Web hosting companies offer much more than simply hosting your websites. You can now include marketing services in your hosting plan, sometimes at discounted rates for including them in your web hosting plan. So, what kind of marketing services do many hosting companies offer? Of course, it depends on which hosting company you choose, but many now offer the same services. Here’s a list of eight marketing tools and services you can get from your web hosting provider.
Google Adwords Credit
Paid advertising has long been an amazing way to drive people into your business especially if you’re not a household name just yet. Every second of each day, an average of more than 40,000 search queries are conducted on Google. This officially makes Google Adwords, the advertising section of Google, the king of paid online marketing. Several hosting companies will give you a $100 Google Adwords Credit along with your purchase of basic hosting for your website.
Hosting companies that provide this benefit include Hostgator, Fatcow, Bluehost, iPage and JustHost.
Yahoo/Bing Ad Network Credit
One in five people used the Yahoo/Bing network to search for topics online in 2015. Twenty percent of the search market is nothing to scoff at. In fact, ads served by the Yahoo/Bing network are reportedly cheaper than Google Adwords.
So if you’re looking to get ahead and start reaching your business’ target audience, the $100 ad credit offered by most hosting companies is something you can take advantage of.
Yellow Pages (YP) Free Business Listing
Long gone are the days when you would flip through the large, bulky Yellow Pages to find contact information for businesses in your city. Businesses can now list their information in the online version, YP.com.
In 2007, 55% of respondents who used YP.com made purchases after a search on the site. Apart from getting found by searchers, since YP.com has high domain authority, placing your website link there will provide valuable SEO link juice to your site which will be helpful when people go to search for a particular service or product you provide.
Fatcow Hosting and Hostgator amongst others offer the Free YP.com business listing but then if you would like to become a featured business (a paid service) so that your business shows up higher on the search results’ list, there is a 15%-20% off coupon provided that you can apply toward that purchase.
Email List-Building Tools
Even with the advent of social media and mobile technology, email marketing is still a powerful way for businesses that are serious about building rapport with their clients and customers. An email list building tool offered by a wide variety of hosting companies is Constant Contact.
Constant contact allows you to capture the emails of prospective leads directly from your website, create and send email newsletters on a regular basis and track the performance of those emails.
Blogging / Content Management Tools
Content marketing could easily be the best marketing innovation of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are people who have built entire business empires around creating helpful, educative, and entertaining content as a way of:
- Introducing prospective leads to their business
- Demonstrating expertise and building authority
- Allowing clients to see that there are REAL people behind the business and not just automated voice machines
- Leading people into a sales/marketing funnel that eventually has the prospect exchanging money for a service or product
Content marketing, when it is done strategically, WORKS. Thus, it makes sense that hosting companies use services like WordPress and Joomla, which allow you to build blogs, as strong selling points.
Free Toll-Free Number
Need a toll-free number for your business? Fatcow, for instance, has partnered with Nextiva to provide users with a free toll-free number for your business. A toll-free number is the best way to get potential customers to call when interested in your products and services. Every business needs a phone number.
Free Business Email / WebMail Client
An email address with your domain name at the end can help tremendously. Instead of having yourbusiness@gmail.com for instance, you could have yourbusiness@yourbusinessdomain.com. Many web hosting companies offer up to five free email addresses, so you can provide specific email addresses to others on your team (accounting@yourdomain.com, or webdesign@yourdomain.com, for example).
Every web host currently has some kind of webmail client that allows you to do exactly this and it is typically included for free in your hosting plan.
Even better, there are web hosts that will allow you to integrate your custom domain email with Google Apps for Work (which was recently renamed G-Suite) so that you can still leverage the power of the Google Email system but without the Gmail extension. Google Apps for Work currently costs $5/month or $50/year.
Premium Marketing Services
Apart from all of the free or discounted marketing services detailed above, you could actually contract your hosting company to provide you with extra marketing services which could include website design and branding, search engine optimization (SEO), and content writing for your site.
This kind of service comes at a cost, but if you are not tech savvy and don’t know anyone who could do this type of work for you, it might be worth it to have your hosting company do it for you.
And there you have it. Eight marketing tools and services you can take advantage of from your web hosting company.
