How Data Centers Connect the Dots Between Blogging and Lead Generation

Blogging is the bread and butter of your data center business. 

Blogging powers your search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and provides material for further content production.

“Blogging is the foundation for search engine optimization and social media done correctly.” says Jennifer Feinberg, President and Co-Founder of SP Home Run, “If you skip blogging, you are not providing helpful educational resources. You are essentially spamming social media and being self-promotional—talking about yourself really turns people off.”

 So how do data centers create remarkable content to attract prospects? Two words: Buyer Personas.

Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are fictional representations of an ideal client for a business.

Developed by surveying past, current, and ideal clients and thorough research, buyer personas help businesses get a better understanding of what drives their clients. By consulting their buyer persona research, businesses can deliver valuable content to their prospects.

Buyer persona research will uncover certain themes about your prospects such as:

• Their values
• Where they network online/offline
• Their goals
• Common interests
• Their pain points

After collecting the above information, you are ready to start blogging about these similarities in your data center prospects, but how do you connect the dots between blogging and lead generation?

Buyer’s Journey

“Lead generation offers must be specific to each buyer persona and where each buyer persona is in the buyer’s journey,” says Feinberg, “There are different offers that are appropriate for different stages of the buyer’s journey.”

Let’s look at the three stages of the buyer’s journey:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Decision

The awareness stage occurs when a prospect is just beginning to experience a problem/opportunity. The consideration stage transpires after the prospect has defined their problem/opportunity and is researching different solutions. The decision stage occurs after the prospect decides on a solution and is determining which business/vendor to select.

While blogging fulfills the attract stage’s agenda, increases your social media presence, and helps with SEO ranking, further content is needed to graduate your prospects from strangers/visitors to leads and customers.

Developing Content for Various Stages

Content-rich blogs are easy to repurpose into more advanced material.

Material within each stage of the buyer’s journey should appropriately correspond with the buyer’s commitment level. Suitable lead generation offers per stage are as follows:

• Awareness: white papers, eBook, guides, checklists, videos, and kits
• Consideration: webinars, case studies, calculators, data sheets, planning, and guides
• Decision: trials, demos, tours, needs, assessments, and quotes

Take note, the further the buyer progresses, the more complex the material becomes. Offering various resources for different stages will help attract prospects for every stage of the buyer’s journey.

As a final piece of advice from SP Home Run VP and Co-Founder Joshua Feinberg, “You’re primarily blogging to attract strangers to your website that have never heard of your data center company before and turn them into website visitors. Then, convert those visitors into leads, and use additional content and context of where they are in the buyer’s journey to close those leads into clients. Use content that’s most relevant to your clients to delight them, and turn them into promoters of your company.”

Is your data center making the most of its blogs to attract prospects at every step of the buyer’s journey? Let us know in the Comments below.

To learn more about using blogs to generate qualified leads and accelerate your sales funnel, watch our webinar recording, “Data Center Blogging Best Practices for Lead Generation and Sales Cycle Acceleration.”