GoDaddy is known for its website hosting services but it wants to be more than that for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Today it introduced Websites + Marketing, a set of services the company says small businesses and entrepreneurs can use to increase their audiences. GoDaddy includes tools for website building, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and managing business profiles on platforms such as Instagram and Google My Business. The latter lets companies manage their presence in online searches.
For GoDaddy, the goal in launching Websites + Marketing was to take customers beyond just website building and help them focus on interactive engagement. Interactive engagement includes the ability to sell products and manage your presence online according to Heidi Gibson, Senior Director of Product Management at GoDaddy
“The big evolution for us is moving beyond website building,” Gibson said. “It’s a means to the end and just one part of the puzzle of succeeding online. To empower our customers, we need to help them manage their entire presence online…and to do that effectively, they have to be able to centralize the management of it.”
Gibson said customers need help knowing when to spend the time doing email marketing versus other tasks such as blogging. By focusing on other aspects of a marketing effort, including using social media, you can protect a company if its website breaks down, she said. She said this happens all too often.
“Customers would build a website and then say their site is broken, [saying] no one comes to it,” Gibson explained. “People need to find you by having this whole online presence that is reinforcing upon itself. Enabling that is the larger trend that this is a part of and that we’re really striving to lead.”
We saw a demo of GoDaddy Website + Marketing and liked the deep selection of templates and stock images. You can pull images from Getty Images or from your Facebook account. The idea is that GoDaddy wants to make it easy to use these resources across your entire online presence, including email marketing and social media.
GoDaddy is part of a recent trend in which companies want to offer a complete marketing experience in addition their core product. For example, Mailchimp recently expanded beyond just email marketing platform and into a full-service marketing platform. Mailchimp now offers website building, marketing automation, and customer relationship management (CRM).
The Insight tool in GoDaddy Websites + Marketing provides a score on how effective users are in managing their online presence.
GoDaddy Insight and Site Makeover Tools
A key way that GoDaddy can enable personalization in Websites + Marketing is with a smart recommendation tool called GoDaddy Insight. The tool performs data mining to help small businesses plot their action plan and attract new customers in their particular product category. GoDaddy Insight also helps small businesses and entrepreneurs personalize their business goals, whether they’re a restaurant owner, a plumber, a hair salon, or a nonprofit organization. It uses data algorithms to analyze anonymized data on millions of websites to help customers create a business plan according to their needs.
“[GoDaddy] InSight is a guidance system developed on the back of all the data we’re able to track through GoDaddy’s services,” Gibson said. “We’re able to see what makes a site successful across a number of sites, based on your location and how long you’ve been online.” The GoDaddy Insight tool provides a score to show small businesses how they’re doing online with their marketing action plan compared with similar businesses.
The company has rolled out features for Websites + Marketing gradually in test mode over the last couple of months, and now the company is officially launching the full suite. In a March 2019 survey of 2,211 small businesses, GoDaddy customers reported that within a year of using Websites + Marketing (formerly GoCentral), they were able to boost their revenue by 18 percent, increase their new customers by 23 percent, and double website traffic using the SEO tools in the product.
GoDaddy builds on the website building tools in products such as GoDaddy Websites Builder (formerly GoDaddy GoCentral) by offering a visualization tool called Site Makeover, which provides a view of a website in more than 20 styles, all at the same time. GoDaddy boasts that users can change colors and fonts for a website with a simple button click.
A critical component for any website is to include ways for customers to connect with the business on social media. GoDaddy addresses this need in Websites + Marketing by letting entrepreneurs respond to customer reviews. They can access the reviews by syncing their websites with Facebook, Google My Business, Instagram, and Yelp.
Pricing
GoDaddy offers four pricing plans for Websites + Marketing: Basic, Standard, Premium, and E-commerce. All of the plans can start with a free trial. All plans are priced at an annual cost and offer a PayPal button, around-the-clock support, and a mobile-friendly site.
The Basic plan costs $10 per month (billed annually) and includes support for one social media and listing platform, five social posts and responses per month, and 100 email marketing sends per month. The Standard Plan costs $15 per month and delivers three social media and listing platforms, 20 social posts and responses per month, and 500 email marketing sends per month. The Premium Plan offers unlimited social media and listing platforms, unlimited social posts and responses per month, and 5,000 email marketing sends per month. Meanwhile, the E-commerce plan delivers unlimited social media and listing platforms, unlimited social posts and responses per month, and 25,000 email marketing sends per month.
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