I’m new to OpenSRS.  As a member of the marketing team, I’m attending HostingCon in Chicago. One session that I thought was highly-valuable to web hosting companies was Adam Eisner’s “Making Your Business Consumer Friendly”. Adam is our Domains Product Manager, and he presented to a full house on Monday July 28, 2008.

Looking around the room, his presentation seemed to resonate with the audience. I think Adam got people rethinking their approach to finding and keeping customers, and people seemed to walk away with some great ideas. Although there is a great review by WHIR available, I wanted to give you my notes on what Adam presented.

It’s Crazy Out There

Adam started of his presentation by setting the landscape that web hosting companies find themselves in today. Web hosting companies are facing a highly competitive marketing which is high volume, low margin, and competitors are willing to do anything to win your customer’s business. Although, this is obvious to most web hosting companies, many are making the same mistakes over and over again when it comes to growing their business. Adam wanted to give a few ideas on how to combat and overcome these challenges, and show people how NOT to make the same mistakes.

Sell on Problems, Not on Features

Adam made the point that web hosting companies keep going after the wrong audience. Adam said that your buyer is not webhostingtalk. Webhostingtalk is one of the largest web hosting communities out there, filled with many experienced webhosters. Don’t get me wrong, Adam has nothing against this community, he just believes that it isn’t the right audience to focus on.

Do You Know Who Your Customers Are?

So who is the audience? Well, the majority of consumers, and small business (your ideal customers) actually find the Internet really messy, confusing and hard to navigate. They are trying to do what seems like simple things like get their pictures online, or get their business online. The opportunity is for web hosting companies to present their offerings in a way that will appeal to these types of people.

For example, many webhosting companies package their services by outlining technical features such as 10GB of storage, 2GB transfer, and 10 email accounts. While these might be great features, hosting companies should focus on making it easy for customers to solve their problems. People just want their website to work, or get their business online, or upload and share photos. If webhosting companies can make it easy for their customers to get this done, there is a huge opportunity out there.