The colocation market is steadily changing as entities such as colocation, enterprise hosting, private cloud, and managed services begin to merge and intertwine.
Where each enterprise once held different markets, clients, business models, and offerings, the line continues to blur as each competitor strives to hold their stake in the market.
This competitive atmosphere makes it essential for colocation providers to stay on task, identify the right clients and partners, and maintain their pricing power.
Learn strategies for analyzing your competition, identifying market opportunities, and positioning your colocation company for profitable growth.
Analyze Your Colocation Competitors
Colocation providers aiming to make an impact in their market must first analyze their competitors before they can determine their own competitive advantage.
Include relevant businesses of all sizes and categories in your competitive research:
- Direct competitors
- Indirect competitors
- Non-business model competitors
When conducting competitive research, consider how your prospect’s company size affects their needs/wants and how your competitor’s company’s size impacts your prospect. A company’s size can be measured by its revenue, number of employees, or number of clients. However, the measurement you select must remain the same for each entry.
There are two types of colo providers that compete with each other:
- Large regional/emerging (inter)national providers
- Local providers
Factor both when conducting your competitive research.
There’s also a third category—the big national colo providers—Digital Realty, Equinix, QTS, and TierPoint, for example. However, the competitive analysis is a little more complicated because it is not a true reciprocal apples-to-apples comparison.
Monitoring competitor recruiting efforts can help your colocation business identify internal employment gaps. Monitor LinkedIn streams and career pages, and focus not only on job titles but also on job descriptions, as job titles may vary from business to business.
Local colocation providers often make the mistake of hastily partnering with local MSPs. This partnership may pose a major conflict of interest, as the two businesses often target the same/similar clients and often do not share the same goals/values (account control, marketing goals, and sales budgets, for example).
Take Stock of Your Content Assets
The way data center stakeholders and decision-makers purchase colocation has drastically changed over the years.
Where potential clients once relied on salespeople to deliver the vital information needed to make purchase decisions, they now take an active role in their buying process, seeking the information needed on their own.
It is important for businesses to take inventory of all their content assets to ensure they are targeting prospects during various stages of their buying journey.
Sales leaders should verify that they have content available to generate traffic, generate leads, nurture opportunities, and close new clients.
At the bare minimum, colo providers should optimize their websites, blogging, actively managing their content, publishing on social regularly, and investing in paid/sponsored placements.
Colocation providers ready to take their business to the next level should use buyer personas, personalized and educational content, full-funnel revenue growth strategies and tools, SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound), and continuous data-driven improvement to support their revenue goals.
The Next Step for Colocation Providers
So, what exactly are buyer personas, full-funnel revenue growth strategies and tools, and SMART goals? How do colo providers apply data-driven improvement to support their revenue goals?
Are you analyzing your competitive pricing and taking stock of your content assets? Are you staying ahead of other colo providers? Let us know in the comments below.
Learn more about Colocation Data Center Providers and Go-to-Market Strategy (GTM) for Growth.
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