Marketing of Cloud, Colo, and Managed Hosting- Six Mistakes That Could Prove Costly

It is virtually impossible to safeguard an enterprise’s digital assets or to scale the IT infrastructure unless the organization seeks support of 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 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 on a prospective IT partner.  

This has forced third party service providers adapt to the new world order that is governed by buyers and not sellers. 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.

Common consumers are experiencing fatigue due to interruptive ads and campaigns that are targeted at them with help of sale and marketing tools. These include unwelcome ads, spam mails, unsolicited messages, and many other campaigns. The sheer exhaustion and frustration of consumers have lead to development of smart tools that block such ads and messages to protect consumer’s right to digital privacy.

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

This has resulted the entire gamut of colo providers, hosting services, managed service providers and cloud vendors has in accepting the bitter truth that they are no more in the control of sales process as the target audiences have shut their doors on them. It is primarily due to the fact that 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 for exerting their opinions.

Surviving a cold environment of hosting business

The process of surviving in a hostile and indifferent environment of hosting business, one needs to identify and focus on target audience by proper identification of clients and by following vital tips to get found by relevant customers.

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

Putting all eggs in a single basket

Vey 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. These include either Pay per Click campaign or Search Engine Optimization.

There must be an extensive implementation of retention, account differentiation, sales cycle acceleration, and lead generation. The entire volume of budget should be properly distributed so that all factors are properly covered.

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 significance of valuable objectives including revenue growth, improvement of bottom-line, sales cycle acceleration, and client acquisition among others.

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 strategy of marketing. 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 of 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. The cutthroat competition in the modern hosting industry it is more significant to get spotted by your target audience earlier than your competitor.

Solos have become obsolete and the modern marketing concepts focus more on an integrated and streamlined approach of sales and marketing departments.

Failure to focus on distribution and promotion

Proper utilization of resources is a must for attaching significance to promotion and distribution of content in a more effective manner. Many organizations are therefore allocating fifty percent revenues for creation of content and the remaining fifty percent is reserved for promotion and distribution of the same.

Not getting early attention

Unless you happen to be found early by your relevant prospects, there are chances that your sales teams will be struggling engage customers. You need to be present during the entire sales process for improving chances of striking deals.