Marketing in the Era of the Cloud

It’s a typical Wednesday afternoon here in the UK. It’s been grey and gloomy, the rains been beating down for hours and there’s a constant stream of traffic outside as more roadworks flood the area.

But inside, I’m sitting comfortably, coffee in hand with three screens displaying website admin panels, social media pages, analytical accounts and a small army of chrome tabs, ready to obey.

Today I wanted to share what it’s like working as a Digital Marketer for a company that specialises in building unique, scalable and truly innovative solutions that live and grow within the cloud. It’s a unique and novel role to say the least, using applications, third party software and cloud based solutions to market a cloud company. It makes me think how far marketing in general has come since the cloud has expanded, absorbing old processes and applications that now seem ancient.

So where do we begin? Well, let’s stick with the basics for now, as although marketing processes and best practices have evolved with the technology available, the fundamentals still remain the same.

We’re just people, talking to other people.

Yeap, that’s right! The core principle, for me at least, is that as a marketer, it’s your role to speak with people and connect with them on areas that they’re interested in. With the growth in available statistics, conversion rates, click through stats, it can be easy to lose yourself in the numbers, rather than focusing on the conversation.

As a marketer for Firemind, it’s my duty and privilege to talk about our company as our company. Removing my singular voice and using it as a more general voice for the company. This is what I would deem as a digital marketers first hurdle to overcome. It’s easy to speak as an individual on a topic, posting something that entertains, educates or interests. However, speaking as a representative for an entire company, filled with many different views, opinions and outlooks is much more of a challenge.

You have to remain fairly balanced in your opinions, whilst still showing a reasoned and positive response to what your companies building, who it’s working with, what events are taking place and so on.

Covid-19 brought with it an unprecedented future for digital marketing as a whole. Firstly, it opened the doors to the accessibility of video call services such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meets. Enabling teams to effectively work in a more collaborative manner whilst working remotely.

Now this wasn’t too much of a change within the Firemind culture, as our team has always incorporated remote working when possible, in order to provide a more fluid and flexible working lifestyle for our team.

It did however strengthen marketing tools and the importance of using the right systems to effectively market our company. We began adopting scheduling systems to ensure we stayed on track with social posting as well as promote social interaction. This freed up time to better understand our CRM systems and enable new avenues of marketing that we’d previously left undisturbed.

As with all roles within the company, these accelerated processes freed up time, the holy grail of a marketers resource. With more time comes more updates, insights, social interactions and planning for videos and interesting series for our followers to engage and learn from.

Tools have evolved and adapted the most for marketers as the cloud has scaled and become natively adopted by many.

The real buzzword for digital marketing and tooling is the use of ‘automation’ to streamline marketing processes and again, provide more time for other tasks. Top contenders in the automation space come in the form of software such as Marketo, HubSpot, Thrivehive and Sailthru.

Whilst each offers slight differences and platforms of focus, they all enable more comprehensive data management and understanding to fuel predictive models. This leads to speaking to the right audience, at the right time about the right product/solution (whilst simultaneously feeding this info back to the marketer).

Data and automation are something I’m becoming more and more familiar with, especially as Firemind specialises in building data led solutions with the purpose of accelerating a businesses use of data in an intelligent and productive way.

Whilst many may be unsure about the effective use of automation within social posts, email campaigns and landing page creation, I for one am a fan of more personalised content that speaks to people about topics they’re really interested in. I see smarter automation as the next evolution in all digital marketing practices. Failure to begin using the tools available and implementing recommendations and personalised content will certainly be the downfall of more traditional marketing avenues.