Yesterday I read the news that GoDaddy had acquired mobile Web site creation tool M.dot. GoDaddy claims to be the world’s top domain registrar with 11 million customers. Although I haven’t seen the numbers broken out I would imagine that a significant percentage — perhaps even a meaningful majority — of GoDaddy’s domain buyers are SMBs.
I’ve never used GoDaddy for anything other than to register domain names. And that’s probably true for most people. However the site offers a wide range of services beyond web hosting. There’s a whole suite of SMB services.
These include most of the same things and services being sold by YP publishers, some newspapers and an independent local sales channels. They include SEO, PPC advertising, social media and email marketing.
Then I discovered that former Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving is now the GoDaddy CEO (appears to have happened in December). The minute I saw that I thought “he gets it.”
Right now GoDaddy’s site is a mess. It’s cluttered, hard to use and confusing. And its brand is a kind of sleazy, in large part because of its TV campaigns. The site basically lacks credibility as anything other than a cheap registrar.
But if the site were significantly redesigned and the brand “cleaned up” there would be a pretty interesting opportunity to upsell SMB domain registrants into monthly marketing subscription services (provided they were decent). Do you agree?
February 12th, 2013 at 1:26 pm
I expect they’ll have some success up selling their existing SMB base, but it will be limited if they’re relying on a self-provisioning model… and long term success depends on the quality of the offerings, as you point out.
February 12th, 2013 at 1:31 pm
I agree there is a pretty big “ick” factor to a lot of their marketing (especially that tasteless SuperBowl commercial) but I think they could be a really interesting player in the SMB marketing space. I just read somewhere that they have over 2,000 customer service reps and if they are cross trained to upsell (I assume they are) they may be a sleeping giant. It will be interesting to watch how or if their new CEO repositions the company.
February 13th, 2013 at 5:34 am
I think there’s some really interesting potential here. We’ll see how much of a priority Blake Irving makes upselling services to SMBs. But they need a “re positioning” effort to go along with it.