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.

Typically the first place I look is in the marketing department. After visiting Peer1’s Management Team page, I immediately found Rajan Sodhi, VP of Marketing/Communications for the company. Under Rajan’s profile he has a link to his blog. I figured he would discuss the “We Get IT” slogan there and quickly found out I was right. Rajan’s Big marketing for small business shed new light on the subject. I had to scroll down a bit to find the exact post, but the We Get IT post not only shed some light on the slogan, but opened many new things to discuss including video marketing, viral marketing, contest marketing, and so much more.

More on video, viral, and contest marketing in future blog posts. Back to the Peer1 slogan. Rajan and his team have a clear vision of what they do, or want to do, for their customers. Personally, I think the slogan is brilliant. What I would really like to know is how long they spent coming up with the slogan and the process(es) they took to reach that point. Did they define their target market? Did they profile their ideal customer? Did they have to segment their audience? What or who sparked the creativity? And the biggest, and most important question of them all, has the new slogan helped increase sales?

Hopefully soon I can get an interview with Rajan and find out more details. Most marketing executives are really passionate about their achievements so I’m sure Rajan will be more than enthusiastic to share some insight on the success of the new slogan.

To answer the post’s question “We Get IT – Great Branding?” the answer is, well, yes! The true test will be the statistics six months out, a year out, even two years down the road. Branding is essential to the success of your business and will help you stand out from the crowd in any industry, even one as saturated as the hosting industry.