Colocation Providers: Helping vs. Harassing

Many colocation providers attempt to win new business by commanding attention from prospects. These approaches include:

• Telemarketing cold calls
• Direct-mail campaigns
• Unsolicited emails and text messages
• Pop up ads

Unfortunately, such tactics frequently have the opposite effect. Prospects today resist efforts that demand their attention and money. They purchase ad blockers, send unwanted emails directly to their junk folder, and refuse to answer their phones when they do not recognize the incoming number.

In fact, resistance to unsolicited marketing has resulted in regulatory efforts, such as the establishment of the National Do Not Call Registry.

Helping, Not Harassing

To avoid being intrusive, colocation providers must take their client's preferences, needs, and goals into account. The key is to get a potential client’s attention without making them feel assaulted by marketing messages, and the best way accomplish this is to understand how they seek out goods and services.

How to Help: Be Visible

Prospects today are not a passive audience. Techniques such as commercials, advertisements, and direct mail can prove to be ineffective.

Prospective clients decide when they are interested in learning more about a product or service and then proceed to search online, making them a more proactive group than earlier generations.

• Search engines: Buyers evaluate their prospects ahead of time by doing online research. Colocation providers must invest in good SEO practices to ensure they appear prominently on the search engine results pages when the customer is looking for them.
• Social media: Peer reviews carry an enormous amount of weight. Buyers use Facebook, Twitters, and other social media outlets to see what other clients say about a data center, as well as check out how well the center engages with them.
• Mobile devices: Searches carried out on mobile devices are now exceeding those performed on traditional desktop computers. To get their information in front of mobile users, colo providers must ensure their websites are mobile-friendly.

How to Help: Provide Expert Advice

The colo provider must present itself as a company with expert staff who can solve problems and help clients get the most value out of their hosting package. From a marketing perspective, this means establishing the following:

• Internal content champion: Internal content champions have the position and influence to put together a cross-departmental team to disseminate marketing content through a variety of outlets.
• Inbound strategy: Inbound marketing consists of content creation and publishing that brings clients to the colo provider instead of vice-versa. Leads cultivated in this manner have a much greater chance of becoming qualified and, later, sales-ready.
• Editorial process: Putting content through an editorial process ensures both accuracy and relevance to its intended audience.

If a business releases content that is not compelling and helpful to prospective clients, it does nothing for their place on the market. In fact, producing content for content’s sake is a guaranteed way to damage a business’s credibility.

Instead of bombarding prospects with irrelevant content, focus on creating helpful and easy to find content for when they need it. A carefully crafted information sheet, webinar, or blog post can keep winning new colocation business long after it goes live.

What has your colocation business done to help prospects and win new business? Sound off in the Comments below.