Table of contents. what to expect from this book. find out who your target customers are. create a survey. Survey Questions

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2 Table of contents what to expect from this book find out who your target customers are create a survey Survey Questions content strategy 101: release your knowledge use your existing content create new content persona a: End users persona B: Designers/Developers persona C: Affiliates

3 What to Expect from This Ebook The hosting industry is one of the most highly competitive online business. The market is large and growing, which is an open invitation to new players. But on the way to first reaching customers, most companies fail and drop out of the market. In this ebook, we offer you a guide to help you create your content marketing strategy and brainstorm ideas for content assets. We hope you can use our expert advice to help improve your hosting brand positioning. 3

4 Find Out Who Your Target Customers Are Content marketing is all about your target buyers. The better you identify who they are, the more ideas you will be able to generate about how to attract them. The target buyers of hosting services could be divided in two main groups: B2C - End-users B2B - Designers/ Developers As a hosting company, you already have a ton of user contacts. The easiest and quickest way to get to know them better, is to send them a few questions. What you learn from your users will help you to: Improve your content strategy for attracting new customers Improve your existing content for pleasing and keeping current clients Discover new upsell ideas to help promote extra services Improve the quality of your service Earn word-of-mouth promoters 4

5 Create a survey There are many sites offering survey applications and most of them have both the free and paid plans. Some of them, as Qualaroo, are also excellent A/B testing and CRO tools. Here are some survey tools you can use: Google Consumer Surveys Wufoo Survey Monkey Qualaroo Insights 5

6 Survey Questions How big are your clients websites? How many visitors per month do they have? How big are the companies? How many employees do they have? What part of them are accepting online payments? What tools do they use for the website? CMS (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal), custom CMS, HTML? Here are some ideas for topics you may include in your survey in order to create your content strategy: Are you primarily servicing end users or design/ development companies? (Be careful here - it could be the end-users who are paying for the service, but the specialists who are making the decisions.) Or are you primarily acquiring customers through affiliate channels? Are the sites you host live and regularly updated or are the projects started and forgotten or even worse - never started? Are new users starting a new project (registration of new domain) or transferring an existing website? Which industries are they in? These questions will help you identify your best target audience and you will know who you want to attract. What comes next is HOW to attract them. 6

7 Content Strategy 101: Release Your Knowledge Solving difficult issues will build your image as an expert in your field, and you may start attending and speaking at conferences, bringing your brand to a whole new level. With well-targeted call-to-action (CTA) buttons at the bottom of each article, you can earn new customers. Before you start creating new stuff, you can share the content you already have (skip to next page if you do that already). Use your existing content As a hosting provider you have already answered thousands of customer questions. You can structure those answers into how-to articles and publish them on the web. How will that help? The search engine bots will crawl them and you will have lots of new pages on your domain. With this shared knowledge you will position your brand as an expert before potential clients. For example, on a page with information about how to backup your website content, an effective CTA at the bottom could be, With ABC hosting services you get free daily backups! Sign up now and get your website transferred for free! 7

8 Create New Content Create new content targeted specifically at your buyer persona, so that you can both rank better in search engine results and generate leads. New Content for Lead Generation Lead generation strategy is mostly used for B2B clients. The content assets you create should be available in a downloadable format, which users can receive for free by providing their name and address. Once you have their contact details, you can start nurturing them (with campaigns, more content, special promotions, etc.) in order to push them along the buyer funnel until they become your clients. 8

9 If you find that your business model is mainly B2C, end-users can be targeted with content that is optimized for search engines (e.g. how-to tutorials, which rank well in Google). New Content for Organic Traffic You need to research for which keywords there is a good ammount of search traffic and create articles which trigger those searches. Well-targeted call-to-action (CTA) buttons at the bottom of each article are the best way to convert these end users into paying customers. 9

10 Content Ideas Here are some content ideas, based on the most common types of buyer personas you re likely to have: Persona A: End Users If you are primarily servicing end users (e.g. business owners who buy directly from you, and either manage their website on their own or have an in-house team), you may target them with the following types of content: Tutorials and how-to videos: How-to guides for website creation or website building tools. Website security guides and tools: Website security is one of the top priorities for every owner who makes money from her/his website. Being an expert in web security is a great way to attract those paying customers. Website uptime tools: A mobile app which tracks website uptime and alerts every time the user s site is down is a great way to target your potential clients. E-commerce guides and payment processor discounts: This is a great way to attract start-up businesses. seful tools, which can be added to a website: End-users search for ready-made solutions and this is a great way to use their search habits and website needs (apps, widgets, and other add-ons) to your advantage. Ideas for such tools include a weather widget or an online scheduling software. Marketing guides: Guides like Local SEO Tips or How to Use Social Media for Boosting Traffic, will bring business owners to your website if you manage to promote them well. Discounts for Inbound Marketing tools: If you partner with a marketing automation company, you can offer appealing discounts to your users for the inbound marketing tools they like and want to use. 10

11 Persona B: Designers / Developers If you find out that it s mainly website design and development companies who refer clients to you or want to attract referrals from these kinds of companies, you can appeal to them by creating these kinds of assets for them: Icons pack Stock photos Website themes by industry Security packs You can also position your brand as a leader among B2B customers if you create the option of master accounts for design companies, with which end users may grant access to their hosting accounts. This way no password exchanges will need to happen. icon packs stock photos website templates security packs 11

12 Persona C: Affiliates If you target mainly affiliates, you need to create great marketing materials. Point out the top benefits your customers can get, so that affiliates can use them to attract users. If, for example, your pay the most attention to technical support, highlight the fact that users will wait less than 15 minutes for a reply. If uptime is your top asset, state that your websites are never down. You can create a widget to display user reviews on external sites, by simply adding a few lines of code. Customer reviews are great at convincing users to make their first purchase. 12

13 Author: Kate Proykova Before joining Hop Online three years ago, Kate was working for SiteGround hosting company as an SEO expert. She is combining her hosting knowledge with the latest web marketing tendencies to come up with an insightful guide how to build a working content marketing strategy for your hosting brand. Illustrations: George Chelebiev George brings the spice to Hop Online graphics. He constantly experiments and pushes the visual part of things. When he is not stuck in Illustrator or Photoshop, he is browsing the web for new trends. 13

14 Hop Online is a full service Content Marketing agency, helping businesses to achieve their goals through a strong online presence. We create and deliver succesfull content marketing strategies and social outreach community building for big and small brands around the globe. Find us on