Cloud, Colo, & Managed Hosting Marketing: 6 Mistakes to Avoid

Feb 05,2024 by Manoj Yadav

Marketing of Cloud, Colo, and Managed Hosting

It is virtually impossible to safeguard an enterprise’s digital assets or to scale the IT infrastructure unless the organization seeks support from a third party vendor. These IT partners include the entire gamut of hosting service providers, cloud vendors, colocation services, or managed service providers to name just a few.

The disruptive forces in an IT environment have given rise to a number of challenges as well as new opportunities. Every enterprise under the sun is prone to get disrupted by these forces. This has transformed the process of purchasing third party services as influencers and decision makers adopt in-depth research before zeroing in on a prospective IT partner.

Buyers have forced third-party service providers to adapt to a new world order they govern. Conventional sales and marketing concepts have gone for a spin due to myriad of disruptive forces that include selective consumption, search engines, mobile and other hand held devices, and social media platforms.

Interruptive ads and campaigns, targeted at common consumers with the help of sales and marketing tools, are causing them to experience fatigue. This includes unwelcome ads, spam emails, unsolicited messages, and many other campaigns. The sheer exhaustion and frustration of consumers have led to the development of smart tools that block such ads and messages to protect consumer’s right to digital privacy.

Modern audiences have been empowered by innovative tools. such as spam blocking applications, caller identification, true caller applications, satellite radio, and DVRs, just to name a few, allowing them to thwart aggressive marketing campaigns.

This has resulted in the entire gamut of colo providers, hosting services, managed service providers and cloud vendors having in accepting the bitter truth that they are no longer in control of the sales process as the target audiences have shut their doors on them. This is primarily due to the fact that the adoption of these tools and their influence has extended from Business to Consumers to Business to Business or B2B.

Well before the decision makers or influencers are about to roll out the process of sales conversion, almost seventy percent of the decision making is already over. This leaves hardly any space for influencers to exert their opinions.

Surviving the cold environment of hosting business

The hosting business can be a harsh and uncaring environment, making survival a challenge. To succeed, businesses need to focus their efforts on attracting the right customers through thorough client identification and strategic visibility tactics.

This brings us to the importance of avoiding costly mistakes that are listed below.

Putting all eggs in a single basket

Very often it is observed that providers of colocation, managed, and cloud services follow a single point agenda of using one strategy for lead generation or customer identification. This includes either the Pay per Click campaign or Search Engine Optimization.

There will be extensive implementation of retention, account differentiation, sales cycle acceleration, and lead generation. We should properly distribute the entire volume of the budget so that it properly covers all factors.

Lack of foresight

There is hardly any point in progressing ahead unless one knows the point of destination. It is naïve to follow fancy objectives including followers and other vanity metrics. An agenda which is influenced by personal ego can lead you nowhere. This underlines the significance of valuable objectives. These objectives include revenue growth, improvement of the bottom-line, sales cycle acceleration, client acquisition, and more.

Using a uniform strategy for all clients

There is hardly any sense in bundling all your clients into a single group and then targeting them with a similar marketing strategy. The days of packing sales directors and CIOs into a single category of small business are over. Modern prospects demand individual or fragmented attention without any trace of semi-relevant approach.

This is because in a modern environment there are more targeted campaigns than you could have imagined and every single marketing campaign is an a la carte offering that takes into consideration individual needs and tastes.

Non-alignment with sales and marketing

There were instances that prompted sales teams to criticize marketing teams as mere revenue guzzlers and marketing teams terming sales guys as unduly overpaid and lazy individuals. In the face of the hosting industry’s brutal competition, seize the advantage by securing your target audience’s attention first.

While solos used to be the norm, modern marketing demands collaboration between sales and marketing.

Failure to focus on distribution and promotion

Proper utilization of resources is a must. This allows for effectively attaching significance to the promotion and distribution of content. Organizations are devoting half their resources to creating content. The other half goes towards getting that content seen by the right audience.

Not getting early attention

Early discovery by relevant prospects is crucial for your sales team to successfully engage customers. You need to be present during the entire sales process to improve your chances of striking deals.

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