Cloud Computing: It all matters is how well you do it!
Written by Aman Poddar; MGB (Master of Global Business – Contemporary Marketing Management) student. SP Jain School of Global Management – Intake of 2017.
Planning to reduce your operational cost? Planning to optimize your marketing analytics? Looking for ways to manage your sales team effectively? Having data storage issues? All of these problems and many more unaddressed above have only one solution, Cloud Services.
Cloud services, a software platform or applications in which is available on a virtual computer and could be accessed through smartphones, personal computers etc. If you have recently checked your LinkedIn or Facebook update, you are using cloud computing. If you have recently checked your e-mail or bank balance, you are on cloud again. People are using cloud services on a daily basis.
Cloud Services will be a game changer in the near future. Analysts claims that data are the most valuable resource any company could have. But it all matters at the end how well you use that data. People are on the cloud and so are the data. With the advent of Internet in 1995 and the recent technological advancement, it has become easy for an organisation to understand their customer requirements through digital platforms. These data are being used by the CMOs and their fellow marketers to launch their promotional campaigns both online and offline. It is being used by many small, medium and large business enterprises to gain a competitive advantage in this globalized word. These services along with big data analytics helps rummage through the data and organize them in a way that could be used by marketers.
Many big giants like Amazon Alibaba, Google, IBM, Microsoft and many more are investing billions of dollars in providing cloud services. Considering the greater demand, these services are expected to grow 6 times by 2025. There are variousbenefits of using cloud services. Some of them could be very crucial for an organization to grow sooner and gaincompetitive advantage:-
a. Cost effective: Cloud services comes with no upfront investment and helps an organisation to save their investment on infrastructure. Additionally it is scalable and are charged on per user basis. Many start-ups with limited budget to spend can make best use out of it.
b. Lead Tracking: Potential customer and their buying behaviour are all available online through their social media feed and their past purchase data. Ecommerce industries, travel websites, airline industries are making the best use of analysing this data to understand their customer requirements and interest. Google analytics could be the best software to keep a track of all the potential customers on different digital platforms such as social media, official websites, mobile app etc.
c. Inbound Marketing: Traditional marketing involves outbound marketing like advertising, cold calls etc. But recently, many companies are planning to adopt inbound marketing where blogging, social media advertisement etc play a major role. This basically helps to attract customer who are already looking for the similar products. Cloud based tools such as google analytics helps an organization to know where and who is the potential customer. Once the segmentation of the customers are done, it is easy to target and position the product or service accordingly.
d. Improved CRM: Marketers will understand the benefits and importance of having their customer data and these
availability of customer data, helps in improvement of CRM for both B2B and B2C organisation. This is possible through Cloud ERP providers such as Cloud ERP providers like NetSuite and Epicor.
e. Marketing Automation: It’s a cloud based tool, again used by the marketers to monitor and automate their routine tasks such as posting on various social media. This helps them reduce time and reduce cost at the same time. Eloqua (acquired by Oracle) and Marketo are the examples of these services.
f. Sales Force Management: One of the major trouble that an organisation with a global presence face is to track how effectively their sales force are working on a daily basis. Cloud services offers certain platforms where various organisation could actually monitor the performance of their sales force on a daily basis and plan accordingly to increase their productivity. Various SMEs as well as large scale industries are widely using this service and have claimed to have achieve better results than before.
Other benefits such as improved collaborations among the team globally, 24X7 availability of data, disaster recovery, flexibility and scalability boost the performance and confidence of an organisation by helping them focus on their core goals.
Cloud Services are evolving along with the technology. Adoption of Cloud Computing in this digital era are soon going to be a next normal thing in any industry!
About the Author: Aman Poddar
Aman Poddar is a Master of Global Business student at SP Jain Global. A pragmatic business professional with 2 years of experience in IT, Aman entered the business world with high enthusiasm and additional skills. He strongly believes that Marketing is evolving with technological innovations.
