A few years back, if you were a CEO or sales director that needed to fill up your data center space with new clients, you bought more email lists and spammed more people. You pushed your sales team hard to make more cold calls. You bought banner ads and trade show booths to interrupt people.
The Traditional Data Center Marketing Playbook is Broken. And You're Probably in Denial
Be honest. You basically harassed the hell out of your prospects and hoped you beat a few into submission long enough to allow you to pitch them your data center services. Not exactly the ideal way to begin a relationship.
However then along came mobile, search, social, cloud, and the consumerization of IT -- and wow did that change peoples' behaviors and disrupt the traditional marketing playbook that you'd leaned on for so long.
Today people use technology like priority inbox, caller ID, adware blockers, satellite radio, and DVRs to put an end to annoying, interruption marketing.
Instead people do their own research and seek out the information that they want, when they want, on their own terms through search engines and social media.
If your website has helpful, educational content that answers the questions of your ideal prospects, you earn a seat at the table as a trusted advisor.
But if you don't and you're still marketing like you did five years ago, well then there's a pretty good chance that your data center is now completely invisible to a large cross-section of your best potential clients.
In this post, excerpted from the eBook "Inbound Marketing for Colocation Data Centers," you'll learn some important tips for filling up your data center space.
Marketing Must Be Measurable
Over a century ago, advertising pioneer John Wanamaker was famously quoted as saying, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."
Wanamaker and marketing legends like David Ogilvy and John Caples would have absolutely loved to be living in an era where Inbound marketing activities have become extremely trackable, accountable, and actionable.
And since you’re not living in the late 19th and early 20th century like Wanamaker, your data center space sure as heck had better be able to do a lot better in terms of knowing what marketing channels, creative, and campaigns work and which don’t.
Many in the Inbound ecosystem firmly espouse, “In God we trust. All others bring data.”
Or more simply, if you can’t measure it, don’t do it.
Like many data center companies, a decade ago SP Home Run also had literally more than a dozen different Internet marketing tools that couldn’t speak to each other. Valuable data was scattered in something like 14 different databases.
This made for extremely time-consuming comma-separated values (CSV) file imports and exports with which to wrestle. Application program interfaces (APIs) were ridiculously complicated and expensive to navigate. It was like a freaking Franken-system of sorts.
Silos Kill Return on Investment (ROI)
The problem with all of this: Solutions in silos, that can’t communicate with each other, fail to deliver positive ROI.
So, what’s really needed is an end-to-end holistic solution for:
- Website traffic generation
- Website lead generation
- Website client acquisition/revenue generation
- Website ROI analysis
And that’s precisely what the Inbound methodology addresses in its four core phases:
- Attract
- Convert
- Close
- Delight
Why Marketing and Sales Don't Get Along (And That Friction Shortchanges Their Employers)
All too often in data center companies, marketing and sales are completely disconnected from each other -- lobbing insults towards and rolled eyes at each other. "They're just playing with arts and crafts projects over there." "They're lazy, overpaid prima donnas who don't know squat about our services."
Sound familiar? Perhaps a little too familiar?
If you're struggling to fill up your data center space, these silos must come down and everyone needs to be focused on the same goal: driving more revenue with the right kinds of data center clients.
What have you found to be most important when trying to fill up your data center space with new clients? Does your current game plan reflect how modern humans navigate the buyer's journey? Or is your company stuck in the past? Let us know your take in the Comments below.
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