Do Colocation Providers Need to Worry About Inbound Marketing?

As cloud and managed services grow in popularity, marketing also becomes an important part of generating new business. Colocation providers haven’t always been able to get this part right, so executives end up worrying about tactics like inbound marketing.

More than other marketing strategies, inbound marketing, and lead generation makes the most sense in this context. This is because you can be there (with your online presence) at the exact moment when someone is searching for a solution that you’re able to provide.

This is a better tactic than annoying and harassing potential clients with outbound marketing. Further, colocation is a highly technical niche when compared to other sectors in the IT industry. As a result, traditional sales and marketing processes need to be adapted to reflect this as well.  

Data center operators are worried about developing rich content that will drive traffic to their website, but this alone won’t be enough. So how can they go about doing this?

Build Brand Awareness with an Online Presence

Keyword rich content will help colocation providers get discovered when conducting a search, but this is just the first stage in inbound marketing. Further, the content must be developed to answer the questions that a potential customer might have.

You must develop buyer personas to understand what each customer might be looking for when choosing a data center; this could be information about modular data centers, cloud services, and managed services.

Further, they will also look at variables like security, stability, expandability, connectivity, capacity, green operations, and customer service. This means that data centers have a lot of information that they can work with when developing new content.

So, building brand awareness can help attract potential customers, but you need to follow through by engaging them and converting them. Further, you will also need to keep them happy for them to stay with you.

Colocation Centers Need to Reimagine their Marketing Strategies

Colocation providers can no longer sit back and use the same marketing tactics they have used for years as the colocation space is changing rapidly. If they aren’t worried about the changing landscape now, they will regret it later.

Data centers need to be ready to get disrupted, so it’s important to develop a full marketing funnel with a complete inbound strategy that’s persona-centric. Since it’s a small market when compared to other technology niches, word of mouth can also play a huge role in attracting new business. So as a rule, operators need to always strive to keep current customers happy.

The Bottom Line

With the right inbound marketing strategy, data centers can attract potential clients, engage them, and make them curious, close the deal, and then hold on to them.

Inbound marketing doesn’t stop with attracting customers; it’s a process that will continue throughout the life cycle of colocation businesses.

How have your inbound marketing strategies helped to grow your business? Let us know your thoughts in the Comments box below.

To learn more about how colocation providers can generate leads through inbound marketing, be sure to download your copy of Lead Generation Best Practices for Colocation Data Centers.