Case Study
Web Hosting Products
Timeweb is one of Eastern Europe's largest and oldest web hosting service providers. Around 200,000 users use the company's services, including shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers. At the time of my work with Timeweb, company management has faced multiple growth challenges.
Being a well-established hosting provider, Timeweb faced multiple growth-limiting problems. The first was that their current market was relatively mature and saturated, so generally speaking, their marketing efforts could snipe a few clients from their competitors but not generate any meaningful lead generation stream. Second, the market was experiencing a general trend of client migration to website constructors with web hosting services included, thus making it extremely difficult to retain existing customers and attract new ones.
To solve these problems, Timeweb considered multiple options. One of them was to look abroad and generate business in new geographies.
My growth strategy concentrated on crucial focus points:
I kept the research as lean as possible, aiming to gather both product and marketing research data. I value a data-driven approach to growth, so my main objective at the start was to select a few markets of interest, discover customer pain points, generate, test, and validate product hypotheses, and develop efficient product positioning.
When selecting a market for potential expansion, I looked for multiple vital characteristics. These included:
Considering these metrics, I chose India, Nigeria, Brazil, Indonesia, and Kenya as the first target markets. These were quite diverse markets, so before committing to any of them, I needed to dive deeper and narrow down my selection based on ease of market entry and lower product localization requirements. With that in mind, I chose to test the demand in India and Nigeria.
Insights: Selected markets have demonstrated the greatest potential due to the rapid development of their tech environments and the lack of established industry monopolies. Local customers valued available prices and product flexibility, which were our company's core value propositions.
Finding local industry advisors and business development consultants gave me greater insight into operating hosting businesses in these critical markets. It allowed me to focus on the following stages of the research.
The customer research and insights gathered fall into two groups: marketing research and product research. The marketing leg of the study focused on establishing key customer profiles in focus markets, developing a customer journey map, determining relevant positioning, and exploring potential pricing models.
Product research helped me formulate an international product roadmap, figure out customer pain points and their motivations, and highlight all potential bottlenecks in the company's product to lay the groundwork for satisfying user experience and limit potential customer churn.
The research design strategy needed to address both marketing and product concerns, so it included a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods, including polls, customer development interviews, UX experiments, test lead generation for messaging testing, and product-market fit validation.
UX experiments helped me identify current bottlenecks in the customer experience. I used a freelance marketplace to find and recruit web developers, web administrators, and other customer profiles to test our existing product offering and see if the product required optimization efforts for a smoother customer experience. Collaborating with the company's professionals, I developed a list of tasks necessary to launch a website and observed where users experienced the most significant issues.
Insights: Due to the unfamiliar layout and complicated design, most customers needed help navigating the product interface. User experience updates were critical to fix because we wanted to avoid early churn.
The results of these experiments informed product issues that could hinder our market entry efforts. They provided me with data to develop a product roadmap and align stakeholders on a data-proven growth plan.
The same users were later asked for a product discovery interview focused on the five whys of hosting use to identify pain points to address in our product positioning and messaging and could inform our product roadmap even further. During these interviews, I gathered more data on key purchasing decision motivation factors that I could use in my marketing and sales collateral to stand out from the competition. I also gathered insights into the customer journey map, allowing me to select the right marketing mix to engage the customer throughout the marketing funnel.
Competitor research focused on identifying key marketing talking points, content structure, marketing mix selection, pricing, and product experience. Insights gathered from all my research efforts allowed me to build a positioning focused on key customer pain points, choose the right mix of channels, and find new lead-generation methods.
Since our product worked with data, creating trust with potential customers was essential. I looked at developing an influencer marketing strategy combined with an affiliate model and content marketing plan to demonstrate industry knowledge.
In my influencer strategy, I focused on building partnerships with local web development influencers, including thematic blogs, Telegram channels, YouTube channels, and online blogs. This way, I established a direct lead acquisition funnel and laid the groundwork for future branding efforts.
Content marketing was important for smooth customer onboarding and inbound SEO strategy, particularly in-depth knowledge bases and how-to guides. Content marketing tends to be a long-term game, and it was crucial to start early by generating a high-intent lead generation funnel and a long-term editorial calendar to make marketing efforts more systematized.
Email marketing, particularly drip campaigns, was instrumental in converting leads into paying customers and upselling efforts. Email and content work hand in hand to fulfill both short-term and long-term growth plans by creating means to target high-intent leads with offers, engaging with them through helpful content, generating free value for users, and eventually converting them into paying customers.
Email lists helped generate audience data for more targeted Google Ads campaigns, and previous Facebook and Google Ads campaigns allowed me to use retargeting campaigns to gather leads more efficiently. These marketing channels helped me reengage with users in the consideration stage and lead users who have already engaged with our brand towards product offers, thus optimizing customer acquisition costs.
Aligning stakeholders on strategy objectives and the game plan
Collaborating with the legal team and local consultants to establish basic business requirements. Making sure stakeholders are in the loop
I aligned business objectives and current challenges through a growth plan and a product roadmap. Designers, developers, and stakeholders are aligned and familiar with the strategy. Buy-in from the C-suite and all critical stakeholders
Launch strategy concentrated on generating leads, business, and data through initial campaigns. Collaborating with data analysts to gather insights from data and adjust plans as we go. Use data to identify key markets to focus on.
We used agile methodology to test channels, messages, and product features and scale the most efficient growth elements. Reiterate on less efficient building blocks. Constant learning and sharing of knowledge with the team and stakeholders
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