Latest Marketing Cloud Technologies and Their Implications for Your Business

Updated on December 15th, 2016 by Quertime Writer in Business

Some cloud based technologies have become the norm in certain operational areas – for example ecommerce sales channels, cloud based systems have very high adoption rates and in some cases are the preferred choice for new implementations.

In addition, many other basic business functions have cloud solutions which have high adoption rates – across bookkeeping, human resource management and customer relationship management. Cloud platform adoption rates in marketing functions is however a mixed bag. As can be expected, adoption has been high around the online marketing areas – for example in online marketing analytical systems which naturally lent themselves to cloud based solutions.

Examples of this are things such as Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics – where the first products in this class where cloud based solutions, which fit well with websites which were normally hosted on external servers.

In addition, marketing platforms covering functions such as search marketing, SEO and banner advertising naturally lent themselves to cloud based solutions as they integrated well with systems hosted outside the client locations. However, there are a number of traditional marketing activities – those which were first completed in office, desktop environments which are now moving to cloud based environments.

The Benefits of Cloud Marketing Tech

The universal goals of marketing teams are around attracting new customers at the lowest possible cost and retaining these customers in the most efficient way possible. New technologies can help with these – intuitively, you can see how the adoption of cloud based solutions can help reduce support costs across a marketing function and therefore help to divert investment into tasks which help attract new customers.

Looking at examples of the cloud based analytical systems, we can see how the centralised programming of these applications, allows even small businesses to benefit from clear and accurate data, without the large costs of hiring a specialised development teams. This has enabled businesses to better understand their customers, produce better products for them and make the sales processes more convenient.

In addition, by running these applications on robust, centralised hardware, the incidence of failure has been vastly reduced. An application such as Good Analytics provides businesses with an almost 100% uptime rate, for virtually zero costs.

Because cloud based systems can be deployed so quickly, they are the natural delivery choice of new technologies. They enable a client to quickly test and buy the solution – served from distance away locations at convenient times.

How It Can be Difficult to Keep up with This

Keeping up with new technologies can be a full time in itself. If managers are not careful, they can spend much of their time reviewing and considering new technology, rather than concentrating on specific revenue generating activities.

This problem has become particularly acute as much of the innovation is increasingly made in small start-up business. A client can no longer expect that it’s large, legacy software provider is producing the most innovative products. On the other-hand reviewing all the available solutions out there can be expensive.

This has arguably led to a degree of inertia with businesses as they have stuck to their tried and tested systems – reduction the adoption of cloud based solutions.

Examples of Emerging Tech which People May Not Have Heard of

The major cloud based solutions can be categorised in the following ways:

Surveys – systems of data collection which allow marketing teams to deploy quickly, to many online locations
Natural Language Processing – allow marketing teams to understand the context and meanings of lengthy documents and pages
Design – provide tools and creative inputs to enable more efficient design work – particularly used in promotional projects
CPC – enable highly controllable and scalable promotion of online pages
Analytics and Reporting – enable the detailed understanding of a business’s marketplace and customers and helps with internal communications within businesses.

Some Examples of New Businesses and How These Help Their Customers Are:

Survey – Snap Surveys
Reduces the costs of research and data collections – enabling a business to improve is product development and delivery – improving customer retention

NLP – Narrative Science
Reduces the costs of researching a marketplace and developing promotional content – reducing CPAs

Design – Autodesk A360
Improves the designs tools available to a team, which should improve the quality of promotional content for no increase in costs – reducing CPAs

CPC – Outbrain
Enables clients to test promotional campaigns and quickly scale – reducing the costs of failed campaigns and thereby reducing the CPA costs

Analytics and Reporting – Google Analytics
Can identify usability issues within an online service – which can be resolved, thereby increasing customer retention

The Implications

In this section we are going to look at some of the implications from these technologies. New emerging and growing cloud based technologies represent both opportunities and threats for your business so it is useful to be aware of them and be prepared to use them in order to maximise your strengths and neutralise your weaknesses in the marketplace.

In terms of benefits, your business should be able to benefit from accessing new services quicker and testing out these services without having to commit large investments. This means you can find the best ideas and tools for you particular business.

In addition, full implementations of the right tools should be possible with only a minimum number of technical staff employed.

However, your competitors also have these advantages. The best performing of these will be constantly looking for new cloud services to reduce their CPA’s and increase their customer retention. The risk to you is that they may be taking customers from you, if you are standing still.

In addition, there are some cloud products such as AdWords which have become so popular, they cream off all the profits for themselves – meaning it because ever more difficult to find customers are a profit.

Whether these are positive or negative for your business depends on how quickly you are able to test, judge and then implement those tools that improve your marketing functions. We hope that this article will help you with your business efforts and that you can take advantage of those technologies up to their full potential.

Author: Iveta Ivanova

Iveta Ivanova is business, marketing and technology enthusiast who is interested in latest tech news and trends. This article was written with the research of eCommerce NetSuite Omni-channel software.