This guide outlines how marketing cloud systems have made marketing easier even for small businesses.
Marketing can be difficult to get right. There are many things to take into consideration, including your products and services, your company ethos, your target market, and your budget. Put all of this together, and it might be that you feel your marketing strategy is somewhat limited.
However, that’s because you haven’t considered the new technology that is around you, particularly for marketing cloud technology. Using the cloud to help with your marketing can help you to achieve a lot more, even with a meager budget or a small target market.
Marketing cloud technology benefits
What is it that the marketing cloud features and abilities can do, and how have they changed the face of marketing?
Location Doesn’t Matter
When you use cloud-based technology to assist with your marketing campaign, one of the biggest benefits you’ll find is that location does not matter. The cloud means that you don’t have to physically reach any of your customers, and therefore you can have a much bigger reach for less money.
Knocking on doors and stopping people in the streets with a flyer might still have their place (it will depend on how much you enjoy marketing and what your business is), but this can be added to cloud-based marketing so that you can control everything that happens from your laptop, or even from a mobile device.
Remember, if you have a physical store, you will also need to include physical marketing in your plans. You can offer free samples to passers-by, run special late-night opening events, or have your windows and doors wrapped with graphics.
Pay As You Go
In the past, marketing campaigns tended to have the potential to be extremely costly. This was especially the case if you used an outside company and had to pay a down payment, or even the full balance, upfront.
This meant having to use funds that might have been allocated elsewhere, or otherwise using up all or most of your marketing budget, before you could have the chance to see if that marketing campaign was going to work. With the cloud, it’s different.
Many come with a pay-as-you-go setup, meaning that you don’t have to pay anything upfront, and you only need to pay once the campaign starts bringing in customers. This will save you a lot of money, but it will also help to show you which campaigns are working and which you need to work on.
Fast And Effective
Using marketing cloud technology to run a marketing campaign is a much faster, much more effective way to work than using print media, for example.
By the time you have designed your ad, submitted it to the printer or the publication you are advertising within, and then waited for the advert to start appearing, you could have set up any number of cloud-based campaigns and had them running for days or even weeks. You’ll therefore get the maximum amount of exposure, and this is ideal if you are running a quick sale or pop-up store, for example.
Adaptable
Another benefit of the marketing cloud technology is just how adaptable it is. If you need to make a change because, for example, you made a spelling error, the times of an event have changed, or you want to stop the advertising altogether, then you can do so within seconds at the touch of a button or the stroke of a few keys.
The advert will update in real time, and your customers will have all the correct information as soon as you know that it needs to be changed. Imagine if you had a print ad running and the times of the event it was advertising needed to be changed – it would be impossible, and the event could be a disaster, wasting time, money, effort, and perhaps even giving your company reputation a bad name.
Free Trials
Online there are many different free trials running at any one time. Competition in the cloud-based sector is fierce, and trying to determine how and where to spend your marketing money can be a difficult task. Free trials can help you to decide exactly which route to go down.
You can work out which platform is easiest to use and which is going to boost your business the farthest. Once you know exactly which service is going to be suitable for your requirements, you can start paying or sign up for the pay-as-you-go option, depending on what platform you have chosen. This way, you reduce the risk as far as possible, enabling you to be more confident in your marketing campaign.
Able To Compete
One of the best things about using cloud-based marketing is that it gives smaller companies the ability to compete with larger ones. So local businesses have the same chances and advantages as those that have nationwide coverage.
It’s the first time that small, independent companies have been able to market themselves on the same level as household names, and this has changed the entire landscape of how people sell and buy.
It means that any company has the potential to grow huge, and this is an exciting development. It’s no wonder that business owners are embracing the cloud when it comes to marketing and using it as much as possible.
Analysis
Finally, using cloud-based technology for your marketing means that you are able to analyze all of the data that comes from it in one place. You won’t have to pull information from a variety of different sources and try to tie it all up together into one cohesive report – for the most part, the platform that you are using for your advertising will already have done this for you.
Even if it hasn’t, all the information you need will be in one place. Therefore, you are able to measure the success of each campaign and determine which ones to run again and which ones to abandon.
Of course, this point isn’t always best left solely to impersonal analytics. It’s often best to use an outside company such as WeReach Marketing to perform a marketing audit so you can not only have the data about how well – or otherwise – your marketing is doing, but also about what it means and what changes you might need to implement to improve things.
Easy Access To Customer Data
Because digital marketers cannot interact face-to-face with prospective consumers, promoting goods and services online is a significant barrier. Experts agree that understanding your target audience well enough to influence their purchasing choices is the best thing you can do.
Customer data will assist you in understanding the audience’s requirements and expectations. Keeping track of this critical information by traditional techniques, such as surveys, is time-consuming and labor-intensive.
A cloud data center, on the other hand, simplifies information storage and access for marketers. They can use it to store customer data and access it at any time and from any location, allowing for remote work.
Enhances Data Security
Cloud computing not only makes data more available to digital marketers, but it also protects its security. Every piece of client information is critical, and you cannot afford to lose it.
By incorporating cloud computing into your digital marketing efforts, you can permanently remove this danger. As a result, neither accidental nor purposeful breach is an issue for your company.
Data security and privacy are important because they have a significant influence on customer trust and the business’s reputation. This is especially critical today, given the data privacy requirements and legislation that organizations must follow.
