Elements of a successful cloud marketing strategy

Cloud marketing is quickly becoming one of the newest buzzwords in business today. It provides companies with the ability to increase their marketing reach and results without necessarily increasing their costs, giving a new life to many a marketing department. During recession years, marketing is one of the functions that commonly experiences severe cuts. The emergence of cloud-based marketing options along with a slightly improving economy signifies great opportunity for your business.

What is cloud marketing?

It is not really as scary or odd as it sounds. Basically marketing in the cloud leverages your existing marketing efforts and utilizes Software as a Service to be the engine that runs it all. It uses an outsourcing model so that your business can focus on generating marketing strategies and plans without having to worry about the technology infrastructure. This reduces your IT overhead dramatically and lets you focus on your areas of expertise, making your labor dollars more effectively spent.

Cloud-based CRM systems are and should be easily integrated into this approach, giving you greater ability to nurture leads and customers. This is shown to be one of the most powerful ways to market in today’s world.

Common marketing vehicles in the cloud

A robust strategy for marketing in the cloud will really center on your website and driving traffic to it with the ultimate goal in mind of making sales. Some of the primary vehicles that should be a part of your cloud marketing implementation include:

-· Paid search

Some people may call this the cheater’s way out but the numbers show that it works. Be careful, however, to choose wisely so that your ads are appropriately targeted to get maximum results.

-· Social media ads

If your social media presence is what it should be, these can really work. Similarly, advertising on social media can help to build your social media presence in return. Advertising on different social media platforms should not be done as a cookie cutter exercise. By this we mean you should not create one ad or promotion that is duplicated all over the place. Each platform is unique and should have content developed just for it.

Twitter can be one of your best friends here because advertising on Twitter is simply about promoting your existing content. Even where you will want to have new materials for ads on other platforms, they should provide a clear and consistent message and can leverage each other to keep your costs in line but be appropriately targeted to their audiences.

-· A robust social presence

To have the most robust social presence possible, you should target at least three different social media platforms to cultivate. This will give you enough presence to be taken seriously by customers, prospects and search engines.

Additionally, it is well worth your time to create your company’s presence on other social media sites. Identify targeted companies where you believe you can get in front of many potential customers and get active. Comment, post and share on a regular basis. This is a highly effective way of generating awareness for your company and getting people from other social media sites to yours-and, ultimately, to your site.

-· Active blogging

As with social media, you should not focus solely on your own blog but on guest blogging. Certainly the advantage of gaining backlinks can be beneficial but, in a way, the most useful reason for doing this is to get exposure in front of real people, potential customers for your business. Guest blogging is one of the best ways to establish yourself and your company as an expert. When you do that, you have elevated your entire cloud marketing strategy.

For your own blog, be sure to stay committed to feeding it on a regular basis. If it goes stale, people will stop following you. Also, make sure to incorporate pushes to and from your blog to or from your social media sites and your website. Inter-vehicle traffic is as of yet an under-rated method of increasing your presence but has tremendous power to do so.

These are just some of the key elements and vehicles that will help you leverage the power of the cloud with your knowledge and experience of marketing as well as your budget to get your name and message in front of the right people in the most efficient way.