Businesses of all sizes use cloud-based services to streamline operations, hosting, data storage, and more. The “cloud” is now part of mainstream operations, with around 90% of organizations using it in some capacity. With cloud computing, businesses can put back-end architectures like application software, databases, and servers into virtual environments. The term “cloud-based services” generally refers to this range of capabilities.
Cloud marketing refers to a business’s digital marketing efforts. It encompasses social media, emails, websites, and more. The “marketing cloud” is a suite of digital marketing tools that marketers can access as web-based services.
This guide explains the benefits and practical applications of cloud marketing.
Moving to the cloud: Marketing’s migration
Traditional marketing relied on media like TV, print publications, and radio ads. Cloud marketing is the modern equivalent, targeting today’s consumers through relevant digital media, from e-newsletters to blogs. It’s not just the media that has changed, however.
The storage of marketing data and applications has shifted from local to cloud-based servers. The tools surrounding marketing data and analytics have modernized, as well. So, not only can you create a social media campaign, but you can also use technology to monitor metrics, such as likes and shares, to assess that campaign’s success. You can even see how many visitors a campaign brings to your website and how many of those visitors convert to buyers.
With this array of web-based tools, marketers can overcome limitations (like a lack of real-time feedback) that once constrained their capabilities. They can also collect more data about their target audiences, allowing for more effective marketing because they can tailor their tactics to the audience in question.
Here are some of the other benefits of using cloud-based marketing platforms:
- Gather data without storage constraints: Maintaining servers is expensive. Even smaller businesses can expand their server capacity, boosting size, storage, and processing ability—all for less money.
- Scale up with ease: Cloud-based servers are flexible and fast. They’re also easy to scale up quickly if your business grows. Scaling up is harder to do with a physical data center (i.e., this will require ordering new hardware first).
- Execute and monitor digital marketing efforts: Digital marketing can be combined with other cloud-based tools to monitor the success of campaigns and tweak them as needed. An email campaign can be sent using newsletter tools and analyzed in terms of opens and clicks, for example.
- Integrate data from multiple digital channels: One of the biggest benefits of cloud marketing is the diverse range of platforms available. Marketers can capture, combine, and store data using cloud-based tools, integrating information from varied channels to gain a more detailed consumer profile.
- Reduce expenses: With cloud marketing tools, marketers save on the costs of traditional marketing media, such as TV airtime. Many cloud marketing channels, like organic social media, are free to use.
- Collaborate effortlessly across the globe: When integral parts of your business are in virtual environments, they can be accessed remotely. A remote professional doesn’t need their physical server hardware to gain access. You can use Upwork to find the skilled talent you need anywhere in the world.
Read on to find out how your marketing team can tap into the power of the cloud.
Cloud marketing in action
Marketers utilize cloud-based platforms to carry out day-to-day tasks and improve their work overall.
They rely mainly on two types of cloud-based applications: the actual media and the tools to work with or measure that media. For example, the media could be the website, while the tool to create it might be a cloud-based web design platform, and the tool to measure its success might be Google Analytics.
Read on for some examples of cloud marketing in action. This list covers a mix of media and tools, explaining how the two types of cloud-based applications interact.
Publish and manage marketing content across digital channels
Cloud marketing media include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, company websites, blogs, and email campaigns. With cloud-based platforms, marketers can easily and quickly publish content across a wide array of digital channels. This method allows them to reach more people, more quickly, and in a more targeted manner.
Say you run an online shop for home decor, for example. You rely on social media to reach your primary target audience, women in their 30s to 40s. You can easily adapt the messaging of a longer Instagram post to shorter points for Twitter. Cloud-based aggregate social media tools let you publish and promote across your various channels using a single platform, saving time, money, and energy.
Engage with consumers directly
One of the biggest benefits of cloud marketing compared to traditional techniques is the “real-time” element, allowing you to communicate directly with your target audience. For example, with a TV ad, there is no way to gauge the audience’s reaction. With social media, you can get feedback via comments. Take it a step further and interact with consumers to keep them engaged.
You should regularly monitor your business’s social media channels. Monitoring is usually done via the media directly, although it’s possible to use tools to streamline the process. You can use a mobile tool to sync various social media feeds in one central dashboard, allowing you to see when responses are needed, for example.
If your audience is global, you can rely on a network of worldwide virtual talent to ensure you always have someone working in every relevant time zone. Upwork gives you access to independent sales and marketing professionals from all over.
Record and analyze marketing performance metrics
You don’t have to rely on actual consumer feedback via social media comments to get information about your target audience. One of the biggest advantages that cloud marketing offers is getting loads of data about consumers across pretty much every channel.
Take your website, for example. Web analytics tools can provide metrics like where website visitors are coming from (e.g., via links from other websites or your own social media channels), how much time they spend on each page, and what links they click on your page.
Are you more interested in social media statistics? Social media analytics tools let you analyze the success of social media posts, for example, based on impressions, shares, posts, engagement, reach, and more.
Develop rich consumer profiles
What’s the point of collecting all that data about consumers? You can use it to develop consumer profiles. A consumer profile could include basics like sex, age, and education. For example, if you run a luxury blog for moms, your ideal consumer is likely mothers aged 30+ with a certain minimum income. They may have advanced degrees or occupy senior positions at work.
This data lets you determine details about your audience. You might notice that many of the visitors to your website come from a magazine for professional women, for example. This detail suggests that many of your consumers are working moms. You can then target your marketing approach accordingly.
Integrate digital marketing with e-commerce tools
E-commerce allows people to shop online easily. It’s gotten so popular that online shopping has overtaken major parts of traditional brick-and-mortar retail. If you have an e-commerce website, integrating it with digital marketing is an effective way to attract more of this audience.
The advantage of using digital media to push people to your e-commerce site is that you don’t require them to step away from their screens. The effort is minimal. From an email, social media ad, or website, they can click straight to your shopping portal.
Automate marketing efforts
Digital marketing can be made more streamlined and efficient with automation. You can use tools to schedule social media or blog posts. Automation is also beneficial if you want to schedule posts when you aren’t at your desk, for instance, over the weekend or at night.
Automation can increase visibility and sales and boost marketing return on investment (ROI). It also alleviates the burden on your marketing team, taking tedious tasks that a machine can do off its shoulders. There are many affordable automation tools available. There’s even technology to create trigger-based marketing messages. For example, if a person clicks on a certain link, they get a targeted pop-up offer relevant to their clicks.
Convert to cloud marketing by engaging key talent
Cloud marketing encompasses the many cloud-based tools and technologies used to implement, maintain, and measure digital marketing. Your organization probably already uses some elements of the cloud. Hopefully, this guide gave you some ideas for further expanding and streamlining your operations.
