Focus your business and stand out from the crowd

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Customer conversion  [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] Cost vs. ROI

A strong brand is crucial to differentiate one web host from another. "A successful brand communicates a company's unique values, builds trust and loyalty, and engages the company's target audience," said Agranat. "The process of branding additionally helps companies focus their business goals."

Some companies are naturally reluctant to focus their target audience or service offerings, fearing that it will limit their revenues. Marketing experts say that the opposite is true. "There seems to be an almost religious belief that the wider net catches more customers, in spite of many examples to the contrary," said marketing gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout in their book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.

Ries and Trout offer Pepsi-Cola as one example. Their primary competition is, of course, Coca Cola. Pepsi-Cola, which was outsold by Coke more than five to one in the late fifties, was able to move to being only 10% behind in total sales in the United States by the 1980s. They did this by making a brilliant marketing move: focusing their target audience exclusively on the teenage market.

Web hosts can benefit from this specialization strategy as well, by tapping into markets ranging from small local businesses to enterprise-level corporations, teenage gaming portals to government databases, or even broader audiences speaking Spanish, Chinese, Dutch and more.