The “Marketing Cloud,” Where Social Media Meets Marketing Automation

Salesforce.com, the powerhouse sales contact automation company, made a grand announcement at Dreamforce, their September 2012 user conference in San Francisco. Mark Benioff, CEO, explained Salesforce’s move toward a new “marketing cloud,” where marketers can combine social media monitoring, content marketing, advertising, and marketing automation in one online platform.

This is big news, and indicative of an important new trend as marketing automation matures. And social media is at the center of the trend.
In Salesforce’s case, the marketing cloud concept was enabled by their purchase of Radian6, a leading social media monitoring product, and Buddy Media, an enterprise social media marketing platform. They have even set up a Twitter account, @marketingcloud.

The trend addresses a long-felt need among marketers for integrated tools to manage comprehensive messaging and management of customer and prospect relationships. In the last 12 months or so, two important factors came together to pave the way for the marketing cloud concept.

First, social media began to mature. For a few years now, social media has been the “new kid on the block,” typically set up as a flexible, experimental skunkworks operation run by creative young marketers who live and breathe social channels. At the same time, the software as a service (SaaS) model, also known as “the cloud,” has become the standard for new marketing automation entrants. So, just as it became time for social media to grow up, go mainsteam, and become a regular tool in the marketing organization, marketing automation was ready to integrate social media into other cloud-based platforms, creating the new concept of the marketing cloud.

In Salesforce’s case, the marketing cloud is designed for business markets. But the trend is evident in consumer markets as well.

Sony Electronics, for example, has used the marketing cloud tools from Adobe to promote its tablet hardware at the popular—and influential—South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, in March, 2012. Knowing that festival combines technology, music and social media, Sony created a sizable presence at the show using a unique Twitter contest, Facebook and video to connect with musicians, fans, journalists and bloggers. They measured the results using Adobe Social, and reported a 200% increase in conversations about the tablet, and 122% audience expansion.

The functionality supported by these integrated cloud marketing approaches covers the gamut of marketing research, communications, analysis and customer relationship management. Suppliers are integrating such capabilities as:

  • Business intelligence
  • Campaign automation
  • Community building
  • Content management
  • Data hygiene
  • Lead generation
  • Lead nurturing
  • List development
  • Media relations
  • Online advertising
  • Online meetings
  • Search engine marketing
  • Social media management
  • Virtual tradeshows
  • Web analytics
  • Webinars

    • Using the marketing cloud, marketers can work toward a variety of social media marketing objectives:

    • Develop customer acquisition strategies using Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels.
    • Understand the best techniques for motivating engagement among social network communities, by using real-time data.
    • Keep their social networks engaged by creating the most targeted and relevant content and experiences.
    • Let their community members express their views and share experiences with the brand and with their networks.
    • Identify their most influential advocates.
    • Follow the customer journey from awareness to interest to purchase.
    • Measure the effectiveness of online and offline paid media in pushing traffic to social networks.

    Laura Ramos, a respected analyst at Forrester, encourages marketers to embrace cloud marketing, noting the special advantages of the cloud in lower capital investment, faster implementation and increased ability to handle large data sets securely. Compared to traditional CIOs, today’s CMO is less likely to worry about internal control, and see the value of the marketing cloud. In fact, CMOs are increasingly comfortable with technology, and manage larger technology budgets than ever before.

    These developments tell us that modern marketing is getting more digital, more cloud-based, more integrated, more data-driven and more social. The marketing cloud is just the latest stage in the ongoing evolution of marketing and marketing communications. What will be next?

    Original Publication

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