Why Data Center Consulting Websites Often Can't Scale

When most people launch websites, they do so for a variety of reasons. Usually high on the list of priorities is revenue generation. Yet for most data center consulting websites, reaching a revenue goal remains elusive – even if it is a SMART goal (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound).

Why?

In most cases, the problem is three-fold:

1. Most of the website focuses on products and services rather than providing helpful, educational resources that potential clients would actually want to read.
2. The website content only appeals to prospects at the very tail-end of the sales process and is ready to buy – and pretty much ignores everyone else who isn’t ready today.
3. The scale was a complete afterthought, with the all-too-common rookie rant of “Hey, I’ve been blogging for like three days already. Where the heck are all the potential clients?” If only it were still 1995, and the list of websites founded before 1995 could fit into a single Wikipedia article. In case you’re not aware, it’s extremely competitive today where, for example, the search phrase data center on Google returns 432 million results. Yikes, that’s a lot of competition to make the “top 10” results on the first page!

In this post, you’ll learn why most data center consulting websites fail to scale – and more importantly, what you can do about it, so your website doesn’t end up a source of never-ending frustration.

Design Systems for High-Volume Content Creation

Many data center executives, including sales and marketing directors, who dabble in digital or Inbound marketing may occasionally write a blog post, consult a keyword research tool every once in a while, and post on social media a few times a year -- which would be OK, if it were 2005. But that’s not the competitive reality of today!

Note: Since so many data center companies are asleep at the wheel with Inbound marketing, giving yourself a “free pass” may be tempting because your digital marketing isn’t as bad as the “other guys.” However, when it comes to getting found on search, your competition for getting found at the top of page one isn’t just limited to other data center service providers. Pretty much any company, association, trade publication, conference organization, channel program, MSP, or personal blogger that creates remarkable content on any topic relevant to your ideal buyer personas is your competition for attracting those strangers to your website.

Build Your Data Center Consulting Website for Scale

Everything that you do with Inbound marketing must be built to scale.

Every year, HubSpot works with a professor or graduate student from the MIT Sloan School of Management to objectively analyze the data that drives Inbound marketing results.

Each year, there are similar conclusions. Natural tipping points kick in around 100 and 400 indexed remarkable blog posts for blogging.

In other words, if you only blog once a week, you may still be on the right track to reach your goals -- but it just might take you 100 to 400 weeks or two to eight years. Yikes!

Landing pages have tipping points too. The first kicks in at around 10 to 15 landing pages. And then there’s another tipping point at around 40 landing pages.

So, if your data center consulting website is like most and there’s a Contact Us page and perhaps only one or two white papers, you will be severely underperforming.

At the minimum, there must be at least one landing page and offer for each buyer persona and each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Don’t Over-Invest in Today at the Expense of Next Quarter and Next Year

Inbound marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.

Unless your Inbound infrastructure is already very well built out, most Inbound marketing plans take six months to a year before they show significant results.

That said, there’s a very long-term payback with a very different mindset shift than paid search engine marketing programs such as Google AdWords.

Let’s say you have a modest $5,000 monthly to spend on Google Ads. While you’ll start getting traffic within hours of launching, once your credit card is maxed out or a Fortune 500 competitor shows up, and drives bid prices up from $5 a click to $50 a click, what’s your backup plan?

(And if you don’t see Amazon, Google, and Microsoft coming up in your rearview mirror very aggressively with various cloud services, you’re completely underestimating what it takes to win the battle for digital marketing relevance in your niche.)

Now, suppose you took that same $5,000 per month and created and promoted a whole bunch of reasonably evergreen, remarkable, persona-specific content. In that case, it’s very likely that much of that content will still be attracting visitors and generating leads, not just this month or this year, but for several years from now.

So, Inbound marketing done right is really asset building -- not an expense. These assets will soon become so mainstream that companies will be accounting for them on their balance sheets. (Generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) will need to catch up first)

Recognize that You Cannot Win the Race Across the Pool By Just Putting Your Pinky Toe In the Water

Inbound marketing is a cultural change and requires a full-company long-term commitment.

Most data center companies are losing out on huge opportunities to generate leads and advance those leads into sales opportunities and clients due to massive gaps in their content creation and content distribution programs.

With more than 60% of the buyer’s journey now taking place before your sales team is even aware of opportunities, you can’t afford to lose the content game. Period.

What have you done to ensure your data center consulting website scales properly? Share your favorite tip in the Comments.