Does your data center have a difficult time standing out amongst others? 
Are lead generation and sales cycle acceleration something your data center struggles with?
If so, becoming a thought leader in your industry could help take your business to the next level. Thought leaders are industry experts known generating innovative ideas and sparking success!
Individuals and businesses can become thought leaders, making them recognizable industry experts and authoritative figures within their trade.
Today, becoming a thought leader is integral to a successful business model and no longer considered an afterthought or luxury.
The Importance of Trust
In the data center industry, establishing and building trust is an essential part of a business strategy because of the highly technical audience. Focusing on educational content can help businesses reposition themselves as world-class communicators that grow their data centers with world-class clients.
When evaluating your content, ask yourself:
- Is this content educational or egotistical?
- Is this content helpful or self-promotional?
- Am I being helpful or harassing?
However, before you dive into content creation, the following four prerequisites must be completed (in order) to devise specific, optimized content:
- Goals
- Buyer Personas
- Keyword Research
- Editorial Calendar
Outline Your Goals
When developing goals for your data center, consider what you are specifically trying to accomplish. Goals can focus on producing more visitors, leads, clients, revenue growth, or just about anything else, but it must be a SMART goal to be optimized.
SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
SMART goals are essential parts of a business strategy because they are easy to evaluate and help determine if your strategy needs revisions.
Create Your Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of a business's ideal client. Buyer personas are developed by researching and surveying both current and previous clients and help businesses understand what motivates their clients.
Buyer personas are vital assets to businesses because they help frame content, making it easier for marketers to deliver valuable content.
Conduct Your Keyword Research
Along with buyer personas, keyword research helps to determine which topics your content should cover.
Ideally, your keywords should be highly-specific long-tail keywords. For search engine optimization (SEO), try to find a good balance between the number of monthly searches and the difficulty rating or score (1-100). The more specific your keyword is, the higher chance you have of ranking but, the lower your chance is of being searched.
Create Your Editorial Calendar
Creating an editorial calendar to schedule your content will help create a social media presence.
Calendars should contain at least three months’ worth of content/ blog topics, and each blog title should be tied back to a buyer persona. Keeping a consistent social publishing schedule will help with SEO ranking and building trust amongst prospects.
Blogging to Build Trust
“Keeping a regularly published blog for your data center that is helpful and not self-promotional is the foundation for your strategy and will power your SEO and social media plans,” says Joshua Feinberg, VP and Co-Founder of SP Home Run, “In turn, your SEO and social media plans will drive your success as a thought leader.”
Whether you are blogging, writing eBooks, creating SlideShares, or scheduling webinars, be sure to keep your content educational—especially your blogs—to maintain your thought leader status.
As Feinberg cautions, “If you embark on social media publishing or SEO without having a content strategy that’s centered around your blog, it almost always leads to self-serving spam content that no one wants to read.”
What does your data center do to differentiate from competitors? Let us know in the Comments section below.
To learn more about standing out as a thought leader in the data industry and building trust among key stakeholders, tune in to our webinar “Data Center Blogging Best Practices for Lead Generation and Sales Cycle Acceleration”
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