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Marketing Idea
I was sitting here brain storming about doing some promotional things but fake gold bars seem kinda tacky.
The best thing that comes to mind is hiring Betty White to be a spokesman for my website. Being she is the gold standard in old ladies.
Any idea's?
Comments
Fake gold bars, you mean tungsten?
Promotions tend to be good when there is a giveaway. Everyone likes free swag. Sites are happy to promote such also.
If I were in this industry, I'd be sending customers a little something and running promos with my company on it - hats, shirts, mugs, etc. Heck even a little end of year thank you card delivered in old fashion mail does wonders.
Do people even buy this stuff?
I thought about doing this, but I think there's a high percentage of customers who would be absolutely terrified for receiving something in the postal mail from us.
Sure companies buy this stuff.
Most real companies (with actual offices) have piles of the stuff.
Idea with all promotions is to stand out. Posting yet another offer on the usual sites is fine, but visibility is pretty lacking.
Geeks love their black tshirts. They tend to live in them. When they leave the house someone might see your company. Plus it's the target market for lots of folks. Geek visibility to other geeks without stooping to spamming and other common tactics.
Cool, but 50% or more will be returned because the address or the person doesnt exist. At least the "offshore" ones
For christmas we are working on some type of bonus for everybody who is a client, just not sure what yet.
Geek service freebies / addons is compelling for retaining customers.
Like the offloaded SQL, DNS clustering, backups, etc.
Think about what you can do on the cheap that adds value to existing and/or potential customers.
I am doing some SEO/marketing for @24khost recently and here is a quote from our PM's:
Can we maybe hand out 1 - 2 day trials out on 64 or 128MB RAM?
Trials are very good for reviews and testimonials
We don't allow trials as we offer a 7 day money back gaurantee
vps trials set you up for abuse.
We consulted many other host's before we made this determination. We do not do trial vps, we only do them in certain cases.
I cut parts out because I still would like some privacy :P
Comes down that our friend jonothon things skids bother on 64MB - 128MB for 2 - 3 days :P
@24khost
I am not trying to harras or push this, just wanted people to give their opinion about this
@BronzeByte Who's interested in a trial? We're happy to hand out a few.
@concerto49
I know tons of people who want to buy VPSes after a smooth and quick (as in instant setup) trial.
Too bad I am doing some marketing for 24khost now, if interested in marketing you can always shoot a PM
Ahhh long live trial VPS'es.
We chew through providers on a monthly basis. $5 here, a $20 there. It really adds up to determine typically, the service isn't as advertised or the node is overloaded or the upstream pipe is clogged.
Having mini 32-64MB VPS trials for testing things would be so very welcome.
Glad to say @24khost is one of the few companies that has been both receptive and quick on offering a trial to me. Now, I am happy to say, a customer
We don't do auto signup's in the first place and probably never will. Second our whmcs does not have built in capability for that yet with our panel. Also when our vps are so low priced why would I give out a free trial when they can purchase try it out for 7 days and still get a full refund?
@pubcrawler the way still looking into that Vegas node situation. Might have been some saturation not sure what is going on there but we are monitoring it.
Trials are not great for reviews and testonials.
They are great for abuse though.
@lele0108
Advertising in the right place makes the difference
I suggest using ads-injection, the winning!
Let's break it, your clients are geeks. What does geek like? Porn. Pornstar with your domain name tattooed? Just works.
Not really. Let's a take a look:
Trail: Offered for free, anybody, even if they do not have money can get one.
7 day refund: Same thing as as trial, but weeds out a lot of abuse.
So if I take @Taz's Idea and Apply @BronzeByte Logic
I get 2 idea's
1. Porn star Trial's
2. A 24khost logo on a porn stars left ass cheek
2. A 24khost logo on a porn stars left ass cheek
We'll buy 50 VPS.
2 and you got a new client
@Tez
That actually could work LOL
Just put a model on every page with a nice boobs (cough nice boobs cough) and I am sure they will share the website because of the girls then suddenly somebody realizes they also offer hosting and buys i after closely inspecting all girls
works for godaddy.
Should setup 2 sites. 1 for male 1 for females.
@lele0108, I hate the hoop jumping around refunds. Can't say trials periods have always lived up to what providers say they are to be either. Far from perfect on experiences there.
To combat fraud and abuse, a provider should require full account creation with real info. Unsure what the fraud check services and similar charge, but cover those costs with trial fee. Like a 99 cent 1 day trial. Or something along those lines, but with real info attached and has to be cleared.
Totally free = totally advertising for abusers. So 100% agree with @lele0108.
@pubcrawler
That's indeed a very good practise, in fact, doing manual setup + $0.01 fee gives you the oppertunity to stop instant setup for abusers and with the $0.01 you can check if the PayPal's name matches and if the account is verified.
In case of mismatch, refund the $0.01 and kindly ask them to buy a normal package
Anyone for real in this business should be working their customers to make sure folks are happy test driving things first. Help on the move in should be available to some degree (maybe FAQ for migrators) and other common references.
There's lots of space for improvement, customer retention and impressing customers old and new. Really fond of what @Francisco does with IRC chat on his site (even though IRC is total geektopia) and over the head of lay folks.
Bundling other services is a good idea. Like integration of Rage4 DNS for your customers or other value added services. Not purely for upselling like domain registrars, but for partnerships, brand growth, partners, customer satisfaction, etc.
Biggest promotional point I'd invest in is accessibility to real human ticketing and helpdesk as near to 24/7 as feasible. Pound that idea home like a spike into competitor's pocket books.
But then again, if we deal with the abusers, we win. Everything has risks, but being able to survive also means something. Maybe the abuses will report back saying "we tried to abuse their node but failed, good work!"
What about offering something truly unique? Easier said than done but it's a great way to drive the marketing side of things, which is hard to do when you offer technically the same product as most low end hosts.
Some ideas I've seen over the years:
Sponsor something - Linode sponsored the Rails Rumble for many years & they became the goto host for Rails devs.
Showoff something - DigitalOcean show the number of realtime servers deployed on their homepage. Most of the PR revolves around hitting some goal of deployments (and the media seem to love this).
Partner - Partner with companies or charities, offer them hosting, piggyback off their customer base.
Support Software - Support some type of software/game that lots of people use & need in a hosted environment, make it easy to get setup & running. Obvious ones are Wordpress, Joomla & Magento. But there is some SEO software like AWR that people run in a hosted environment & need a large pool of IP addresses.
Customers Advocates - Turn your customers into advocates of your brand, this perhaps the most powerful type of advertising you can do. Send them free stuff, keep them happy, always go above & beyond for them.
Price point - Offer something different. I remember seeing a host that bills on resource used rather than a flat monthly fee. You could credit people for unused resources to spend on other products or refer to friends.
Got plenty more, probably best for a blog post or something.
@ServerBear, good contribution there!
@ServerBear still you get more traffic from porn starts :P