34SP

Founded: 2000

Business type: Hosting and Managed Services

Engagement goals: Positioning Development

Collaborating with: Co-founders and external development partner

Service: Positioning and Messaging

Find out more: 34SP.com

The Challenge

Hosting and managed services companies operated in a saturated landscape, with major players like AWS and Google Cloud taking dominant positions in an increasingly commoditised market.

While UK-based hosting provider 34SP had grown through customer referral and historic marketing, there was a concern that its positioning and messaging had become increasingly undifferentiated in a sea of sameness.

While the business had some visibility on its best-fit customers, it did not optimise its website or marketing to attract these customers and lacked clear messaging that firmly captured the attention of a clear target audience.

34SP engaged Open Velocity to help refine its audience targeting and create a positioning strategy to put the business’ strengths front and centre while standing out from the crowd.

Alongside providing clarity to the business on who they are for and why people care, this positioning project also provided the foundations for the redevelopment of the 34SP website.

Through an extensive discovery process we developed a broad and deep understanding of the business, its values, goals and trajectory. We complemented this with a deep dive into their direct and indirect competitors to understand the specific challenges of their market. This revealed a lack of differentiation between competitors and a high level of copycat feature-led messaging within the sector.

We followed this with customer surveys and in-depth customer interviews to understand the customer needs and identify why users were choosing and staying with 34SP. Segmenting this by customer type allowed us to understand what different customers valued in a service and how this aligned with 34SP’s strengths and future business plans.

Ultimately, this allowed us to identify a unique niche upon which 34SP could capitalise, building on the strengths of its existing service to distinguish itself from the competition.

• We provided clarity on how 34SP can competitively differentiate itself from its competitors

• Developed headline messaging for the business to use across all key assets

• Identified primary and secondary audiences and developed clear buyer personas to inform future marketing efforts

• Developed an information architecture outline to inform the redevelopment of the 34SP website

• Assisted in the briefing of the website development project to ensure our development partner was clear on the target audience and messaging.

• Developed a customer feedback process that the business can continue to use at regular intervals