Splitting off your business brand vs. staying monolithic
I am currently brainstorm about an expert/advisor service for mentorcruise.com, basically the core offering but adjusted for B2B.
That means that I kind of need to split off MC for Consumers and MC for Business, since I think some of the procedures should be quite different (e.g. businesses don't need any of the tools I've built for consumers, but instead need team access, for example).
I wonder if doing so on expert.mentorcruise.com mixes things too much in terms of offerings, or whether I am losing too much SEO and other strength by moving things to expertcruise.com (that's not a real name and will never be).
The only similar scenario I can think of is Codementor, which branded their freelancing services CodementorX at first, before moving things to Arc.dev.
Interesting question. Looking forward to reading others' opinions on this.
To me, as an outsider who doesn't know a ton about your field but knows what you do to some extent, it seems to me that you can come up with custom features for each of the categories you provide mentorship in (software, design, business).
What you're talking about (an "expert/advisor" service) could be just another category instead of a standalone service. Each of your categories could be used either by individuals or teams, so I'd imagine all those categories could benefit from the features you have in mind (like "team access"). If my assumptions are right, I'd keep it all under one brand to benefit from things like better SEO and brand recognition, upselling other categories, etc
So I'd be inclined to split categories (by minor adjustments in functionalities) under the same brand as opposed to spinning up a new brand for a new category. But that doesn't seem to be how you're thinking of this. what am I missing?
It's a great point. I guess what I am inclined about is the core experience of MentorCruise doing "too much". There is mentorship, you can book sessions, we work with a few schools, have mentors at different pricing and different categories, now a B2B service should come to that as well? Something where you have team access, a SLA and possibly pay per-seat instead of the mentorship fee? It can feel bloated really quickly and it's harder to keep things apart.
I also think a lot of our marketing is based around individuals: getting that promotion or career change, and there is lots to do there. I wonder if starting to broaden up to teams and advisorship hurts the core business in the long run?
Your points about brand recognition and SEO are super valid and the biggest thing I worry about. Then again, I can cross-sell to teams between MentorCruise and UnnamedAdvisorService and SEO for B2B is probably less important.
Fair. Marketing and core business positioning would be my biggest concerns with keeping it under one brand.
If you haven’t made up your mind yet, one more factor I’d use is the cost of switching to the other option if you change your mind later on when you have user feedback and data.
Good luck!
Interesting point :) Thanks for helping out!
Definitely don't use a subdomain or a new domain. First products that come to mind are freelancing sites like Upwork and Advisable. And they do it well.