4 Marketing Rules I was Reminded of When I Switched Web Hosts

Awhile back, I helped Simple Strat move our website and our clients’ websites to a new hosting provider. Let’s just say it did not go well. We’ll call that new hosting provider Host B.

As I moved our sites back to our original hosting partner, I started to think about what went wrong. How did we get here? I was reminded of a few things we tell our clients all the time and realized that what Host B really had was a marketing problem.

I thought this was interesting because at first glance, their marketing is great. They produce a ton of educational content, you see them everywhere, and their branding really resonated with us. But where they were missing the mark was way more important than all that.

Side note: I’m not writing this piece to attack a company. I’ve shared my feedback with them and that’s enough – but I do think these lessons will serve as an important reminder to some as they did to me. So, I apologize if some of the story sounds a little vague. If you do figure out who “Host B” is, don’t write them off completely. They do some things really well and I know some awesome people that work there, they were just a bad fit for us.

So what happened?

Let’s keep this part short. We were working with a hosting provider that handles a lot of the techy back-end stuff for us, and they did it well. But we were approached by a salesperson from Host B and began to entertain the conversation.

Host B basically offered the same things as the host we were using at a similar price. But they were closer to home, offered a partnership program, seemed more transparent and genuine, and had a couple features that seemed to be worth checking out. So, we made the switch.

Within a few weeks, a glitch in their system caused our site to go down for over an hour, we couldn’t reach support during business hours (like the middle of a Thursday afternoon and I’m not talking about just waiting on hold for too long), and their staging server migration was much slower and much less user-friendly than what we were used to. To recap, we had sites down, couldn’t get ahold of support, and were spending more than triple the time to accomplish the same tasks.

Funny thing is, Host B’s branding focuses strongly on its reliability and customer support, and its staging server feature is touted in almost all their materials. When we brought up these concerns, not much was addressed (we did get some money back but not much and nothing to reassure us that we wouldn’t run into the same issues in the future).

Rant over, let’s get to the lessons.

1) Build your brand around what you’re great at, not what you want to be great at

I see this all the time when companies work on their branding or even their core values. We all have great visions for what our company can be or what we want it to be, but those visions are rarely an accurate representation of what the company is today.

But while your company isn’t perfect, it surely does some things really well. When you’re creating your marketing messaging, focus on those things and leave the rest for your goal setting and strategic planning if you feel you need to.

If you’re having trouble staying objective for this, just talk to some of your customers. Really, you should be doing this on a regular basis anyway. Ask them what they like most about your company and/or its products or services and where your opportunities for improvement are. Usually you’ll start to hear the same things over and over after just a few interviews, and there’s your answer.

2) Under promise, over deliver

I’m sure you’ve heard this before so I won’t belabor the point. But knowing this and acting on it are two different things. Take 10 minutes today and think about all the pieces of your customer experience. Where are things not so great? Where are things amazing? How are you talking about those things in your sales process and marketing materials?

Rarely are we able to offer a perfectly optimized customer experience. In many industries, there are just some things that aren’t that fun for the customer. For our clients, it’s filling out a marketing inventory before our marketing strategy building process begins. Don’t be afraid to tell your customer in advance that it’s not going to be the most fun thing they’ll do that day, but it’s necessary because of X and it gets better from there.

3) Customer service = marketing

If you think your customer service team doesn’t have an impact on your sales to new clients, you’re dead wrong. Spend time making it great. Figuring out how to turn pissed off customers into happy ones isn’t easy, but it’s critically important.

I know, sometimes we need to write off bad customers. But that should be an exception rather than a common occurance and it should almost never happen if that bad customer is an influencer in your target market.

I just spoke to someone the other day about their experience in helping a major corporation go through this. He said something to the effect of, “You’d be amazed what a $5 voucher can do. After we were done optimizing their customer service, they’d often have customers call in angry and end up happily buying a more expensive package before hanging up.”

Consider my situation. I’ll soon be opening up a website development and hosting company on the side for small businesses, Simple Strat designs sites for clients, and I talk to people about websites all the time. Before the end of the year, it’s very likely that I will cause more than $10k to go to Host B’s competitor rather than them.

4) Know your target audience inside and out

This is something we stress all the time at Simple Strat and it’s the reason we try to interview our clients’ customers before every job we do now. At a minimum, you have to have a thorough understanding of what problems your ideal buyers have, what goals they’re striving for, and what solution they’d be using if they don’t buy yours.

In Host B’s case, Simple Strat is 100% in their target audience. We care most about having our client’s sites up and very quick fixes if they go down, and we care about saving ourselves time. The alternative we’re using is a host with similar features. After we switched, we were forced to offer our clients less reliability and we were spending more time than with the alternative, so we had a bad experience.

But a small business that’s upgrading from a low-tier host like GoDaddy or Host Gator would likely LOVE what they get from Host B. So that tells me that Host B either needs to focus more on making sure they’re designing their service around the things that their target audience cares about, or they need to consider changing who they market to.

And that’s it. Marketing fundamentals 101, right? But when was the last time you really thought about these things for your company? I know it made me rethink a few things about mine.

Let me know your thoughts or questions in the comments, I’d love to continue the conversation.