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 that are at the very tail-end of the sales process and ready to buy – and pretty much ignores everyone else that 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, excerpted from the eBook “Inbound Marketing for Colocation Data Centers,” 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, it may be tempting to give yourself a “free pass” 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 of relevance to your ideal buyer personas is your competition for attracting those strangers to your website.

Build 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. For blogging, there are natural tipping points that kick in around 100 and 400 indexed remarkable blog posts.

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’re going to 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 a good six months to a year before they start to 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 per month to spend on Google AdWords. 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 say $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, if you took that same $5,000 per month and created and promoted a whole bunch of reasonably-evergreen, remarkable, persona-specific content, 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. One day soon these assets will even become so mainstream that you’ll see companies accounting for these assets 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 make sure that your data center consulting website scales properly? Share your favorite tip in the Comments.

And to continue learning how to attract, convert, close, and delight your ideal clients and tenants for your colocation data center, make sure that you download the free eBook on “Inbound Marketing for Colocation Data Centers”.