Marketers turn to cloud to modernise their campaigns

The past few years has seen a complete change in the way organisations conduct their business: accounting, sales and other departments have been transformed by the onset of cloud computing but other business sections have also been affected. 

Marketing has also been completely transformed. In the past marketeers had to wait for IT before the technology they needed to deliver and manage their campaigns could be implemented. This scenario means that marketing is placed firmly into the driving seat, allowing it to make decisions about which technologies are right for the fulfilment and delivery of its projects. However, does this mean that marketing can now ignore the cries of IT? No, they should still be working together.

Differences nevertheless emerge as each department has different priorities. "IT will be managing, working on and scheduling multiple projects across the organisation, and so they may not give priority to marketing projects that may be of a higher priority to marketing", explains Edward Weatherall, commercial director at the Institute of Direct Marketing. This is because a marketing campaign is in his view rarely seen as being business critical to the IT department.

Stuart Wheldon, senior director of customer success and strategy at Eloqua, agrees with Weatherall’s viewpoint. "I think that marketing has historically been seen as the last frontier to be operationalised”, he says. He thinks this is because "IT has been very focused on the infrastructure in order to run the whole business, and managed it from the same area, but with the shift online marketing now plays a bigger role.” Yet he believes that some changes in approach have been afoot in the last 15 months. IT is now playing a bigger role by working with marketing.

IT assistance
Whenever marketers wish to use cloud-based platforms and technologies, IT staff can assist them by offering their expertise. For example, marketers won’t always be as concerned as IT about data and security compliance issues as IT has to be. This can therefore leave a gap in understanding, and it can lead to frustration and conflict between the two departments. Another issue is created when marketers implement technologies that aren’t integrated into the entire IT infrastructure of the organisation, creating potential problems that will irritate IT like additional expensive and data silos.

For example, a marketing campaign database that it not integrated can’t be accessed by sales, and therefore the entire organisation could lose out on revenue-generating opportunities as a result of it. By going it alone marketing can make it more difficult to integrate its cloud-based systems and applications into the rest of the organisation. Yet although it can be argued that marketing should care about how its technologies integrate with sales and other departments, its main concern tends to be focused on what it needs in order to fulfil its own campaign goals and objectives.

While marketing might have gone it alone a few years ago, Wheldon says that it is now looking at marketing automation solutions that are sufficiently sophisticated to require the assistance of IT. This more co-operative and collaborative approach means that IT can ensure that marketing’s systems, such as its cloud-based business intelligence tools, fall in line with its own legal obligations, responsibilities and policies. IT personnel need to remember that marketing needs to be able react now, whenever a change in the market occurs. It still can’t wait six months as the current pace of innovation and the introduction of new market trends, practices and technologies is increasing.

"Fundamentally in the internet world we can’t wait for things to happen; we have to react now and not in six months”, says Martyn Jobber – CEO of Hydra. This means that marketing needs to be able to adapt as quickly as possible in order to remain current and as relevant as possible. "Traditional projects don’t allow for this in the way that the cloud does, and cloud adoption can often lead to customer success", he adds.

Part of this success involves seeking new ways to deploy innovative technologies, and this necessitates being able to scale up and down whenever it is required by the market and the organisation. “When you are dealing with the millions of phrases customers use, the hundreds of pages of websites that exist, there is a need to purchase new hardware whenever taking on new customers in order to be able to service them”, he comments. There is also a need to consider cash flow issues and timescales.

Cloud: a force for change
Michael Newberry, UK product manager for Azure at Microsoft, suggests that the cloud forces IT to think more strategically too, while Weatherall stresses that there is a need to consider how the technology fits in with the marketing strategy, and there must some thought about what can be provided internally, by a cloud provider or whether there is a need – considering data security and compliance issues – for the adoption of a hybrid model (whereby sensitive data remains in-house and not stored in the cloud).