Why Buyer Personas are Critical for Data Center Revenue Growth

During a recent webinar, Co-Founder of SP Home Run, Joshua Feinberg, discussed “Webinar Best Practices for Data Centers and Cloud Service Providers.”

The webinar informed data center C-level executives and sales directors how to use webinars to educate their buyer personas and build trust at scale.

One of the main highlights of the webinar was why top-of-funnel programs fail to grow revenue. Before answering, we must first understand what top-of-funnel means. Top-of-funnel signifies the upper part of the marketing funnel, and it contains primarily inbound efforts such as email, social media, blog posts, SEO, white papers, and paid advertising.

One of the primary reasons these top-of-funnel programs struggle to grow revenue is that they have missed one highly critical aspect—creating a buyer persona.

Joshua Feinberg says the buyer persona is a “critical prerequisite” to lead generation and revenue growth. Joshua defines a buyer persona as a “semi-fictional representation of an ideal client based on research and educated speculation.”

By understanding your buyer personas, you will improve your overall business and marketing strategy because you will provide content to the appropriate audience. Additionally, Joshua says you should develop buyer personas “for each of your ideal prospects, job candidates, and channel partners.” It would not make sense to have a single buyer persona when each client is different, and their motivations and behaviors differ from one another.

Attracting Net New Strangers to Drive Data Center Revenue Growth

When sales and marketing departments decide to develop a marketing strategy—whether it relates to digital or traditional marketing efforts—they tend to leave integral marketing processes out of their strategy, which can hinder their future success.

The use of blogging, social media, and keywords is key to becoming successful in attracting new strangers. Yes, all three of these marketing practices are highly important, but as Joshua Feinberg states, “this alone -- even when done superbly well (it rarely is) -- is not enough to close new clients and generate revenue.”

We need to understand the buyer personas and know who they are. From there, you can develop content—like webinars or blog posts— that relate to the interests of those particular individuals.

Attracting net new strangers to your site is great, but how do you know if they are qualified leads? Moreover, how will you convert net new visitors into leads?

Converting Net New Visitors into Leads

Blogging and social media are great tools to grasp the attention of your buyer personas; however, to attract qualified leads, you must build a marketing strategy that includes calls-to-action (CTA’s), forms, landing pages, and confirmation pages.

The primary goal is to get prospects to create a relationship with your business. You cannot build relationships with unknown prospects unless you add CTA’s, forms, landing pages, and confirmation pages. These types of tools invite potential prospects to learn more about the content you are providing, and they give you the opportunity to gather leads.

The way to accomplish this is to make content available to them through CTA’s. Forms allow you to gather all the necessary information about your prospect, such as their name, email, and phone number, through a form field that appears on the landing page. The form allows you to contact them in the future with email, feedback, or follow-ups. You can provide various content to target the different stages of the buyer's journey; however, make sure it is relevant to your buyer persona.

The Burning Question

The major question is: How do we turn these leads into new clients and revenue?

The answer revolves around the concept of gaining trusted advisor status. Potential prospects want to work with someone whom they trust and who is highly knowledgeable within the data center industry; so that they can increase their data center revenue.

Do you struggle with turning your leads into new clients and revenue? Let us know in the comments below.