Background

ShedamHost is a United States-based web hosting company, developed to give people easy and affordable ways to get their ideas online. The company provides affordable domain registration, SSD Reseller Packages, SSD Web Cloud Hosting, and cloud services to customers.

Recently, to further ensure growth and market share in the web hosting industry, ShedamHost decided to expand and enter into Nigeria’s web hosting market. This move requires good digital marketing strategies and an online marketing agency that knows the Nigerian market well enough.  In view of this, AdHang was selected by the company, and to work with their representative in Nigeria: Mr. Sule Aminu.

“We are a new hosting provider in Nigeria’s market, working with a tight budget, and at the same time wants to reach Nigeria’s website hosting market as much as possible,” Mr. Aminu said.

After a meeting with the ShedamHost’s representative to uncover the company’s objectives, goals, services, and target audience. The company and AdHang settled on the following:

Services to be Promoted by AdHang

  • Shared hosting
  • Domain registration
  • Reseller hosting
  • VPS hosting
  • Dedicated hosting
  • Domain transfer

Target Audience to Reach by AdHang

  • Web designers
  • Developers
  • Content creators
  • Programmers
  • Software developers
  • Entrepreneurs

Objective of the Digital Marketing

  • Awareness and increase of sales

Mr. Aminu said, “I appreciate your kind considerations.
I am okay with the offer of the campaign for 1 month.”

Challenges

After situation analysis by AdHang, many challenges were found, some of which are as follows:

  • No search engine ranking in Nigeria
  • No contents in Nigeria to foster buyers’ confidence
  • Tough competitors
  • Limited budget and short timeframe

Solutions

To overcome the challenges faced by the company in Nigeria as much as possible within the budget and time frame, AdHang team as usual has to step-up the game, and formulated different digital marketing strategies – from communication needs, message strategies to creative appeals.

AdHang wrote advertising headlines to communicate the solutions ShedamHost provides.

The agency designed online banners in sizes for a seamless viewing by the target audience.

Online advertisement from ShadamHost was displayed on many Nigerian local websites, these include but not limited to the following:

  •  365technoblog.com:  Nigerian teach blog’s site
  • Socialwider.com:  African/Nigerian social networking site.
  • Africatopforum.com: African/Nigerian marketplace
  • Cokoye.com: African/Nigerian online discussion forum
  • Nigeriaonnews.com: Nigerian news website
     

Experiences have shown that most people do not subscribe after seeing internet banners for the first time, and when they eventually need the services, the banners might not be there, then they go to search engines to look for the services/products. And some prospects after seeing banner ads would prefer further searching to know more about the company.  To satisfy these needs, AdHang team did the following:

  • Wrote a search optimized sales’ piece and published on 10+  Nigerian online forums
  • Placed a classified publication on the premium section of Africatopforum.com
  • Wrote blog posts every week (4 times in a month) about ShedamHost and published on 365technoblog.com permanently. Therefore positively promoting the brand through the sites and search engines as these contents ranked well on searches in Google, Yahoo, etc.

To further ensure spreading the tentacles of ShedamHost in Nigeria, and fostering buyers’ confidence:  

  • AdHang wrote a press release about the hosting services and published it on 10+ different websites (blog, news site, forum, etc).
  •  Shared all the written posts’ link on 85 Nigeria-focused Facebook groups with a combination of 5 million+ members

 Results

  1. Creation of awareness about ShedamHost across 36 states in Nigeria and beyond.
  2. The campaigns educated the potential users and buyers across Nigeria about the hosting services ShedamHost offers.
  3. The banners reached 1, 620, 092 internet users, thus creating branding effects.
  4. Stimulated demand for the hosting services in Nigeria and across Africa.
  5. ShadamHost comes up in search engines with positive narratives from different sources as users search for it.
  6. The ShadamHost, solutions, features, benefits, name, images, and sales’ contents are placed in strategic places online forever promoting the company around the clock.