Do customers know your business?

Barb Rechterman, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, GoDaddy

Back in the early days of Go Daddy, Barb Rechterman and the company’s executive team struggled to figure out why more business wasn’t coming their way. Go Daddy, a Web hosting provider and domain name registrar founded in 1997, had one of the least expensive domain names in GoDaddy.com, but it had excellent customer service, the best price in the market and a great value proposition.
So why weren’t people flocking to use Go Daddy’s services? The answer was simple — not everyone knew who or what Go Daddy was.
“From that research, we started down the path of the Super Bowl, because if people really have no idea who you are, there is no possibility for them to do business with you,” says Rechterman, senior executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Go Daddy. “In the history of Go Daddy, it’s been one of our biggest challenges.”
The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Go Daddy decided to do two Super Bowl ads in 2005 to build the brand and gain an audience. Those Super Bowl ads were the company’s first on television.
“The marketer in me today says, ‘Holy smokes, I can’t believe we didn’t try to air a television ad before the Super Bowl so that we actually knew what might happen,’” Rechterman says.
Today, Go Daddy has advertised in eight consecutive Super Bowl campaigns and is set to air ads on the 2013 game. Before the first Super Bowl ad in 2005, Go Daddy had 16 percent market share of new domain names. Today, Go Daddy enjoys a 52 percent market share.
“We’re overachievers, so we tend to always want to outperform the prior year,” she says.
Here is how Rechterman has developed marketing strategies that have elevated Go Daddy’s brand and business.
Make your business known
Up until and through 2004, Go Daddy was growing, business was profitable and things were happening for the company. However, something just didn’t feel right.
“We were growing at this nice, steady rate, but it wasn’t the up and to the right acceleration,” Rechterman says. “So we decided at that point to make a Super Bowl ad that was brand building.”
At the time that Go Daddy decided to air those Super Bowl ads, the concept of a domain name and that language was somewhat difficult to explain.
“Rather than trying to tell people, ‘You need a domain name, you need a website, you need hosting, and you need email,’ what we did instead was used humor and made something memorable so people would then remember our name and might even do us the favor of checking out who we are online and what we do,” she says.
Go Daddy’s ads were successful in overcoming what had been the company’s biggest challenge: getting people to understand who and what Go Daddy was.
“Not everybody has the money for a Super Bowl ad,” she says. “Executives need to think about the fact that there are lots and lots of great businesses out there, and with the emergence of the Internet, if you don’t have a website and leverage that website effectively, you, as a business, will have a harder time getting noticed.”
Go Daddy’s Super Bowl ads have been notorious for sparking interest. After its 2006 campaign, out of all the advertisers in the Super Bowl that year, Go Daddy accounted for 80 percent of Internet traffic during the game.
In 2008, more than 1 million views were tracked to GoDaddy.com and the company’s commercial had 2 million views the day of the game. In 2010, the website had 1.1 million visitors per minute, according to Akamai Technologies.
“What people don’t realize about the Super Bowl is it’s not just about the ad,” Rechterman says. “It’s about preparing our systems and internal website structures for the eventual traffic load that we’ll take on that day and making sure that the site and the systems are as optimized as they can be for that particular day.”
Form your marketing strategy
When Go Daddy first started its television advertising campaign, the goal and the strategy of that campaign was brand awareness. Today, the strategies are to still maintain brand awareness but to also build and layer in the pieces of Go Daddy’s customer and product stories that are important for people to know.
“We want to have people understand what it is we do and that our goal is to enable small business success,” she says. “Our ads have started walking down the path of telling people about products that we have other than domain names.”
Go Daddy has begun highlighting its websites, hosting services and its customer care center.
“There are three separate, distinct ads that we are airing now to re-emphasize those particular messages, but we didn’t give up our girls [models] in these ads, and we didn’t really focus on the girls either,” Rechterman says.
To know where to focus the company’s marketing strategies, Rechterman and her team do a lot of research.
“It’s not simply about a gut feel or a passion,” she says. “We do a ton of research to help us identify what we should be doing to grow our customers and to know our customers.”
Go Daddy uses four core values to help drive its business forward. No. 1 is to take care of the customer above all else.
“Get to know them,” she says. “Take care of them and understand their needs.”
No. 2 is give people individual accountability and create passion in the employee base.
“They become connected to the business and we pride ourselves on connecting our employees to our business,” she says.
No. 3 is to never be satisfied.
“Our chairman, Bob Parsons, has 16 rules, and the first rule is to get and stay out of your comfort zone,” she says. “We live that forever and ever.”
No. 4 is to be part of something special.
“Here at Go Daddy, something special for us is to be part of our customer’s business success and enabling them to have business success,” she says.
The key to truly understanding your customers and finding a direction for your marketing strategy is to talk to your customers.
“If you’re just starting out, get to know who your potential customers are,” Rechterman says. “A lot of people have really great ideas that they don’t then spend the time to figure out how to get those ideas to market. The answer is always in a discussion with either the customer or the potential customer.”
Getting the research to do that is valuable. That will almost always tell you what your strategy needs to be.
“Let’s say that our customers were saying, ‘We’re tired of Go Daddy girls,’” she says. “That might build a marketing strategy. That’s a problem from a marketing standpoint that you’ve got to solve.”
Through constant research to better understand the customer and delivering on those points, Go Daddy has become the world’s largest Web hosting provider with more than 5 million active hosting accounts. The company has more than 53 million domain names under management and more than 10.6 million customers worldwide.
Go Daddy employs more than 3,200 people, and in 2011, it exceeded $1.1 billion in sales.
“Just because you think you have the right idea, doesn’t mean you have the right idea,” Rechterman says. “You have to actually talk to people who would be the consumer of your good or service to know the right answer.” ●
How to reach: Go Daddy, (480) 505-8800 or www.godaddy.com