Organisations with a vision for long-term growth need a robust and scalable marketing strategy, and today technology is making it possible by percolating every business, including the marketing function. The latest buzz is ‘Marketing Cloud’, a software platform, which helps organisations scale up their marketing efforts, and by default, it has become integral to the marketing plans of all organisations.

Organisations with a vision for long-term growth need a robust and scalable marketing strategy, and today technology is making it possible by percolating every business, including the marketing function. The latest buzz is ‘Marketing Cloud’, a software platform, which helps organisations scale up their marketing efforts, and by default, it has become integral to the marketing plans of all organisations.

What is Marketing Cloud

Marketing Cloud is a software platform that helps organisations in promoting their products and services through integrated digital experiences customised for every single end user. Also, considered as a comprehensive marketing solution, it enables marketers to measure, personalise and optimise marketing campaigns and digital experiences for effective marketing.

Why Marketing Cloud

Organisations are increasingly deploying Marketing Cloud platforms, because using data about customers, including existing and potential, to improve the customer experience, requires the right tech tools. In fact, the platform is a solution that facilitates marketers in reaching their customers by using their data in a comprehensive way. Contrary to being just a tool for measuring digital reach, Marketing Cloud helps understand, measure and better plan advertising through traditional channels and covers digital, TV, print, retail channels and even the company call centres.

Salient features of Marketing Cloud

Campaign Analytics: Allows organisations to gather, analyse, and act upon customer data in real time and across all marketing channels.
Data Management Platform: Organisations can build unique audience profiles to identify the most valuable segments for use across any digital channel.

Campaign Management: Enables organisations to deliver automated one-to-one messages across all marketing channels, including digital, based on customer's actions and preferences.

Content Management: Simplifies management and delivery of content and assets to enhance customer experience.

Programmatic Media Buying: Helps easily manage and automate paid campaigns by predicting the impact of changes to search and display social ads

Video Monetisation: Helps create personalised TV and video experiences on multiscreen platforms.

Social Media Marketing: Comprehensive solution for creating relevant and personalised content to be published to most engaged audiences, and improve social marketing results.

Experimentation: Empowers organisations to experiment and create A/B and multivariate tests, understand successful content, and deliver personalised experiences.

Benefits of Marketing Cloud

In the process, these unique features result in multiple benefits to organisations. They include cross-channel integration and deployment, connecting media and communication channels, offering campaign planning and development; data management, analysis, and segmentation; unified measurement, reporting, and analysis; and workflow and collaboration tools to plan and deploy seamless marketing communication initiatives.

Improved lead generation, enabling marketing and sales departments to manage their prospect interactions and online marketing campaigns in one centralized and user-friendly platform are among other benefits.

In addition, personalised and accountable tracking of marketing and sales touch points through the consumer lifecycle, with solutions automatically programmed to manage prospect behaviour and activity in real time, nurturing leads to the point of sales-readiness and beyond, are also possible through Marketing Cloud platform.

Customisable campaign development and messaging deployments built around data collected by organisations from multiple streams on most valuable prospects and customers can be undertaken. Further, it offers better insights into campaign performance to help prove marketing accountability and link revenue to campaign results. It also enables the tracking of campaign results in one single dashboard. Creating multiple, custom dashboards using a library of drag-and-drop widgets to deliver relevant content can also be achieved using Marketing Cloud platform.

All these benefits eventually impact the marketing scalability in the long-term. For, without investments in platform scalability, campaign activity across hundreds of clients will lead to capacity challenges.

3 key reasons to opt for Marketing Cloud

1-    Pushing marketing activities on to the cloud results in rich dividends for marketers. For instance, many marketers interact with customers on the web through email, on social media and mobile devices using isolated software applications to manage each type of interaction. But Marketing Cloud acts as an integrated platform for web management, social marketing and analytics. Synchronising these programmes will give marketers a "unified customer profile," allowing them to coordinate messaging. Besides, it quickly integrates and transmits insightful customer data within all systems.

2-    Marketing Cloud platforms help deliver customised, personalised communications to customers, showcasing the right products at the right moment. Regardless of the size, Marketing Cloud platforms can handle an average of nearly a billion marketing transactions per day. Moreover, the cloud software can be accessed from anywhere and organisations can effectively leverage data around user behaviour, subscriber preferences, and real-time data, to deploy smart and personalised campaigns.

3-    As organisations are under pressure to justify their spending in marketing, investing in a solution like Marketing Cloud is not an easy decision. But it is imperative to adapt to the changing marketing dynamics.

In today's connected world, every customer interaction is important and Marketing Cloud provides tools to manage the customer journey across all channels. Organisations of any size can grow their business with professional level marketing tools by deploying Marketing Cloud. It enables organisations to plan, personalise and optimise customer interactions, understand customers better, and measure results to maximise the ROI from marketing spends. Successfully implementing Marketing Cloud is the main differentiator between marketing success and marketing mediocrity.