Why Marketing Cloud Rules the Digital Business World

Remember the times of your childhood, when you lay on the grass on a hot day and watched the fluffy white clouds drifting in the sky? You can still daydream while gazing at the sky today but a new kind of cloud has become an integral part of the business landscape. Let’s take a look at this revolutionary development in business technology and its applications for marketers.

Keep your business in the clouds, not your head

Contrary to a child’s imagination, clouds have a lot in common with technology. The tech version of a cloud is a type of service that involves storing data on the server of a service provider, which gives customers constant access to their content. In other words, a cloud is a virtual portable disk that allows you to view all online information collected on a given platform.

This technology can greatly facilitate management and marketing strategies. The idea is to provide safer data storage, more efficient information transfer and easier handling. An additional advantage is a lack of hardware limitations.

Cloud and marketing go together like peanut butter and jelly

The concept of cloud marketing is the result of the dynamic development of the Internet and the changes that have occurred in society. We are more mobile in terms of consuming data and more willing to engage in a dialogue with brands.

Marketing is almost as old as commerce itself. However, in the 21st century, while the client rules the market, marketers must do everything to stand out from the information noise and reach the intended recipients. The average consumer faces nearly 5,000 advertising messages a day. This can lead to the phenomenon of banner blindness and increase the popularity of Adblock plugins. Efficient communication with the consumer through every possible channel is not a fad, but a necessity and a response to customer needs.

Marketing cloud services allow you to:

Get to know consumers → Get them involved → Personalize their experiences

All these activities are aimed at a specific goal: to make the best impression on customers, so that they are more likely to come back and recommend your brand.

What’s in the marketing cloud?

Cloud marketing is primarily an integrated set of marketing functions delivered to clients through the cloud. However, the level of integration and complexity of the offer vary considerably depending on the platform provider. Among various solutions in the field of marketing cloud, we can distinguish:

CRM (Customer Relationship Management). An intelligent system which allows you to get to know the expectations of customers, to meet these expectations by offering the right product and taking care of post-purchase customer satisfaction. All of this happens through the use of machine learning, marketing automation and data analytics. CRM systems gather and analyze data contained in the client’s behavioral profile, monitor all purchases, returns and complaint transactions. Check out a few interesting examples of using the CRM system.

Creating multichannel campaigns, using integrated tools to manage the full customer journey:

• web and mobile push
• SMS and MMS
• email
• social media
• beacons
• coupons, stamp cards, promotions

The integration of data from online and offline sources allows the assessment of the effectiveness of all communication, answering the question of the impact of online advertising on sales in physical stores. Thanks to this, you can objectively determine what type of campaign is the most profitable, identify better ways to reach your audience, as well as discover opportunities for promotion that you have not previously considered.

Marketing automation is a system that allows you to respond to the occurrence of a specific event without having to manually perform the action. You can decide which triggers, conditions and actions will be crucial for a given process. For example, when a user has a birthday, the platform automatically sends a message of greetings and a discount on particular products or services as a gift.

Predictive analysis allows you to anticipate future consumer needs and behaviors, in order to prepare personalized communication in advance. Artificial intelligence and advanced machine learning algorithms allow you to observe predictions in real time.

Among the available services, you can also distinguish various apps (like live chat), content builders, task collaboration tools and much more.

Why staying in the cloud is better than having two feet on the ground

Marketing cloud implementation gives you an opportunity to reduce marketing costs. The cloud is a service, not hardware. You get a ready platform that solves many problems. You don’t have to worry about working with different companies and controlling each marketing process individually, because all features are gathered in one place.

Features included in the marketing cloud allow you to improve the process of generating and classifying leads, which significantly increases the efficiency of work, and consequently has a positive effect on profits and increases the pool of customers interested in your brand.

Your campaigns can be more professional and carried out in a more conscious and responsible way. First of all, you can track all customer touchpoints. This will allow you to analyze individual preferences and purchasing decisions, then to properly implement automation and personalize the message. You can monitor the effectiveness of each campaign on an ongoing basis.

The cloud helps out marketers in predicting whether a given solution will meet the company’s expectations. The appropriate configuration of the marketing cloud eliminates the risk of situations in which an effective campaign will be withdrawn due to the inability to predict its results.

Will you be on cloud nine using cloud technology in marketing?

Cloud solutions are a big advance in the evolution of marketing technology, both in terms of brand, product and service development, and in terms of awareness of the potential of data-driven marketing. An integrated platform increases your competitiveness and visibility, in every aspect of your business. The result is faster sales and improved marketing efficiency for rapid growth.

Inga Leder, Communication & Marketing Specialist

Originally published at Synerise: Why Marketing Cloud Rules the Digital Business World on June 18, 2018.