There are many different kinds of data center consultants.
In this post, you’ll learn why most websites for data center consultants fail to achieve their goals and what you can do about it.
Your salesy, self-serving, “me-me-me” promotional marketing content is no longer effective.
Just like all Internet users, evaluators and decision-makers for data center consulting have become avid fans of the hyper-personalized experiences powered by leaders like Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, SiriusXM, and TiVo.
These platforms have trained your best prospects to tune out quasi-relevant content – because they know hyper-relevant content is just a mouse-click away. How many seconds will you spend trying to find information on a website that wastes your time?
Do you know anyone buying a $15 music CD today just for the one decent song on the album? $0.99 on an iTunes account solves that problem.
Who wants to spend 60 minutes watching a 39-minute TV sitcom anymore when a DVR and the fast-forward button save nearly 21 minutes – potentially several times a week?
People are paying each month to literally block annoying, interruptive – and in some cases, grossly inappropriate -- commercials on the radios in their cars.
And spam filters now mistakenly lump the “good guys” in with the “bad guys.” Guilty until proven innocent. And let’s not forget “Priority Inbox” in Gmail.
Is your content really relevant enough to battle all of these forces that the digital competitive landscape has stacked against you?
Enterprise IT decision-makers have gotten fed up with being interrupted by nonsense that they don’t care about. And they’ve invested some serious time and resources in tools that tune you out.
So given all of this, how can you attract the right strangers to your data center consulting website?
In a world where 57% to 70% of the buyer’s journey is now over before prospects for data center consulting services are ready to speak with you, the stakes are too high for you to bury your head in the sand. You can’t afford to guess what your ideal clients want.
Invest time to create personas – the foundation for remarkable content creation.
Buyer personas are archetypes, basically semi-fictional representations, or your ideal clients based on primary- and secondary research and a little bit of educated speculation.
When data center consultants skip developing buyer personas, most content becomes way too self-serving and salesy. The end result? No one reads the content, and there’s no opportunity to convert website visitors into qualified leads.
If you spend time on blog post writing, optimizing for search engines, posting to social media, or email marketing and you have no goals and no remarkable content, it doesn’t go over well.
Because you likely don’t have bottomless resources, focus your efforts on your most important and your most profitable ideal buyer personas. For most data center consultants, two to four buyer personas are a good place to start. Plus, be sure to account for the three stages of your buyer’s journey:
For example, you end up with three buyer personas with a grid that resembles a tic tac toe board – nine boxes that need contextually relevant content.
The data center consultants’ websites that reach their goals tend to have relevant, helpful content for each ideal buyer persona and contextually relevant, helpful content for each part of the buyer’s journey.
Ten years ago, personalized content was a luxury that only very well-capitalized “dot-coms” could afford to have. Today even relatively small data center consultants can afford a content personalization engine for their website.
As platforms like Amazon, iTunes, and Netflix have gone mainstream, even relatively unsophisticated Internet users see those platforms as the new standard for highly-relevant content.
But those in the data center industry must attract the attention of many web-savvier mid-market and enterprise IT evaluators and decision makers.
That’s why selective consumption – which allows you to cherry-pick exactly the content where you want it when you want it, and how you want it – makes a one-sized-fits-all content strategy nearly worthless when it comes to attracting strangers to your website and converting those strangers into qualified leads and sales opportunities.
Let’s face it. Your prospects have very little attention span. Some may even skim your content while waiting a few moments for a router to power cycle.
If your remarkable content doesn’t jump off the screen within seconds as hyper-relevant, they will click the back button and be gone from your website forever, faster than you can press Ctrl+Alt+Del.
You’re essentially looking for the right ideal buyers to land on your website and spend several minutes consuming a bunch of your super-helpful content. The end result we’re after is this two-pronged emotional reaction:
And that is the moment when the person who was a complete stranger before -- never having heard of your data center consulting company until a few minutes ago -- is now in the right frame of mind to notice the call to action (CTA) button or banner in your sidebar, or below your blog post, offering a highly-relevant eBook, white paper, special report, or downloadable guide going into the topic in much greater detail.
You’ve begun to educate this person and build up some trust equity. Enough trust that when that visitor arrives at a well-designed landing page for a highly-relevant premium content offer, that person will raise their hand up high, reveal their “business card” information on your landing page form, and grant you permission to begin building a relationship and guiding him or her through their buyer’s journey.
Done right, that’s how Inbound marketing attracts strangers from search and social, transforms them into website visitors, and then takes highly-impressed website visitors and converts them into qualified leads for your data center consulting services.
What content on your data center consultant website has been most successful in attracting the right website visitors and converting those visitors into highly qualified leads? What content has failed to achieve your goals? Let us know your take below.