It’s been a while since cloud adoption has gone mainstream with organizations across industries recognizing its strategic value. Almost every other business function is witnessing cloud technology-driven transformation, and marketing is certainly one of those. Cloud has the potential to massively change the way organizations interact with their target audience. Marketers are leveraging cloud to interact with their customers in real-time, measure campaign results, create interest across the buyer journey, track multiple digital channels simultaneously, create targeted CTAs (call-to-action) and improve their efforts with data analytics. To execute innovative marketing plans, marketers are increasingly moving to customized cloud solutions.

A new era: Cloud-based digital marketing

From automation tools to analytics software, there are multiple cloud marketing applications that can help marketers build effective campaigns and track them more efficiently. Leveraging such tools, marketers can engage their prospects in a more unique and personalized manner. Here are few such cloud-enabled marketing tools that can be utilized for driving data-driven marketing at your organization:

• Marketing automation – Marketers can leverage automation tools for publishing and promoting content to engage their customers across various channels
• Content management – These tools leverage cloud services for creating as well as managing content that can be deployed across multiple channels to attract customers
• Social media – Social listening has become a really important tool for marketers, and hence, social media tools can be leveraged to listen to and engage customers with compelling conversations and personalized responses
• Analytics – Data analytics plays an important role in segregating customers basis their online behavior, and also to evaluate marketing campaigns based on consumers’ buying journeys

Integrating cloud computing with your digital marketing strategy helps in implementing data-driven marketing campaigns and brings umpteen benefits for an enterprise.

Accessing customer data

Customer data is an important weapon for marketers to know their target audience. But, collating such data through old methods, such as surveys, makes it a little difficult to be stored. Leveraging cloud services can help ease the storage and management of such information and allow marketers to access the customer information from anywhere and anytime, thus making remote work easier.

Analytical tools for better insights

Cloud-based analytics can help to generate more insights about the customers for creating personalized content. These tools can be further leveraged to test various marketing channels and find out the marketing strategies that work best. Cloud-based CRM tools make it easy for marketers to understand their customers’ needs more accurately.

Reduction in expenses

Cloud computing in marketing is quite cost effective when it comes to storing and accessing data unlike traditional methods. It further helps to automate various marketing processes using cloud-based services. Hence, marketers relying on cloud services for implementing their strategies will automatically experience cost savings.

Managing sales cycle

An organization can have a sales cycle ranging from a few days to several months depending on the type of industry they operate in. Traditionally, such information used to be tracked via tools like MS Excel, etc. Now, cloud-based tools like Office 365, Zoho and Salesforce have totally changed the picture, making it quite easy to maintain the long sales cycles and allowing marketers to spend more time on developing innovative strategies.

Ensures improved collaboration and better productivity

From PR marketing to online advertising, cloud computing allows you to have a seamless execution of all your marketing needs. It provides a reliable platform/ infrastructure to connect with your target audience in a smooth and real-time manner. Leveraging cloud also helps marketers to collaborate anytime from anywhere, enabling them to save time and drive efficiency in the entire marketing workflow leading to improved collaboration.

Cloud marketing platforms: Enabling data-driven marketing

Cloud marketing platforms are powerful tools that help enterprises provide a complete and unified view of their prospective customers and optimize their marketing strategies accordingly. They also allow enterprises to seamlessly remain connected with the customers via social handles, emails, etc., thereby improving the overall customer engagement. Marketing cloud offers multiple solutions in a single suite to track customer journey end to end, run marketing campaigns and automate various marketing processes.

These cloud-based digital platforms make it quite easy for organizations to segment their customers and target them in a more personalized manner. They allow you to track relevant customers, basis their behavior and buying journey. These platforms also help you to easily manage all marketing assets and their integration with various social media platforms, including publishing.

There’s intense competition in the market among the leading cloud marketing platform providers. Players like Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle and IBM are leading the race while new-age players like AgileOne, Hubspot, Marketo, SailThru and Experian are also not far behind.

Right time to blend cloud computing with your marketing strategies

Cloud has certainly changed various business functions, and embracing it for redefining marketing strategies is inevitable for all leading marketers. With cloud-based digital marketing strategy, enterprises can build a powerful presence online by publishing engaging marketing content in lesser time and engaging more cohesively with their target audience. These cloud-enabled tools ensure the right assessment of marketing plans, optimizing them as per customer’s behavior and pulling up the right strategies at the right time. All said and done, organizations can’t afford to miss this cloud-enabled marketing journey. They need to put cloud at the core of their marketing strategies to make them data-driven and more personalized.