During a Microsoft event earlier this month, I had the chance to speak with someone involved in strategic and technology development and one of the questions that was discussed was how would small businesses be able to take advantage of multiple tools online to help control their marketing efforts. What exactly do I mean? Take a look at the different sites and/or software that you’d possibly need to use in order to manage your brand presence:
- One to maintain your site – typically a Content Management System web interface
- One to handle your email marketing campaigns & lead generation efforts
- An interface to manage online advertising for PPC keyword bids on Google, Yahoo & MSN
- Domain registration & management
- Any e-commerce websites to help facilitate purchases
- Social media brand monitoring
- Interface to communicate with other teams to help manage customer relations (e.g. CRM system)
All of these sites/software that a company uses is probably all well and good but is probably more in tune with medium to large businesses. Sure, small businesses can handle this – I’m not disputing this, but isn’t there more of a need to find some way to consolidate these efforts to make it simpler for members of your marketing/communication team to maintain the brand presence online? I’d say so.
An idea would be to find a company that can handle a majority of these responsibilities or at least offer services that you can use an all-or-nothing approach. Yes, there are some caveats to using this method, but the purpose of this post is to make you think about rather than going to multiple websites to manage 20 different things, perhaps you should invest in companies that already offer these services as a bundled package.
What do I mean? Well take for example how Network Solutions has its offerings. Sure, when you think about Network Solutions, you’re looking at them for domain services. You want a new web address, you come to Network Solutions. They also do hosting. That’s it. So you have your website and hosting and then what? Do you go out to find yourself an email marketing vendor? What about search? Do you immediately sign up for a Google AdWords account?You also need to worry about monitoring traffic to your sites? Where do you go to get that from?
All of these are valid questions and things to think about, but does it surprise you to know that Network Solutions offers a majority of these services as part of their package? It’s not just Network Solutions, but other domain registrations that offer hosting. It’s the smart thing to do, especially for small businesses to take advantage of. Many of your resources are already being spent on doing multiple things to help drive business to your company so instead of paying for things like complex technology, you might want to stick with using the services your provider offers. Not saying whether they’re good or bad, it’s still a great offer to take advantage of.
Keeping with Network Solutions as an example, by having your site hosted with them, your marketing team can have a one-stop shop to work on search engine marketing, localized targeting and even maximize your media dollars through email marketing efforts. Hosting providers may also be partnering with other vendors so that will help make things easier for you to work with. There’s no need for you to handle thousands of login credentials just to manage your marketing campaigns. Wait until your company grows to a larger one before you invest in more functional and complex technology. Hosting providers like to specialize in helping small businesses and offer many different resources to help guide you through this step-by-step process on creating & managing your online presence.
Sure, we’d all like for there to be a universal dashboard that can connect with every single vendor that we have a login for – such as email marketing vendors (Vertical Response, Blue Sky Factory, Constant Contact, etc.), social media efforts (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), search marketing (Yahoo, Google, MSN), and countless others. But until that startup gets off the ground, perhaps it’s best to focus on what offerings hosting providers can give you. More and more companies are branching beyond the realm of hosting & domain registration because they see there’s a need to help businesses with managing their product online rather than just supplying them the venue for their site files.
You can check out what services Network Solutions can offer you by clicking here.
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