Stuart Foster at The Lost Jacket has written a post recently about The Rise of Cloud Marketing:
“We’re all in.”
Cloud computing is a way of computing, via the Internet, that broadly shares computer resources instead of using software or storage on a local PC.
Microsoft has bet its future on this technology. You can find it being used to distribute .torrents, ease the pressure on servers and scale up and down appropriately. They’re “all in”, so why haven’t content creators jumped on board?
Fear and a loss of control.
The cloud breaks down and distributes and disseminates bits of information so they can be reassembled later in a more complete narrative. Marketing needs to work and think in this same way.
We can’t rely on our customers being able to see the entirety of an integrated campaign anymore. They’re far more likely to see bits and pieces of content here and there and only have a brief encounter with your messaging.
That last paragraph contains a powerful statement, and shows the inherent difficulty that businesses can have in creating marketing messages that are able to be used in different media. The difficulty is that one marketing vehicle, such as a 30-second TV spot, does not work on every platform. Sure we have seen this before, in a limited fashion, with the differences in print marketing vs TV or radio – but the entire game has changed now. Your marketing message needs to incorporate Social Media, web-based platforms, and mobile devices.
Half of my Marketing Budget is Wasted
The old cliche about marketing used to be that a business knew that part of the money and effort spent on marketing was wasted, they just didn’t know which part. A recent survey mentioned in the WSJ shows that this perception is still true in the days of Social Media:
…a separate survey of 500 U.S. small-business owners from the same sponsors found that just 22% made a profit last year from promoting their firms on social media, while 53% said they broke even. What’s more, 19% said they actually lost money due to their social-media initiatives.
The good news is that we can measure the effectiveness of these new media much better than the old media.
The bad news is that “…the latter survey’s respondents say it requires more effort than expected.” That’s right people, Social Media marketing is not a Golden Goose that lays marketing eggs for you. It takes work, it takes time. Engagement and relationship-building are the new means of marketing, even as the goal remains the same.
Find out where your customers are, then go there and listen, learn, and finally – get involved. Talk to them in their language using the tools that they use and you will have taken the first concrete steps toward integrating your marketing. Building a foundation that your business can grow on.
