The cloud has been around long before we gave it a name and marketers are poised to lead. The cloud is a no-brainer for marketers. The majority of content is designed to be public facing, so security is not a hot button and cloud technologies provide an entire department with built-in processes that require fewer resources to manage with a more predictable budget. But the most important reason is that marketers need to drive the adoption of cloud technologies in order to stay competitive in the marketplace.

Are you preparing your marketing department to support the coming changes by marketing in the cloud?

What Came First: The Cloud Or The Behavior?

We have been going to the office from 8am to 6pm for decades. So, what changed? Given the competitive nature of business and the draw to stay

The mobile workstyle is a new generation of employees who expect a flexible work schedule and willingly submit contextual information that can be harnessed by marketers to inform their customer creation and retention strategies.

What Is Contextual Marketing?

Mobile is giving marketers deep insight into a user's context, making timely and relevant marketing the golden key to success. As the adoption rate for cloud technologies and smartphones increase, marketers who are not using contextual-marketing tactics will be left behind.

A customer mobile context consists of:

• Situation: location, altitude, environment conditions and speed.
• Preferences: personal history as shared with social networks
• Attitudes: customer behavior and logistics

Having this deep insight into consumer behavior will change the way we perform marketing in the cloud. It will require small and mid-sized businesses to adopt marketing automation software and cloud technologies in order to compete. Marketers will be creating hyper-targeted messages based on the customer’s situation, preferences and attitudes. This requires understanding your customer on a whole new level and will require multiple tests before you get your message and target right.

Source: Forrester 2011

What Can Cloud Technology Do Now?

Getting into contextual marketing will be important in the next five years in order to stay competitive but the first thing organizations need to do is implement the systems that shifts time away from maintaining databases and manual inputs and moving to a streamlined approach. Implementing an integrated sales and marketing system empowers your teams to work together and build a long-term marketing strategy that uses the technology that will enable innovation and advancement in the coming areas of marketing.

Cloud Technologies Marketing and Sales Teams Use Today

• CRM Online - Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is a cloud-based solution integrated with outlook, giving marketing teams insight into sales performance reports.
• SharePoint Online - Whether you're building an intranet or a public-facing website hosting information in the cloud will streamline processes and lower the technical barrier for content management practices.
• Exchange Online - Communicate anywhere?  You bet. If you have a connection to the Internet, your team will have access to the resources they need to communicate with each other.
• Lync Online - Easy web conferencing with integrated phone & video.

Resources

Download PDF of mobile marketing terms - http://www.mmaglobal.com/glossary.pdf

Ask, J. A., Gownder, J., Riley, E., Brown, E. G., Parrish, M., Schadler, T., et al. (n.d.). Digital Marketing: The Future Of Mobile Is Context.

Ried, S., Kisker, H., Matzke, P., Bartels, A., & Lisserman, M. (2011, 04 21). Sizing The Cloud.