Many that create and manage colocation hosting websites focus a lot on design and branding, and not very much on achieving goals.
Evaluate if Design and Branding Are Overshadowing Your Goals
And this – ignoring goals at the expense of design and branding -- is a terrific approach, as long as you’re still operating in 2005, in an era where your sales team still dominated the buyer’s journey.
Today it’s quite different. Typically 60% to 90% of the decision-making process for colocation hosting and data center-related services happens before a qualified prospect is ready for a conversation with someone from your sales team. This represents a drastic shift in power towards the buyer, away from the seller, and one in which many firms are frankly not getting found early enough.
We talked about this change at length in our Inbound Revenue Acceleration Webinar for Colocation Data Centers.
So what kinds of goals need to be factored into your website and overall digital strategy?
Identify Which Goals That You’re Trying to Achieve on Your Colocation Hosting Website
Goals must be SMART goals – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
A goal has to be specific like you want a certain amount of qualified leads each month. Or a certain amount of sales opportunities each quarter. Or a certain amount of clients generated within the next 12 months, by a certain date.
- The goal has got to be specific (“S”).
- It’s got to be something that you’re able to measure (“M”).
- It needs to be attainable (“A”) based on your past history.
- It needs to be relevant (“R”) to the overall mission that your marketing and sales team combined, your revenue team combined, is going after.
- And it must be time-bound (“T”). Everyone can make wild predictions about what they want to do in the future. But unless you assign a deadline to it, how are you going to know if you’re actually making progress or if you ever reach that goal?
If you talk to someone that’s ever gone on a weight loss program, for example, he or she may say, “I want to lose 20 pounds.” That’s awesome. By when?
And the “by when” is what makes all the difference because anyone can always say, “I want to run a marathon.”
OK cool. Are we talking about trying to run a marathon in six months or in six years? Because that can make an enormous difference with regards to how aggressive that you train.
Prioritize These 3 Simple Rules
- Set goals.
- Develop buyer personas.
- Make your website a helpful, educational resource for the ideal clients that you want to attract.
If your website home page is doing things like advertising the price of your services, or advertising discounts or something like that, almost like an e-commerce website, there may be something majorly wrong with your strategy.
How does your colocation hosting website perform? What kinds of goals are you working towards? Let us know your progress in the Comments below.
If you're in the data center, mission critical or cloud services industries, or you sell to the data center industry, don't miss our weekly update newsletter -- Data Center Sales & Marketing Institute (DCSMI) Update Newsletter. Get notified about new reports, events, podcasts, and blog posts.
