Marketing brochure and site maintanance service.

[matrosov]

Have a two fold question . Did anyone desing a marketing brochure for your hosting company, to give out during face to face customer meetings? If you did, could you recommend a good starting place either on the web or in literature on how to design an effective brochure. Also, does anyone offer a website maintanance service to their clients for an additional fee?Traditionally site upkeep was a job for a web developer so if you do offer this service on top of hosting could you let me know some of the reasons why you feel it is worth the time expense and the effort.

Thanks.

[Placer14]

Well...if you have the skills, yoiu could design the brochure yourself and they can print it from the orignal (proof and all). Alternatively...go to a local printshop and they might be able to design something nice for you if you provide copy (text/info) to them. (Offer then hosting for service?)

As far as maintinance, offer it at a reduced rate per hour. Nothing for free. Or if it's a customer that might need many updates, offer a certain amount of time for updates for free included with whatever package you set up. But at the very least offer them a reduced rate for your time in updates. Keep them coming back to you if you can.

[rusko]

although we do not provide maintenance (we dont do shared hosting), i can see some advantages to doing that. webhosting is a pretty generic service, in most cases. a client can pack his bags and leave to a different host without too much trouble, provided they do not run something that requires high availability.

as a provider, it is in your best interest to achieve something software makers refer to as vendor lock-in. in other words, you need to make sure that the client is so dependent on something unique to your service offering that they would have a hard time moving their business elsewhere.

although not in the site maintenance context, i often hear 'you are not the cheapest, but you know and understand our business so well, we feel you are almost a part of our company' from our clients. this means that (besides me being a cordial guy) we have achieved lock-in on that account and can look forward to a much lower degree of churn as opposed to industry averages.

this is of course just one advantage and im sure there are a few more that did not occur to me. in your position, i would think about whether providing the service at a loss (as a loss leader) would make sense. for example, if your customer base were paying $40 and up per month for business/corp presense hosting, it would imho make sense to take a loss on the maintenance. however, it is more than likely that in your case it would not be feasible, therefore you would need to do a lot of math to ensure the service is both profitable and competitive in terms of pricing.

in this day and age when everyone is extremely price conscious (which is not equivalent to cheap/bottom of the barrel), you can not afford to offer a value added service that is not price competitive. if you cant do it at a good price, dont do it. after all, if an existing client recognizes the va service as being pricey, she is going to investigate whether her main service package is costeffective as well.

another pitfall with providing a 'creative' service is the fact that there is no easily evaluated deliverable. after all, you can not control the clients' expectations and do not necessarily evaluate your performace the same way as they do. what happens if they dont like what you did to their site? if that happens, a client that was previously perfectly happy with you as a host may overnight become dissatisfied with your performance as a solutions provider.

strategically, you need to evaluate whether it would make sense for you to offer this. if you see a potential for a substantial new revenue stream and are reasonably confident that you would be able to perform according to and exceeding clients' expectations, go for it. however, if this is not something your company is currently good at, i would suggest focusing on your core competencies and getting them right.

all in all, you are the best judge of the viability of offering such a service. there are examples of companies that have gained a lot of new business and revenue from organizations looking for an integrated, turnkey soltuion. there have also been quite a few companies that were forced to divest or discontinue their value added service lines to concentrate on their core competencies in order to survive.

good luck,
paul