There are generally two reasons why people search for information online:
To be entertained or to solve a problem
While you may personally love a good entertaining video on YouTube, checking in on your favorite sports team, or busting a move to unwind, rest assured that those looking to learn about your multi-tenant data center are coming to your website to solve their problems, not be entertained.
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And just to be clear, before website visitors know your company, they could care less about your prices, employer of the year awards, or sports team predictions.
Nail Relevancy for Your Multi-Tenant Data Center’s Website Visitors
How do you know what the ideal clients for your multi-tenant data center actually care about? What did they worry about? What their professional goals are? What could get them promoted if they master? Or what could get them fired if they screw up? Where do they hang out online and offline? And how do they evaluate data center firms?
It’s really simple: You must develop a well-researched buyer persona for each category of ideal buyer that you want to attract to your website, convert to leads, close into new clients, and delight for long-term retention and positive word of mouth.
Avoid the Google Search Dog House
When visitors who are most similar to your ideal clients land on your website, you’re looking for two emotional reactions:
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Holy crap, this stuff is awesome! These folks really know their stuff. – AND
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What else do they have to say?
The first component (“Holy crap, this stuff is awesome!”) is what buys you some time to build trust through thought leadership and education – and prevents that visitor from succumbing to insane levels of multi-tasking distraction.
Remember, if your website visitor hits the back button and leaves within a few seconds, not only will that visitor not likely ever return to your website, Google knows that your website sucks too.
Why’s that? Because so many millions of people are logged on to Google-owned servers, when someone sticks on your website for five, ten, fifteen minutes, or more, Google knows that website visitor found what they wanted.
And your website gets a gold star, so to speak, in the search relevancy world – which definitely earns your website more opportunities to get discovered on the all-so-coveted page one of search engine results pages.
The flip side? If website visitors leave within a few seconds, Google knows that, too, and will assume that your website content is providing a crappy user experience. What happens when Google thinks that your website provides a crappy user experience? You end up in the dog house of search engine results. Bye-bye, organic search traffic.
So it’s in your company’s best interest to totally nail the buyer persona, so your multi-tenant data center delights rather than disgusts and frustrates website visitors.
In order for a percentage of your hottest prospects to convert to leads, you must first convince those website visitors who are just like your ideal clients to stick around long enough to give you a chance.
Make Sure That You Show Up During the First 60% to 90% of the Buyer's Journey
Website lead generation is absolutely critical for complex data center services, where as much as 60% to 90% of the buyer’s journey occurs before potential clients are ready for a conversation with sales.
So unless you want to forgo a virtual seat at the table for the first 60% to 90% of the sales process, you’d best make sure that your website content is freaking valuable enough to generate awareness stage leads from those looking for solutions to broad-based problems.
Besides persona research, what else can you do to ensure your website isn’t frustrating visitors?
In this post, we excerpted from Lead Generation Best Practices for Colocation Data Centers; you’ll learn how to get website visitors to the right website landing pages at the right time.
Build CTAs That Get Visitors Onto the Most Helpful Landing Pages
Once we’ve built out the basics of a conversion path with remarkable content for a given buyer persona, our next goal becomes how to get more qualified visitors to our highest-performing landing pages for that persona.
The call to action (CTA) is the key piece of the puzzle and the final part of building an efficient and effective website lead generation system and conversion path.
A CTA is usually an image or anchor text link that steers website visitors to a specific landing page.
Even if you didn’t realize that it's known as a CTA, you’ve probably seen them all around the web -- at least on websites where lead generation and sales cycle acceleration are a priority.
To be considered a CTA, there needs to be an action verb.
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But many CTAs perform well even if there's no action verb...usually because they contain a hyper-relevant, attractive cover page image or title slide that makes the intangible seem more within reach.
Learn How to Use CTAs to Get More Website Visitors to Your Most Effective Landing Pages
For a simple conversion path, here are the most common tried-and-true steps for a top-of-the-sales funnel, awareness stage piece of premium thought leadership content -- such as an eBook, white paper, or planning guide:
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CTA ‒ Added to the most relevant place on your website, the CTA guides website visitors to the landing pages where lead generation offers are live.
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Landing page ‒ A landing page is a specialized page whose entire purpose is to convert website visitors into leads. It does this by offering an extremely attractive value proposition in the eyes of a particular buyer persona at a particular stage of the buyer’s journey.
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Form ‒ A landing page is basically worthless without a form. And forms have limited value without landing pages. So, these two lead generation assets are kind of like peanut butter and jelly. Although on some data center websites, you’ll find forms with varying degrees of effectiveness on other website pages -- not landing pages -- and in sidebars. When designed properly, your website visitors enter their “business card” information into landing page forms, to trade for the offers that are gated up on the other side of the landing pages (on the confirmation pages). With well-designed forms and high perceived value offers, you should be able to distinguish qualified leads from non-qualified leads immediately.
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Thank you page (also known as a confirmation page) ‒ Once a visitor converts to a lead, the lead is forwarded to the thank you page where the premium content is either delivered or expectations managed. The next logical step in the buyer’s journey is recommended.
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Thank you email (also known as a confirmation email) ‒ Essentially reinforcing the same information as the thank you page, the thank you email usually arrives a few moments later in your lead’s email inbox, providing a more permanent reminder of how to access the premium content and continue moving forward on the buyer’s journey.
Remember, don’t try to do too much with any one asset. A CTA has a very specific purpose: to steer the right website visitors to the right lead-generation landing pages, at the right moment. It's actually quite similar in purpose to an email message's subject line..
Or quantitatively (because data rules): The role of the CTA is to motivate a high click-through rate and an even higher landing page conversion rate among very specific website visitors who belong to a given buyer persona and buyer’s journey stage.
And the CTA and landing page both need to work in tandem. If one part of the conversion path drops the ball, website results will most certainly suffer.
Even if the landing page has an amazing conversion rate, what good is that lead generation asset to your multi-tenant data center if no one can find that landing page?!?
So, the CTA and landing page must team up to deliver the best marketing-qualified leads and avoid frustrating website visitors.
Understand Where to Place Calls to Action in Other Inbound Marketing Efforts
Besides image-based CTAs, CTAs also often appear in:
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Email messages
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Blog posts
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Social profile updates
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News releases
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Podcasts
When digital marketing and website lead generation are properly implemented, you’ll see CTAs everywhere on your multi-tenant data center’s website and on its related social channels.
Pinpoint What Must Be Created Before You Can Build and Test an Effective Call to Action
A CTA is usually one of the most basic things website visitors notice- basically a potential lead- on your website.
Many marketing professionals talk about CTAs first. But that way of looking at this issue, while it makes sense from the standpoint of your website visitors, is quite backward from the standpoint of those building and optimizing your website’s various conversion paths.
For building an effective conversion path, this is the order that needs to be followed:
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Start with a premium thought leadership content offer that’s designed for one category of ideal client and one stage of the buyer’s journey (essentially a sales cycle stage).
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Deliver that premium thought leadership content on a thank you page and in a confirming email.
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Design a form whose number of fields and ability to qualify leads is proportional to the perceived value of the premium content. In other words, other things being equal, you’re “entitled” to ask more questions on a form for a 20-page eBook than for a one-page downloadable checklist. The form handles the mechanics of lead generation.
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Create a landing page -- that embeds the form -- and uses persona-driven copywriting to convert website visitors into highly motivated visitors eager to fill out the form. The landing page copywriting drives home the value of completing the form.
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Build a very simple, action-oriented CTA that's linked up to the landing page ‒ At a loss for what text to place in your CTA to landing page, from landing page to form, from form submission to thank you page -- the better your results, other things being equal.
Optimize Your Calls to Action with Industry Best Practices
Throughout this guide, we’ve looked at simple but essential best practices for creating effective and efficient conversion paths to drive your multi-tenant data center’s lead generation campaigns. What are the most important best practices for CTAs?
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Choose an action verb if it is at all possible. Note how most bullet points in this guide -- and the outline of this guide as a whole -- use action verbs and parallel structure.
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Use the same long tail keyword phrase that’s on the landing page. Remember, consistency boosts conversions. Inconsistency kills conversion rates.
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Pick a contrasting color so that the CTA really stands out on web pages.
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Keep CTAs very prominently above the fold. The big exception? Add a targeted CTA following each blog post. To get the most mileage out of your CTAs following blog posts, make sure that these offers featured in the CTAs are very relevant to the blog post topics.
So there you have it: the essentials of creating content for your website that engages and motivates action, rather than frustrates and scares away.
Remember that the foundation for all of this must be built on top of well-researched ideal buyer personas.
Always, always, always use effective CTAs that are specific to a buyer persona and buyer’s journey stage to ensure that your website visitors are getting to the most relevant page on your website at the most appropriate time.
What have you found to be most important to nailing relevancy and lead generation on your data center’s website? Share your favorite tip in the Comments.
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