small bit of code that can track everyone who visits your website. The pixel can help you understand your target audience. It will even show you users with similar habits and interests, which can be invaluable for your future marketing activities.
5. Research Your Competitors
Reseller hosting is a competitive industry. However, this means you’ll have plenty of opportunities to learn from similar businesses by conducting competitor research.
Competitor research is where you analyze similar businesses' marketing activities. You can then reverse-engineer any successful strategies for use in your own reseller hosting. It can also involve SEO espionage.
You may want to research the terms that your competitors are ranking highly for, a tactic sometimes referred to as 'keyword gap analysis'. If these keywords were previously featured in a paid ad, you can even view the amount of traffic generated from that promotion. This can help you identify high-converting terms that you can use in your own advertisements.
6. Create Compelling Calls To Action (CTAs)
A Call To Action (CTA) prompts the customer to perform a desired action. Some common CTAs include purchasing a product, getting more information about a special offer, or subscribing to your newsletter. They often take the form of buttons or links.
An effective CTA helps the customer progress to the next stage of the buyer’s journey or sales funnel, which increases your chances of securing a successful sale. To create a killer CTA, we recommend starting with a strong command verb. Depending on the desired outcome, popular examples include buy, shop, subscribe, or download.
Powerful CTAs also communicate the value customers will get from performing the desired action. Here, it may help to use words that provoke a strong emotional response in your audience, potentially by leveraging the customer’s Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).
7. Boost your SEO
SEO is the process of improving your site’s position and search engine visibility. By climbing the search engine rankings, you can often boost your site’s organic traffic.
The first page of Google receives 95 percent of web traffic, and the first five organic search results get over two-thirds of all clicks. This makes SEO an effective way to grow your audience and increase your sales.
According to an eye-tracking study, up to 80 percent of people ignore paid search results in favor of organic options. This means that SEO is an effective way to get ahead of the competition, even when your competitors have larger marketing budgets.
There are several tried-and-tested ways to boost your search engine rankings. This includes formatting your blog pages so they’re more appealing to search engine bots. We also recommend creating a strong, search-optimized URL format for your reseller hosting website.
8. Run a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
Email marketing is the process of promoting your business, products, and services via email. This might include your company newsletter, notifications about upcoming sales, and even discount codes that you email to your best customers.
Email can be an excellent way to reach your target audience. In fact, it’s estimated that the number of email users in the U.S. will reach 255 million by the end of 2020.
Your ideal customer is probably spending a lot of time in their inbox. According to the 2019 Adobe Email Usage Study, Americans spend over three hours per day checking their work email, and over two hours checking their personal email. That’s five hours every single day, where you could market your web hosting business.
Experts predict that 333 billion marketing emails will be sent out daily by 2022. To help your emails stand out from the crowd, it’s important to craft a strong, engaging subject line for each one. It’s also a good idea to embed high-resolution images, and personalize your marketing emails wherever possible.
9. Promote Your Website on Social Media
Social media marketing is the process of using social media platforms to connect with your target audience. You can use these channels to build your brand and promote your products and services.
Social media is particularly important for building long-term relationships with your customers. Interacting with your audience can encourage brand loyalty. They’ll be more likely to renew their hosting contracts, rather than defecting to your competitors.
An active social media presence can also contribute positively towards your company’s reputation. Many buyers search for a company’s name before making a purchasing decision. If they see evidence of you interacting positively with customers on social media, they’ll likely feel more confident that you’re a legitimate and trustworthy business.
An active and friendly social media presence can also present your company as available and reachable. This will reassure potential customers that you’ll be on-hand to resolve any questions or complaints they may have. This should encourage them to choose you as your hosting provider.
10. Market your Web Hosting Business to a Global Audience
As an online business, you have the opportunity to market to a global audience. If you’re going to promote your reseller hosting services to international customers, it helps to speak their language.
According to estimates, 60 percent of all online content is in English. By creating multilingual marketing content, you can immediately get ahead of the competition and connect with the 74 percent of internet users who speak a language other than English.
There’s a chance that your target audience may be multilingual. However, there’s still evidence to suggest that your typical internet user appreciates a company trying to communicate in their native tongue. According to research, 65 percent of consumers prefer to access content in their native language. By localizing your marketing content, you can increase your appeal to a global audience, and potentially sway them to choose your hosting services over all the competition.
To ensure that your localization is a success, it’s important to opt for native translators over automated translators. We also recommend using labels rather than flags in your language switcher. The way French is spoken in Paris differs from the way people speak the language in Madagascar, Canada, or Haiti. This means that flags aren’t always the best way to represent a language.
11. Try Webinar Marketing
Webinars may not immediately spring to mind as a way to market your web hosting business. However, they can present an opportunity to connect with a new audience and promote your reseller hosting business.
For the best results, your webinars should provide real value to participants, in addition to promoting your services. For example, you might discuss trends, best practices, or advice on how to launch a successful website. This would be beneficial to your target audience, while also providing plenty of opportunities to mention your hosting services.
By sharing useful and insightful advice, you can also showcase your expertise. This can make participants perceive you as an expert in your field. It can also contribute to your reputation as a helpful business that’s always looking to provide value to your target audience, rather than simply promoting your products and services.
12. Excel at Customer Support
Your typical customer is far more likely to trust a recommendation from a friend, family member, or colleague, when compared to any other form of marketing. This means that a satisfied customer can become a powerful way to market your web hosting business.
There are many factors that contribute towards a positive customer experience. However, the quality of your customer support is very important. Ideally, customers will be able to contact you via multiple channels.
Customers who have urgent, business-critical queries will appreciate immediate forms of support, such as telephone or live chat. Other customers will be happier researching answers themselves, via a resource such as a knowledge base or wiki:
If you’re an Hosting.com reseller, you can display information about how to contact support as part of the customer’s cPanel account. This ensures that your customers know exactly where to turn if they ever encounter an issue.
By providing stellar customer support, you can transform your customers into your most powerful marketers. If you manage to secure this kind of persuasive, word-of-mouth marketing, you may experience a significant increase in sales.
13. Make It Easy for Customers to Leave 5-Star Reviews
Many consumers trust real-user reviews. Studies suggest that 90 percent of consumers decide whether to do business with a particular company after reading up to ten user reviews. This means that positive reviews are vital for running a successful reseller hosting business.
Do you want more positive reviews? Often, all you need to do is ask! If you ask a customer directly, research suggests that over 50 percent of them will be willing to share their opinions.
You can also encourage customer reviews using a marketing funnel plugin that’s tailored towards reviews. The popular Starfish Reviews plugin enables you to design a landing page that prompts satisfied customers to leave reviews:
You can also use this plugin to collect private feedback. This can be useful for improving your reseller hosting services, which can contribute positively towards your future customer reviews.
Conclusion
Reseller hosting is a highly competitive industry. However, an effective marketing strategy can set your business up for success, no matter how strong the competition.
To help you connect with as many potential customers as possible, we recommend starting with the essentials. This means identifying what makes your business unique. As a reseller, your business is completely defined by your hosting provider. Wherever possible, we recommend opting for a provider that offers highly-marketable features, such as a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.
After ensuring that your business has a strong foundation, you can launch a multimedia marketing plan. This might consist of everything from email campaigns to webinars and compelling Calls To Action (CTAs)!
Image credits: Pexels.
