5 ways cloud services can help you meet your marketing goals

CMOs are under increased pressure to show tangible return for their marketing spend while delivering on an expanded customer agenda. That means providing a consistent, high-quality experience across an ever-more layered omnichannel environment. As anyone wearing a marketing hat can testify, that takes some juggling. To keep those balls moving, marketing leaders need efficient processes and targeted solutions.
The problem is most don’t have the kind of time needed to pump new life into aging systems or secure the talent and resources to build sophisticated, customer-centered processes in-house.
That’s one reason why specialized cloud services are catching on. Business processes as a service, or BPaaS, are expertly configured process layers that sit on top of an organization’s existing cloud system. Just about any cloud platform will work with BPaaS, be it software as a service, platform as a service or infrastructure as a service.
Although a relatively new arrival in the cloud suite, BPaaS has already found a hungry audience. Research and Markets forecasts the global BPaaS market could exceed $7 billion in value by 2018, and this from a running start of just $1 billion in 2013. We expect marketers will have their hands up for a healthy slice of that business. Here are five reasons why BPaaS might just become a CMO’s best friend:
1.  Improve customer service provisioning across channels: An effective BPaaS customer service system can help marketers respond more uniformly – by aggregating customer data, flagging common issues, cataloging client service histories, and quickly sharing, refining and pushing solutions across channels.
2. Deliver business analytics at the point of impact: Specialized processes can serve up detailed customer information with just a few clicks, allowing marketing teams to understand which stages of the purchasing decision-making process matter most to different value segments. For example, the consumer electronics company Philips began using BPaaS to differentiate its  smart TV called TP Vision. The cloud offering helps Philips capture and analyze data as customers interact with the TV. Marketing teams then use those insights to serve up tailored programming and make recommendations.
3. Optimize digital media spend: Marketers need to know how much to spend, how to split that spend across geographies and business lines, how to divide it across channels and touch points, and how to pull together the right mix of interactions for a given segment or campaign. BPaaS processes can help CMOs tailor their Marketing Mix Modeling to determine spend effectiveness and ROI based on campaigns across each channel.
4. Capitalize on point-of-sale insights: Integrated processes capture and relay transactional information to inform everything from procurement to promotions and can do so far more easily and cost-effectively than most legacy environments allow. The same processes can deliver targeted promotions to buyers, gather survey data, and feed the information collected to relevant parties in the business, often within minutes.
5. Scale up and down as demand dictates: BPaaS allows sales staff to be more effective while on the go. This portability gives organizations the breathing room to take on more business and produce quality results faster, making for a much healthier bottom line.
With CMOs increasingly called on to account for their marketing spend, BPaaS models allow marketers to minimize capital investment and use services on an as-needed basis at a fixed and thus predictable rate. That lets marketing teams pilot and experiment new digital media, sales and campaign capabilities without the investment risk such innovation typically required.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud