Data center marketing hype – what’s real and what isn’t
Like most data center and managed services providers we invest in what I call the marketing speciality of “google marketing”. We even have a guy that I like to call “googlehead” (for all the time he spends on those crazy analytics). One of the big decisions that we had to come up with was, “what key words to use and what should our one-line ads say”. The one-line (or two-line) ads are those ads that come up above or on the right of your “organic” search results. They are paid slots that are intended to get you noticed quicker than your competition. We were very careful with those little ads. Spent way too much time choosingthe right words that would get us noticed. Our biggest concern was accuracy. We sure didn’t want to lure anyone in with false advertising only to have them leave angry. So word choice is terribly important.
Or so I thought.
For sport (like many marketing guys) I Google ourselves or our key words occasionially to make sure that our “googlehead” is doing his job. So imagine my suprise when I Google our company and see the following message on the right-hand side bar:
“Only 2N provider in the region” WOW. Now that is a catchy one-line ad. In the marketing world being “THE ONLY” of anything is awesome. But “only” is a big marketing word that you have to be careful with. ONLY? Really?
So for those that don’t know, the “2N provider” is referring to a data center provider. 2N, is essentially, two complete fully-redundant systems. So in this one line ad, by claiming to be the “only”, this provider is leaving unsaid the antithesis of “only”, implying that no one else has 2N “in the region”. WOW. No one else has 2N? Not EDS, Perot, CSC, ACS, Sungard, Savvis, att? WOW. I think I would want to buy from these guys. For sure.
After all, they are the ONLY 2N provider in the region!
We had to combat this. I gathered my marketing team, we brainstormed, whiteboarded, mindmapped, group-thinked and here is what we came up with: we just changed our one-line ads to read “2N”. BUT WE LEFT OUT THE WORD “ONLY”. Mainly because, while we have 2N components in our datacenter, we are niether bold enough or arrogant enough to lie to the marketplace.
I’ll bet you don’t pay a premium to use the word ONLY either as these guys do.
And let’s face it if you are a 2N kind of buyer/decision maker, you certainly aren’t going to go from a Google Ad to Google Checkout to make a purchase of that magnitude – both in terms of importance and cost.