Insights
Marketers can access more data than ever before, but not all data is being used to its full potential. Integrating your data is key to building a digital strategy that genuinely nurtures your customers through the sales funnel and leads them to conversion.
Working manually with lots of data is complex and time-consuming, and the more data there is, the more it is prone to human error. This is where cloud marketing comes in. Cloud marketing refers to the use of cloud technologies to collect, store, join and transform data, rather than using disparate databases and physical locations to do so.
The use of cloud software to centralise data, gather actionable insights and activate your digital marketing strategy is revolutionising the way brands and agencies work. As a Google Cloud Platform Partner, we use Google Cloud products, but there are plenty of cloud platforms available offering end to end solutions.
Cloud marketing can be used at any, or all, stages of your digital marketing, from collecting the data through to optimising your digital campaigns.
The first step in delivering a data-driven marketing strategy is collecting the right data, in the right format. Cloud for marketing tools make it easier than ever to collect huge amounts of data, measuring the right metrics for your goals.
Examples of cloud for marketing platform tools that collect data include Google Analytics and Analytics 360, Google Tag Manager, Adobe Analytics and Salesforce.
Cloud marketing tools offer new ways to transform your data. Often, the data we collect has hidden insights, but cloud marketing tools can prepare, clean, and join numerous raw data sources into useable data sets, where transformation projects such as attribution modelling can be performed.
One advantage cloud platforms have over isolated databases and servers is their ability to transform huge amounts of data easily and accurately. We regularly use a combination of Google cloud products including Cloud Dataprep and Google BigQuery, to build bespoke machine learning solutions for our clients. Machine learning delivers fast and accurate results that isn’t possible without cloud marketing tools.
Once data has been transformed into usable data sets, cloud marketing tools can turn these data sets into powerful insights that improve the way you undertake digital marketing.
Attribution models, audience segmentation and scoring, bespoke data projects in data warehouses all use the predictive algorithms in cloud marketing tools that can to inform your digital marketing strategy.
Interrogating large and disparate data sets can become increasingly complex and difficult when working in offline environments. Cloud marketing platforms offer dashboard solutions that makes it easy to connect and visualise actionable insights.
Cloud dashboard solutions like Google Looker Studio and Tableau can connect to multiple third-party data sources and data warehouses to report on multiple channels and provide a holistic view of your data.
In fully automated online cloud environments, these reports can be updated in real-time, reducing the hours needed to build reports and allowing more time to be spent on adding strategic value.
Insights mean very little unless you actually do something with this information. Cloud marketing integration can activate data and insights between your data warehouse, analytics, and ad platforms to improve your digital performance.
For example, by pushing audience segments back into your ad platform, the segments can be used to specifically target higher-value audiences or create audiences for remarketing based on specific engagement signals that have been highlighted in your analysis.
Cloud marketing platforms make it possible to bring big data sets, from multiple sources, and blend them together, allowing you to build a holistic picture of your customers and sales funnel. Bringing together data from many sources into one data warehouse lets you paint a more accurate picture of your customer’s journey, and lets allows you to adjust how and where you spend your marketing budget. Building a full-funnel digital marketing strategy delivers better a customer experience, drive efficiencies and more conversions when compared to a siloed, channel-specific approach (nascent in digital maturity).
Cloud platforms have the capacity and power to query huge amounts of data. For businesses collecting large or growing volumes of data, being able to cope with – and use – this data is crucial. Cloud tools also automate marketing processes which means complete accuracy, no matter how much data is being crunched.
Historical data reveals lots about your customers and the customer journey. We can use cloud marketing to take this data and build advanced solutions, such as building predictive models to score a customer’s likelihood of purchasing a certain product, which can then feed back into your remarketing strategy. There are hundreds of ways we can use machine learning to build marketing solutions, something which is only possible thanks to the cloud products.
People are online every minute of the day, and digital marketers need to be able to act on changes in consumer behaviour as they happen – or risk missing out on revenue, or wasting spend. Cloud marketing platforms can be configured to collect and analyse your data in real-time, thanks to functions like automated reporting.
Automated reporting makes it possible to see what is happening as it happens so you can make informed reactive choices, such as increasing spend during unprecedented demand after a product goes viral, or pausing ads when stock levels drop. There is even the ability to set up automated rules so campaigns are started or paused instantaneously when the rule criterion is met (i.e. a change in performance/demand).
Ready to grow via cloud marketing?Contact us and our Google Cloud experts can make it happen
Insights
Insights
Insights