Dependable Solutions, a technology management firm based in Wisconsin, provides professional technology solutions for organizations ranging from small to large businesses, government, police departments, and K-12 school districts. In September 2007, the team over at Dependable Solutions contacted Young Copy requesting professional writing services for their upcoming K-12 conference. Aside from writing postcard copy for the conference, full website copy, and brochure copy, I developed a catchy advertising slogan to help the company boost revenues. Did it work?

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One of my favorite topics - developing a winning slogan. Aside from it being easy, at least it is for me, developing a slogan is one of the best things you can do for your company. But unless you understand the fundamentals of how to develop a catchy slogan that will stay in the minds of your customers, do not attempt to develop one on your own. So before you consider creating a slogan for your business, take a look at the following process I use when I create slogans for Young Copy clients.

First you need to understand there are two sides to every great slogan. One side represents what you do and the other side represents how what you do benefits your customers. Each side can consist of one or multiple words. And when you bring both sides together, you have an effective business slogan. For example, I wrote about Peer1's "We Get IT" slogan a while back.  Let's break the slogan into multiple pieces.

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If you work in the hosting industry at any capacity, you should be familiar with Parallels, a software company dominating the industry with their new virtualization and automation products. Back in December 12, 2007 Parallels announced their rebranding initiative, changing the name from SWSoft to the now popular Parallels. The new brand took off as expected, thanks to the genius marketing team led by Kurt Daniels, senior vice president of marketing and online at Parallels.

I talk to people in the software and hosting industry daily. And since one of my most popular services is press release writing and distribution, Parallels always comes up in the conversation. Either my client mentions the name first or I ask them to give me their 30 second history on the company. To date, everyone I talk to in the industry accurately describes the company's history. So how does a software company develop a new brand, launch the new brand, and become a well known name in the industry - and do it in less than three months?

Parallels® (formerly SWsoft) is a worldwide leader in virtualization and automation software that optimizes computing for consumers, businesses, and service providers across all major hardware, operating system, and virtualization platforms. Founded in 1999, Parallels is a fast-growing company with 900 employees in North America, Europe, and Asia.

I personally think Parallels has an impressive marketing strategy, dating back to Plesk, their hosting control panel company. The marketing team at Parallels knows exactly what it takes to build a brand and gain recognition in the industry. Based on what I see everyday in hosting news related sites, Parallels takes advantage of press releases. From mid January 2008 to today, Parallels has released at least 15-20 press releases. That's an average of five a month. I recommend to my clients they should release at least 1-2 times a month and if budget allows, distribute press releases four times a month.

Imagine what Parallels (or your company) could achieve if they utilized optimized press release writing services. 

In the future I hope to interview the brilliant minds around the new Parallels brand. Hopefully I can chat with Kurt Daniels to learn more about the new Parallels initiative. I am most curious to see how well their press release marketing strategies help increase sales for their flagship products:

Parallels Desktop for Mac
Parallels Virtuozzo Containers
Parallels Plesk Control Panel

Meanwhile, please sign up for the Young Copy feed by clicking on the "Subscribe to RSS Feed" graphic to your right. If you have questions regarding how a well planned, well written, and well executed press release marketing strategy can help you achieve better branding and more revenue, please send your questions via the Contact form.

The other day I received my copy of WebHosting.Info's NewsGrid Daily newsletter. In the newsletter there was a banner ad flashing "free hosting, with no ads." What caught my attention was the simplicity of the banner ad, but more importantly, the name of the company - WebHero. 

I think the name is great. We all have our heroes - The Incredible Hulk anyone? The banner ad said "Free Web Hosting" and flashed "With No Ads." At the bottom of the ad was the WebHero logo (shown above). Typically I would not click on a free web hosting ad, but I had to check this one out. I almost never come across a free web hosting company that has such a great company name. That said, there must be something else to it.

When the WebHero site loads, it shows four products. The first product in WebHero's matrix is the "Free Web Hosting" package - the one mentioned in the banner ad. In the second slot, WebHero highlights the "Everything Hosted" package in green as the "Best Selling Plan." At $4.95 you get 10GB of storage space, 1500 throughput (bandwidth), an ecommerce cart, priority phone support, tons of email accounts, even MySQL databases.

The point of this blog is not to sell you on WebHero's products and services, rather I want to point out how effective company branding can be in terms of attracting new customers. Even though I would not use a free web hosting service, WebHero caught my attention and almost sold me on their paid hosting plan. 

How?

1. Great branding.
2. Extreme simplicity (design and copy).
3. Great color scheme.
4. Everything I would need in a hosting package.
5. Great pricing model.

WebHero, like many other companies I feature in this blog, has done a great job branding their company. Especially in today's overly saturated shared web hosting market, branding plays an even more important role in the success of a company that primarily sells shared hosting services.

Great job WebHero. Keep up the good work.

Great branding comes along every once and a while, and is even more rare in the hosting industry.  However, there are several major players who know how to take a hosting brand to the next level. Meet Peer1, a server colocation and managed hosting solutions provider. They nailed it with their new "We Get IT" slogan. Rarely do you see a hosting company with such a powerful tag line. And since they are in the Information Technology (IT) sector, playing off "IT" and "it" just makes sense. I wanted to learn more about who's behind the slogan. Who came up with this well-positioned slogan? Was it an outside source or an internal source? Finding out was easy. And well worth it.

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Branding is so important to the long-term success of a business, especially in competitive markets such as hosting and software. Everyday I research the latest news in the hosting and software industries (actually more than just those two, but for this post, I focus on hosting and software only). Today I came across a news announcement stating that Webmail.us, the mail division of Rackspace, changed its name to Mailtrust. Was the name change a great move on their part?

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