We ran a bit in the latest issue of the magazine about the new appointments in the marketing department at Verio, and the new marketing strategy ushered in across the company by that move.
The new faces are Ken Giffin, director of marketing, and Wendy Pearson, director of makerting and communications. While Giffin focuses on the Via Verio partner program, Pearson will focus more on the company-wide marketing effort.
Yesterday I met with Wendy Pearson to discuss some of the content of that revamped marketing effort, or the part of it that is complete at this relatively early stage in the redesign.
The new blood in the marketing department starts with Steve Renda, who was made VP of sales and marketing in January of this year. And he brought many of the company's new faces on board.
But the shift, says Pearson, comes from a mandate at the company to reinvigorate a business that has been not quite stagnant but certainly coasting for a period of a few years.
Verio is one of those hosting companies that deals with the small to medium-sized business market, which can be a pretty broad and vague term when you start to really think about the kind of business that describes. Part of the process at Verio in the last 60 days, says Pearson, has been to really narrow the focus within that realm, partly by trying to characterize those hypothetical customers.
At the very high end of a chart she drew that described the importance of IT to a given customer and their competence with IT, she identified a sophisticated, demanding customer that Verio has acknowledged that it just isn't the customer it is best suited to serve, or most interested in serving.
At the low end, they've identified the basic domain-name-and-one-page-website customer that also isn't really in the mould of what they're best suited to, or most interested in, serving.
The customers they're looking at targeting are the kinds of small businesses that are looking toward growing online, changing positions on that chart to move toward more importance of IT, and in some cases a higher rate of competence.
It's an interesting discussion, this idea of a host narrowing its focus and, if not getting rid of certain customers than at least admitting that "these aren't the customers we're interested in serving."
For Verio, the next step in this process - now that it has really polished the notion of what it means by "SMB" - is identifying the means by which it will target these better-defined SMB customers.
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