Our First Digital Marketing Campaign: Secure Green Web Hosting

The time has come. We’ve been learning, building and preparing all year, and now we are ready for our first digital marketing campaign: SECURE GREEN WEB HOSTING.

The premise is simple. For over a year we’ve run an excellent dedicated server hosted in Sydney. One of the preconditions was that the server we leased had to be of the highest quality, and as green-friendly as possible.

In our case, we customised a dedicated box on the excellent Digital Pacific network, powered by renewable energy sources and part of an accredited carbon neutral programme.

Another wish was to offer free SSL on every hosting account.

SSL is a crucial requirement for each and every website, and any websites without it will soon find themselves barred altogether from search engines. In the meantime, Google is rewarding SSL-enabled websites with a 2% search engine rankings boost.

This was especially tricky, in that most SSL certificates are priced anywhere from $10, $15 and up to over a thousand dollars. Even on the lower end, we wouldn’t be able to absorb the full cost of SSL certificates and dedicated IPs ($5-10 a month each), for each account.

As luck would have it, we weren’t the only ones with this desire.

The non-profit Let’s Encrypt have been in the process of developing free SSL for the entire Internet. Soon, there will be automatic provisioning for new registrations and renewals – at the moment it requires a manual process every three months.

With the use of SNI technology to host multiple SSL certificates on any one IP address, this combination allowed us to offer Secure, Green Hosting on every new web hosting account.

For power users and online stores, we maintain a broad range of commercial grade SSL certificates, some of which are featured on our Facebook store.

Our Australian-hosted server, with our ace 24/7 international support and local Australian managers, we feel the product is a winner.

Now it’s time to sell it.

 

Our Marketing Plan: Secure Green Web Hosting

You can have the best product in the world, but, today, effective digital marketing and presence is probably the single most important factor determining the success of a product or brand.

For the past two years, I’ve been studying digital marketing, mostly through the highly acclaimed and vastly successful DigitalMarketer. I’ve followed many lessons, attended online webinars, and expanded my knowledge all over the digital marketing shop, even running a few test experiments.

There are so many tasks, jobs and tweaks required to facilitate digital marketing, that we will be hiring one or two digital marketers in the new year. If you are familiar with DigitalMarketer and looking for freelance marketing work – please contact us!

Now, it’s showtime, where I put everything I’ve learned into practice.

We are essentially running ads for the three weeks leading up to the final Friday before the Christmas holidays.

There are three blocks of five day campaigns, and the final week we will simply push “Last Minute Gift Ideas”, and maybe flash sale products and services to those particularly keen. Much of DM is an experiment.

The first five day leg is about INDOCTRINATION. We introduce ourselves. We teach some of what we’ve learned – green server technology and the many benefits of SSL beyond security – to present ourselves as an authority.

We compare several niche targets, using a plethora of mediums, spread around 3 regions – Melbourne, Sydney, and other Australian capitals.

After the five days, we study what worked, what didn’t, who and where was the most responsive, and what versions of content were most effective.

For the second five day leg, we’ll raise the budget, strengthen our reach to focus on the more engaged niches, and introduce a few new niches to target with our improvements. We’ll have a few new goodies to push to the original niches, including our first offer, while beginning back at indoctrination for the new niches.

The final five day leg will push our offer harder on our strengths with a flash sale to woo the curious, improve the original offer that we introduce to the sophomore niches, and work hard through the phases on a selection of final niches in the most responsive cities we determine would be best suited. This is the leg our first automated funnels should be operational and in effect.

In the week before the holidays, we’ll offer a lovely alternative gift idea and try to collect more data on this particular period that will be useful for next year. Flash sales all over the place targeting previous visitors.

In addition to digital marketing, we’re running two weeks of street posters in Melbourne, which will be interesting to compare their effectiveness vs. no similar advertising in Sydney or elsewhere in Australia. We’re pushing personal referrals. We’ve had stickers expertly placed around Melbourne and its inner suburbs, for well over a year now.

If we can add another 50-100 new hosting customers to our account list by the end of the period, we will have done quite well. This surpasses the marketing expenditure, and, with the data, should start to show hints at how much we could bring in for every $500-1000 spent on digital marketing.

Once we have this formula, we will keep tweaking our assets, our content and our product offerings, until our funnels and sales campaigns are, literally, an automated machine. That’s when Mother.Domains will begin to ascend towards great things.

 

The Experiment Begins

We’re as curious as you are to see what happens next. We will study, reflect, and post our findings on the exercise.

Certainly what we learn at Mother.Domains, we can share, and perhaps our mistakes and successes will help guide you in your own digital marketing ambitions.

Thanks for reading this far. If you’re interested in your own Secure Green Hosting account, here’s an exclusive 20% coupon for you – available until they run out.

Click here to select your hosting package, and enter coupon HOLDYOURBREATH

Enjoy the rest of your day 🙂