Boldly I ask: Do we really know who our customers are? Isabel's recent blog on
How 1&1 (and You!) Can Increase Sales by 12.5%, there is a great statement in the 5th paragraph:
"In other words, it seems web hosting services are typically marketed with the assumption that customers differ only in their bandwidth/storage/monthly fee preferences. But based on my experience, website owners are a diverse crowd. Some are sophisticated developers, others don't even know HTML. Some hope their websites will attract as much traffic as possible, others use their hosting accounts to store private documents."
This statement rings true through on a daily basis. What are the true marketing channels needed for targeting customer acquisition strategies? If my only strategy is allocations, then survival will be brutal, marketing impossible and customer acquisition badly flawed.
A great friend and professional spent some time with us recently and helped me quickly understand "we have no idea who our customers are". And he is right. We target the ultra intelligent developer and tech savvy SMB owner primarily. All others are assumed to just understand what they are buying.
So here is my next question: How many turn away because they don't understand what they are reading?
Target marketing is a science that starts with understanding who is looking in your store window. I vow that it is time to start channel marketing our services to who is looking, not a select crowd that understands what they are reading.
Some steps to getting there I think will help: 1. Learn who your current customers are. Just simply ask. Not with some cheesy email survey, but call them and ask them what they do, want, need, like, don't like and wish. 2. Learn your customers some more. I cannot stress how critical this is. 3. Understand your know segmentations in the market. Are you driving to developers primarily? 4. Get honest opinions from relationships in channels not attached to your know markets. No, not high dollar focus groups, but friends and well, anyone who will give you an honest opinion.
After collection of the actual data, I think most teams will see direction on what channels are being missed. It's not who we get, it's who we don't get.
Hopefully this is a good step in helping strategize what you will need to do. Changes to your website? I'd bet. Order process? Maybe.
Its not easy... but we are just not going to make it without good market intelligence.
I have several domains with Crystaltech and have been very happy with your product and support. However, I've had to migrate some of my joomla sites to another hosting company that offers shared linux hosting as it is not cost effective for me to purchase a dedicated solution at this time and more importantly becasue of permission\security issues when running under IIS on the shared side. I really want to stick with Crystaltech and support a local company and keep all my domains under one roof. I've called your sales department but they are unaware of any plans for shared linux hosting and were unfamiliar with Joomla and the growing community that supports it. Just here to voice my support for you to add linux shared hosting plans at Crystaltech!
BTW: Regarding your other post about VPS: I support a large VMWARE ESX\Virtual Infrastructure 3 envirionment in my day job and we host Coldfusion and MS SQL Server solutions for IBM, Lenovo, Xerox and Polaroid - backended by several EMC SANS. It definitely has different requirements than your hosting infrastructure but the new High-availability, and consolidated backup features in VMI3 are worth taking a look at. Forget 2-3 hours of recovery time - there is no downtime if you invest in the intrastrucure and configure it properly. ~ 7-12% resource overhead.
Do you have a time-frame for shared linux hosting?
Regards,
Mark