How a Cloud Provider Can Generate High Quality Leads for Its Business

Cloud providers are very different from other technology providers with strong roots in the on-premise equipment era. How so, you ask? Their business models tend to be more scalable, less dependent on geography, and more likely to have aggressive growth plans.

In this post, we’ll look at six key areas cloud providers need to be mindful of to generate high-quality leads for their businesses consistently.

1. Define Personas – Even Fortune 1000 companies no longer try to market to “everyone”. Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, and Expedia have been game-changers in that people now expect extreme personalization and segmentation. One size no longer fits all. Make sure you really hone in on your two or three ideal types of buyers and understand their behaviors, pain points, and goals.

2. Research Keywords – As you survey and interview your ideal buyers to develop personas, ask what they search for online. Their queries and questions will be the starting point for your keyword research. Make sure to take into account monthly search volume, the degree of difficulty for your cloud provider website to rank on page one for that keyword, and most of all, how it fits in with your buyer personas.

3. Build Premium Content Lead Generation Offers – To generate high-quality leads from your website, you need extremely compelling offers for premium content, such as related eBooks, white papers, planning guides, and templates. What topics should you develop into premium content lead gen offers? Don’t guess. Let your ideal buyer personas shape priorities. And once premium content assets are built, you need landing pages, thank you pages, forms, and a database to capture and manage all these great leads.

4. Create Calls to Action (CTAs) for Offers-- Now that you have a few offers developed, you need to create some calls to action for these offers that you sprinkle throughout the website for your cloud provider business.

5. Write Blog Posts – Once you understand your ideal buyers' behaviors, pain points, and goals and have asked what they search for online, you’re in a great position to know exactly what to blog about. But no matter how remarkable those blog posts are, the posts in and of themselves won’t generate leads. The missing piece of the lead generation puzzle? CTAs, landing pages, and forms. Make sure you select a highly relevant CTA and lead generation offer for the blog post. For example, if a blog post is on some aspect of cloud computing and privacy, and you have an eBook that explores that topic in more detail, tell readers at the end of the blog post to download your related eBook (after, of course, they’ve provided their contact information in return for your premium content asset).

6. Measure What’s Working and What’s Not – No one has a crystal ball. It’s impossible to predict exactly what’s going to work. So it’s crucial to carefully measure what’s working and what’s not, so you can double down on the winners and fire the losers. Watch your metrics and iterate over time to position your cloud provider business for long-term sustainable, high-quality lead generation.

In this post, you’ve been introduced to six crucial areas to pay attention to when planning how to generate high-quality leads.

Which lead generation channels have you found the most successful in your cloud provider business? Let us know in the Comments section below.