Social and Cloud Marketing Impact on Businesses

Project Report
Social and Cloud Marketing
Impact on Businesses
Submitted to:
Mr. Nitin Chadha
Market Survey Report By:
Saumya Verma
MBA, Class of 2013
Department of Management Studies
Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee

1. Executive Summary 3
2. What Do They Mean
Social Media Marketing
2.1 Features 4
2.2 Strategies 5
Cloud Marketing
2.3 Why to Use 7
2.4 What It Can Offer 8
3. Impact on Businesses– Social Media Marketing
Business To Business Perspective
3.1 Why B2B Need Social Media 9
3.2 How B2B Companies Should Do 10
3.3 Case: How IBM did this 13
Business To Customers Perspective
3.4 How Different from B2B 15
3.5 How B2C Companies Should Do 16
3.6 Case: HP 18
3.7 Case: Jeep 18
Measure ROI 19
4. Impact on Businesses– Cloud Marketing
4.1 Strategies 20
4.2 Platforms of Cloud Computing for Marketing 23
4.3 Why SaaS 25
4.4 Cases in Point 27
4.5 What it Has For Future 28
4.6 Companies Providing Such Services 29
5. Conclusion 30
6. References 31
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Social Media: Tools, Tactics, Time 6
Figure 2: Social tools allow to engage customers in a whole new way 10
Figure 3: Social Media Objectives, Strategy and Tactics 12
Figure 4: Web 2.0 to make websites powerful sales channels 17
Figure 5: User groups allows customers to learn 17
Figure 6: Sales Funnel and ROI Metrics 19
Figure 7: List of Companies 29
Table of Contents
Social and Cloud Marketing– Impact on Businesses2

Executive Summary
3
With the increasing use of social media by the customers, the companies need to be very much
aware of the new buying decision process of the customer. A clear picture of where the customer
spend time, what are the touch points and how a customer uses different channels to gather infor-
mation about the products and services is required to make a good social media marketing strat-
egy.
Also, technology is now an integral part of our life. Even the larger context of inter-personal rela-
tions; ranging from relationships between friends and acquaintances to the relationship between
companies and consumers; is now overwhelmingly integrating technology in its sphere. It stands
to reason then, that technology can play a key role in making our lives easier. But this is not re-
stricted to our personal lives. Technology is the tool that can be used by companies to reach their
consumers better, faster, more comprehensively and more personally tailored to the consumer
need than ever before.
This project report gives brief analysis of social media management and cloud marketing, what
are the strategies to use them, benefits derived out of them, how to measure them. This also cov-
ers both B2B and B2C strategies for using social media marketing.
Social and Cloud Marketing– Impact on Businesses

What Do They Mean
4
Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of Internet marketing that utilizes social networking web-
sites as a marketing tool. Social media marketing is in addition to integrated marketing communi-
cations plans. Integrated marketing communications is a multifaceted, organized marketing and
advertising approach that organizations follow to connect with their target markets. Social media
marketing programs usually focus on efforts to create content that draws attention and encour-
ages readers to share it with their social networks. As this mode of networking has become more
and more popular, it benefits in connecting with the world on any platform such as personal, politi-
cal as well as business. This helps a company increase its brand exposure and broaden customer
reach.
1. Features of Social Media Marketing
A technology for everyone: This is free for all to use. Making World Wide Web much bigger
place: It helps immensely in reaching out to a wider audience.
User-generated content: Online technology makes it easier for anyone to float content as pic-
tures, videos, blogs, news, information on a social media platform.
Is handy and scalable: Social media can be used by a diverse set of users. It also provides easy
to access information and tools to work for the person’s convenience.
An information diffusion mode: The process changes how people read share or collect informa-
tion and thus social media is very much capable of distributing information on a faster pace.
A constructive way to build relationships: With the help of social media marketing, people can
easily share information with others. This ensures that a better relationship is built with social me-
dia as the base.
Connecting with others: There lies a tremendous opportunity to make real and meaningful con-
nect with prospective customers. It provides a better perspective to human relationships. This per-
sonal perception thus helps many companies to find a way to establish the network with their cus-
tomers and promote their message in a better fashion.
From content readers to content publishers: Consumers are not only content readers but with
respect to social media, they are also the content publishers. Hence a valuable platform for peo-
ple, to share any kind of relevant content with their network of followers.
Brand power: The best way to promote or publicize a brand or a product. What drives the media
is the amalgamation of technology with the creativity and thus a whole new world for social media
marketing is available for anyone to use.
Provision of customer service and relayed feedbacks: With the help of technology a person
can easily respond back to the customer’s feedback or even provide services by coordinating with
his employees.
Gain of goodwill: With the help of social media, goodwill can easily be generated for a company
or a brand.

5
Low cost way to reach out to large number of customers: By joining a social media site, you
get access to already available user base of the social networking site.
Website Traffic: When you share blog posts, videos and other content from your website, you
give your audience a reason to click through and visit your site. This creates opportunities to con-
vert the traffic into business.
2. Social Media Marketing Strategies
Different companies with different goals should use different social media strategies. Various fac-
tors like target segment, kind of products and services, budget etc helps the company to use a
specific social media strategy. Depending on the need and creativity of the user, there can be
many social media strategies but broadly they can be put into following categories.
Social Media Brand Management
This includes creating and maintaining a blog, twitter account, Facebook page or a LinkedIn group
and engage people who are interested, share valuable things in your industry, and eventually
build up followers, visitors, and trust.
Here, you are making friends with the customers, making your own popularity. So, when they
need your product or services they will not search for others and can buy from you as well as refer
to their friends.
SM Brand Management engages your target market, builds trust and leads to sustainable success
but it is extremely slow and can work only if a company has a long term vision for their brand.
Social Media Targeting
Social Media Targeting is where you find individuals on social media platforms one by one and
engage them about your services. This includes finding and tweeting people on Twitter based on
their description or keyword tweets, contacting someone directly on LinkedIn for a B2B sale, or
commenting on a blogger’s post.
This is very direct, provide immediate results but companies should be very careful of becoming a
spam. Companies need dedicated person to deploy this.
Market Gamification
Marketing Gamification is when you create your own viral content that usually indirectly promotes
your brand or services. This includes creating a viral video, hosting a competition, or creating a
novel site that’s just to get peoples’ attention.
This technique has potential of reaching millions of people opening door to the other social media
marketing techniques. This certainly creates a buzz. Being quite expensive technique a company
should have high budget for creating the industry buzz.
Social Bookmarking Promotion
Social Bookmarking Sites are services where people share resources via a reference URL instead
of the content itself. These sites include Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Delicious and dozens more.
The goal for this technique is to get on the front page or get top ranked on these sites, driving tons
What Do They Mean

6
and tons of traffic to your website.
While it can drive tons of traffic in a very small amount of time, it is slightly difficult to execute. The
traffic is quite untargeted with low conversion rates and time on site.
Social Media Influencer Campaign
This is probably the most effective and powerful ways of doing social media marketing. This is
having influencers who are popular bloggers, tweeters, video makers and such people promote
your product/services for you. In an Influencer Campaign, you are leveraging the engagement and
trust others have built for months and years. This creates the strongest form of traffic because not
only can it create hundreds of thousands of visitor, it also has a very high brand building and con-
versation rate since it is through a trusted referral.
To make this happen, marketers need to identify who are the top influencers in their niches and
establish relationships with them. Some marketers pay the influencers directly to advertise or
sponsor a conversation, some give out free units, and some just give out first dibs to new ser-
vices. Whatever it is, make sure the blogger discloses the relationship to their readers to not get in
trouble.
While it generates large amount of qualified traffic through a medium of trust, it is quite time con-
suming and expensive.
Social Media: Tactics, Tools, Time
What Do They Mean

Cloud Marketing
Cloud Marketing refers to any and all marketing efforts that take place on the Internet, aka the
Cloud provided as a service. If the marketing effort is performed or results in online expression and
is provided by a professional in the field as a service, with detailed online reporting, it's called 'Cloud
Marketing', now literally meaning 'marketing in the Cloud".
Simply put, Cloud Marketing is traditional marketing + Software as a Service. It's all supported by a
third party devoted to the maintenance of the platform. It consists of migrating all marketing assets
to exist online in customized consoles. Placing these assets online makes them easy for all parties
involved to create, modify, use and share. From a channel perspective, no one (VAR nor vendor)
has to have experience or training with the technology that supports them. It’s all supported by a
third party devoted to the maintenance of the platform.
It helps the businesses navigate web based social networks, content platforms and web based me-
dia marketing. Consulting, SEO, video production, website design, social media, email marketing,
blogging, mobile apps.
3. Why To Use Cloud Marketing
The end result of using cloud computing is a better infrastructure and a reduced cost—more for
less. So cloud marketing is the answer of why not apply that same philosophy to marketing products
through the partner channel?
Using technology allows marketing sector to do a couple of things:
 Reach out to customers more comprehensively.
 Integrate various data sources across traditional and digital media (radio, print, events, social
media, agency database etc.)
 Use analytics to not only up sell/ cross sell but also precision targeting, allowing for the opti-
mum match between the consumers need and services/ products offered.
Cloud computing offers a platform that essentially delivers seamlessness while plugging technology
gaps. Two of the most glaring gaps being:
 While the most marketers collect and analyze their own data for better targeting, there is little
or no integration of 3rd party data or data from other sources such as social media or tradi-
tional marketing vehicles such as television, events, radio, print etc.
 The analysis of the data to observe patterns is still uni-dimensional, focused on only one or
two marketing objectives. Very few marketers are using cloud to identify cross-boundary syn-
ergies that runs across industry verticals from banking to retail, manufacturing to insurance to
airlines etc.
Ultimately, technology is a tool that can serve to enhance existing models and in some cases gen-
erate new models that can enable two important things- expansion of a product/company’s existing
customer base and perhaps, more importantly, help in retention of customers that works towards
creating brand loyalty.
7 Social and Cloud Marketing– Impact on Businesses
What Do They Mean
Cloud Marketing

8
4. What a Cloud Marketing Service Can Offer
SOCIAL LISTENING: LISTEN AT SOCIAL SCALE
 Monitor and report on millions of social sources
 Gain actionable insights on brands, customers and industry
 Uncover sales, service and marketing opportunities
WORKFLOW AND AUTOMATION: ALIGN SALES, SERVICE AND MARKETING
 Build customer profiles
 Share social insight across teams
 Work at social scale and speed
SOCIAL CONTENT: CREATE COMPELLING SOCIAL PRESENCES
 Deploy content on social networks, websites and mobile
 Connect with customers through social applets
 Share branded content across teams to maintain consistency
SOCIAL ADS: AMPLIFY CONTENT
 Amplify brand and community stories
 Reach customers by social profile and activity
 Optimize campaigns in real-time
ENGAGEMENT: CONNECT WITH CUSTOMERS
 Create and manage a robust social content calendar
 Engage customers and build community
 Scale with team workflow and automation
MEASUREMENT: TRACK CAMPAIGN ROI
 Measure everything from campaigns to conversions
 Gain insight into all social ad campaign metrics
 Optimize activity and maximize ROI
What Do They Mean
Cloud Marketing

Impact on Businesses - SMM
9
Some Facts:
 Social media (84%), digital content creation (79%) and digital advertising (76%) are the three
most common digital marketing strategies companies are planning on. The sample includes
both B2C and B2B companies. Of these, social media is the most effective in creating and
sustaining communication with an entirely new segment of customers that aren’t being lis-
tened to today. (Source: High-Tech Tuesday Webinar: Profile of Marketing as a Technol-
ogy Buyer 25 October 2012 by Laura McLellan.)
 Forrester Research predicts, "B2B companies will spend $ 54 million on social media mar-
keting in 2014, up from just $ 11 million in 2009." Via eMarketer. So, staying on top of social
media and networking trends is essential for B2B marketers.
1. Why B2B need Social Media
B2B brands can leverage social media to adapt to the changing times by listening to consumers
online, synthesizing and analyzing conversations, and then leveraging insights for business intelli-
gence that result in the development of more agile strategies. Social media is how the current and
next generation of B2B customers are choosing to learn about new solutions and stay current on
brands they are loyal to. Some of the reasons for B2B businesses to go for social media are:
 Communities & Ecosystems: For social media to have an impact, companies have to fos-
ter collaboration and develop a community feeling. B2B communities are already common.
The B2B environment is made of ecosystems. Social media is ideal for fostering discussions
and brand advocacy through such ecosystems.
 User Content: B2B communities are niche and tend to be about passionate experts who
can create quality user content.
 Customer Collaboration: The ability to include customers in the development of a new
product or service has been a staple of B2B marketing for years. Most B2B offers are and
have been developed in close partnership with clients and third-party providers to add value.
 Low PR Risk: B2B is less exposed than B2C, so B2B players run fewer risks when engag-
ing in online collaboration.
 Mass Media Is Out: TV and outdoor advertising is out of reach for most B2B companies.
Hence the importance of digital and social media.
Some other reasons are:
 Branding and SEO
 Personal Connect with Target Customer
 Employee Collaboration
 Building Trust
 Creative Relevance

10
 Generating Authority
 Rich Content Creation
 Increase Lead Quality
 Lead Generation
 Conduct Customer Service
2. How Should B2B Companies Should Do
 Some platforms where B2B companies should make their presence
LinkedIn, Blogs (Industry/ Domain specific blogs), Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Slideshare,
Google+, Pinterest
 Creating research/whitepapers
 Creating Infographics
 LinkedIn Targeted Ads
 Email marketing
Social tools allow companies to engage customers in a whole new way

11
 Posting Reports and Presentations: If the company has recently completed an industry-
related report or presentation, for example, publish it on SlideShare and post a link to it on
Twitter. SlideShare is really well-designed for how people are looking for information these
days.
 Initiating Interaction on LinkedIn: Another great way to provide knowledge while market-
ing the company is to join groups on LinkedIn and start relevant conversations. These
groups are the biggest opportunities for businesses. Start a topic around what your niche is,
so that you can build an audience that is comprised of other businesses and business own-
ers.
LinkedIn also has a Q&A section where employees of different companies seek advice on
different topics. Providing helpful answers to these questions can help cement your role as a
leader and reliable source of information in your field.
 Organizing Events: One of the most helpful tools social media offers in terms of B2B mar-
keting is the ability to effectively organize events. This brings together leaders in the industry
and enhance thought leadership while marketing your company. Reaching out to businesses
before an event not only helps boost your attendance, but also helps you to build your cus-
tomer base afterward.
 Content Marketing: It is an inbound and outbound marketing strategy that allows people to
understand your company’s value proposition, experience your brand, and evaluate your ex-
pertise. Unlike advertising, content marketing for B2B companies is less intrusive and allows
for longer, less skeptical conversations and relationships between consumers and compa-
nies. Social Media and owned media properties allow consumers to engage with your com-
pany in the early stages of their buyer’s journey before entertaining the idea of contacting a
sales representative.
 Turning existing content into Visual formats and creating audio/video content: While
LinkedIn lends itself to longer conversations between companies and customers, the B2B
industry is starting to recognize the power of the visual. YouTube channels devoted to
launching products isn’t that far of a leap; the use of Pinterest in 2013, on the other hand, is
intriguing. The image-based social network is visually striking, and when combined with
more textual networks like LinkedIn, companies can create a more complete 360 degree pic-
ture of their products.
Content can take the form of blogs, online videos, podcasts, white papers, case studies, e-
newsletters, webinars and more. Consider new sources, too, like:
 Branded Tool: A branded tool for prospects and customers that provides them with a cus-
tomized analysis, report, product recommendation, or plan Widget: This is a small web appli-
cation that provides a simple function – such as weather, news headlines, sports scores –
without requiring the user to visit a website.
 Company-Focused Community Site: Instead of reaching your customers on a 3rd party
social network, build your social network. The main point is to cultivate a loyal community
and bring people together with similar interests and similar problems.

 Photo Sharing: Let customers share the fun of your product with photos. Flickr is the pri-
mary channel for this, but Picasa is also good. Supplement the photo sharing with discus-
sion threads and other content.
 Virtual Trade Show: A virtual trade show is a great way to overcome the time and travel
costs of hosting an actual trade show or conference. Consider a mix of live and pre-recorded
content – videos, slideshow presentations.
 E-Learning Series: a carefully planned curriculum of educational content that is delivered
via a series of webinars, slide show presentations, videos, or other platform. It’s a good way
to educate potential customers on complex topics and gradually introduce them to your solu-
tions.
Social media is a data channel that can tell a company about market swings, consumer tenden-
cies and business trends. Company have to be plugged in to receive the information. Social me-
dia is proving to be a real-time data channel that moves faster than any communications channel
companies have used prior.
Innovative brands are using social media data to develop marketing strategies based on real-time
insights. Guided by the voice of the consumer, businesses can now mitigate risk and make more
data-driven decisions in areas of marketing previously thought to be the domain of creative or in-
tuition. Performing analytics on consumer behavior in social media allows for smarter planning
which results in a more efficient marketing spend.
Social Media Objectives, Strategy and Tactics

3. Case: How IBM did this
IBM turns its sales staff social media savvy
IBM is the world’s largest IT and consulting services company. It has a diverse client base and de-
livers innovative solutions to help solve some of the toughest business challenges.
IT professionals increasingly use social media for product research. It is estimated that social me-
dia will form an integral part of the decision-making process for 75 per cent of IT professionals in
the future.
IBM wanted to tap in to the professional IT community via social media to support sales of its Pub-
lic Cloud service.
From social to sales
The challenge was to find an innovative way to build enduring relationships with this exacting,
technically savvy B2B audience. Activity needed to drive sales leads and embrace IBM’s culture
of innovation, ideas creation, openness and trust.
Objectives were two-fold: to generate a high quantity of good quality leads via social media and
efficiently progress leads from engagement to conversion to sales.
Three steps to success
An empowering social media programme was developed to enable sales representatives to use
social media (Twitter and LinkedIn) intelligently and effectively. At its core, the programme fol-
lowed a ‘listen and respond’ model.
Monitor the social sphere to identify hot topics
The relevance of the campaign depended on finely-tuned, ongoing social listening. Specific areas
taken into account included: customer questions on Twitter and LinkedIn, industry themes being
discussed, challenges and pain points.
Equip reps with a calendar of relevant and timely posts and links
After identifying exactly what issues and needs were affecting the target audiences and influenc-
ing social conversations at launch, a social media toolkit was developed. This drew on IBM’s
depth and breadth of industry expertise and enabled reps to respond to questions, join debates
and make recommendations that went beyond sales-led messages.
Extensive research went into valuable collateral that could be shared with online communities.
And the development of recommended hashtags facilitated greater reach and relevance.
Reps were trained so their contributions to online communities would be ‘real’ – individual, per-
sonal commentary drawing on a bank of knowledge provided for them. They were also educated
in the development of their own social listening skills and specifically advised on the importance of
timely responses. This led to them becoming ‘go-to’ points of knowledge for IT professionals.
Reps were also educated on how to target key conversations to engage ‘forward thinkers’ and in-
corporate them into their network.

Drive leads to each rep’s personalized digital rep page
To ensure a seamless transition from social conversations to sales conversations, each rep
sought to drive leads to their own personalized digital page. This allowed them to share specific
content and information about the solution they were selling at an appropriate time.
Three months after launch, 19 per cent of all Public Cloud Inside Sales Rep Page traffic could be
attributed to social media activity – and 11 per cent of these visitors clicked through to commerce
sites. This is a great achievement since inbound leads are much more cost-effective than those
attracted by paid-for media; they are also better quality, so convert at a higher rate.
Additional results for the first three months include:
 55 per cent increase in Twitter followers.
 More than 3500 tweets and retweets compared to less than 500 at implementation.
 More than two thousand Only clicks driving prospects and clients to rep pages and the
SmartCloud Enterprise website.

Business To Customer Perspective
4. How Different from B2B
Because B2C businesses seek to sell one to many and B2B sells one to one, the key metrics are
likely to differ. For instance, e-commerce site considers traffic, source and conversions as impor-
tant metrics, while, a business solutions company, is likely to consider unique visitors, opinions
and discussions, downloads, contact information and industry data as important metrics.
According to an eMarketer study, B2B online marketers focus on lead generation (38%), retention
(34%) and awareness. B2B social media marketing is ultimately about leads when compared to
B2C social media marketing which lays emphasis on awareness and branding.
Different Platforms for Different Needs
Since B2B buyers are more complex when compared to B2C buyers, the social media strategy
and the effectiveness metrics for B2B entails more focus on positioning and the choice of plat-
form. While B2C buyers can easily be drawn by promos or freebies on Facebook or Twitter, deci-
sions of B2B buyers are more calculated and linked to various factors. Customer service is also
likely to continue with a B2B buyer even after sales or service.
You won’t find the manager of your favorite café on LinkedIn but you are sure to find the manager
of the company you are doing business with on LinkedIn. This example illustrates the difference in
usage of social media platforms between B2B and B2C companies. The platform of choice for
your favorite café is probably Facebook, where they can promote deals and also get fans to
spread the word. On the other hand, B2B companies need to be more disciplined and profes-
sional with their approach. With over 150,000 business professionals on LinkedIn, it is clearly the
platform of choice for a company seeking business exposure and networking.
Whereas B2B and B2C marketers name improving customer engagement as the top priority, B2B
marketers care more about increasing content reach, lead quality and lead quantity. Tactics differ
considerably as well, with B2C more than twice as likely to advertise on social nets, and B2B four
times more likely to create whitepapers and research content.
What are the differences marketers see in B2B and B2C Social Media while measuring the
ROI?
Both B2B and B2C marketers are seeking the adrenaline rush of social media. With consumers
spending so much time on social media websites, savvy marketers are beginning to tap into these
sites as a free, viral marketing avenue.
For a B2B company, the company’s position or major issues in the industry are relevant and en-
gaging content for social media distribution. For instance, a blog post about an upcoming trade
show and things to watch out for shared on LinkedIn or other business networking sites is likely to
draw visitors to the blog post. Following that, occasional posts promoting products will be popular
too, since readers recognize the profile as an industry expert. For B2C, buyers’ needs are simpler,
allowing companies to promote deals and socials via social media platforms. Less informative but
more selling is involved when a B2C company uses social media. They rely on social media mar-
keting for branding and PR while B2B social media marketing is ultimately about the number of
leads.

5. How B2C Companies Should Do
Managing a brand on social media can be tedious and daunting to a lot of companies, but a truly
complete social media service should allow brands not only to easily distribute content on social
media channels but should also:
 Understand your audience and targets
 Own your brand
 Capitalize on user generated content
 Respond properly on negative views
 Facebook Page and Facebook Ads Analysis (Pinterest and Twitter)
 Provide a unique experience and content
 Facilitate user interaction with the company
 Create interaction between users
 Allow companies to have a voice
 Gather insights about a business community online, and help them understand how to man-
age their relationship with this audience in order to increase their level of engagement and
therefore the return on that engagement.
 Collect diverse information depending on the department within the organization using the
tool (marketing, communication, customer service, and R&D). Whether maximizing content
production, optimizing customer service, increasing ROI, drive traffic or measuring perform-
ance, a social media tool or service should allow different departments to find and manage
information useful to them.
 Receive appropriate support and training for a business to optimize their use of the platform
with the help of a customer service team or certified partner. Sometimes clients may be over-
whelmed or frustrated that their constant posting, or what they see as engagement, isn’t get-
ting them any more customers. A good social media consultant or service will support and
educate their clients.
 It should be focused on the necessity of creating social media campaigns around reduction
coupons or offers to redeem not only to increase the number of fans, but more importantly to
convert them into customers.

Web 2.0 tools can make websites powerful sales channels
User groups allow customers to learn from other customers

6. Case Study: HP
 31 days of dragon
 Challenge Increase sales of lagging laptops
 31 laptops were given to prominent tech bloggers
 Bloggers created contests to give laptops give away
 Laptops given out one day for a month
HP: Results
 Instant SEO: Top 50 Google entries were for the contest- 380000 links to 31 sites
 Created huge buzz among target market
 Sales: Increase 85% on an old product- Exponential ROI
7. Case Study: Jeep
 Community Home Base
 Flickr album of user submitted photos
 Links to MySpace and Facebook groups
 Links to user generated content and groups
 News, events, commercials
Touts the real Jeep enthusiasts

Measure of ROI
Measure of ROI
Effective ROI metrics incorporate both online and offline criteria. They also take into account the
indirect benefits of customer engagement, including:
 Better decision-making
 Cost avoidance
 Improved brand equity
 Improved customer loyalty
 Perceived differentiation
 Crisis containment/avoidance
Social media ROI begins with a goal and a strategy to reach it. Using key performance indicators
(KPIs) for the goal, we can measure success based on a certain value for that KPI. All of this is
just part of the sales funnel, and what happens at the bottom of the funnel is dependent upon how
the other parts of the funnel are managed.
Sales Funnel and ROI Metrics

Impact on Businesses - CM
Cloud Marketing
1. Strategies
Technology is having a profound impact on marketing as a function and business process. The
integration that cloud computing offers can literally allow the whole model to be re-imagined in a
way that allows a seamless match between what the consumer wants and what is offered by the
companies. Given that preferences are fragmenting and fragmenting at pace, it is more important
than ever before to place the right communication in front of the right audience. And the latest,
perhaps most comprehensive offering on the technology horizon, cloud computing, offers busi-
nesses unparalleled opportunity. Here is how;
 Cloud makes the integration of diverse data sources such as third party agency data, data
collected from mall events, radio and sms campaigns, phone surveys, etc., easier, faster and
cheaper.
 Cloud enables analysis across such multiple data sources easily and in real-time due to its
pervasive and distributed structure.
If your partners are in need of training on how best to sell your products, a cloud training site may
be the best choice. This site, customized for each partner based on their level of certification, has
video tutorials, whitepapers and marketing tips.
The idea is that partners with limited expertise in marketing, but high experience within the indus-
try, are able to use advertising and marketing resources developed at the vendor level. These re-
sources are high quality and strategically branded by the vendor’s product managers and market-
ing team for channel partners to use.
If your partners have limited marketing resources, it is probably a better idea to develop a cloud
marketing resource library that partners can use to quickly and easily get your product information
in front of customers.
The partners benefit because they get instant, customized help and expertise from the vendor that
is based on market research and brand quality. The vendor benefits because partners are com-
municating a succinct, cohesive, and consistent message at all customer touch points.
Cloud Marketing Strategy will
 use limited budgets to help both ends of the channel reach the end
 will limit competitor encroachment and allow for capture of market share
 marketers with the largest channel presence will be able to come in and capture larger por-
tion of the market
Current Practices Vs Cloud Marketing
 Vendor provides Partner Portal access
 Vendor updates their end
 Partners need to get the information and placed it to their website
 not all Partners have a Web developer on hand.
 By the time content actually reaches VAR websites, it may already be outdated

Cloud Marketing
With Cloud Marketing Strategy each Partner
 Have custom console tailored to their specific relationship with the vendor
 select which bits of information they want to appear on their websites and it appears there
automatically
 Effective time to market: zero
It gives a call to companies to re-think their strategies like emergence of a new Marketing CTO.
This justifies a new pillar in Marketing. They are :
 Creative
 Strategy
 Technology
Cloud Marketing can help the company using advantages of cloud mainly in eight catego-
ries of cloud application:
Web Analytics
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes
of understanding and optimizing web usage. It is often done without the permission or knowledge
of the user, in which case — particularly with third party cookies which can be shared between dif-
ferent web sites — it can be a breach of privacy. Some vendors are Google Analytics, Chartbeat,
KISSmetrics, Crazyegg, Clicktale, VisiStat etc.
PPC Management
The monitoring and maintenance of a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising campaign(s). This includes
changing bid prices, expanding and refining keyword lists, editing ad copy, testing campaign com-
ponents for cost effectiveness and successful conversions, and reviewing performance reports.
Some vendors are Marin Software, Click Equations, Clickable, Yield Software, SearchForce etc.
It refers to the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites.
Social media marketing programs usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention
and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. A corporate message spreads from
user to user and presumably resonates because it appears to come from a trusted, third-party
source, as opposed to the brand or company itself. Hence, this form of marketing is driven by
word-of-mouth, meaning it results in earned media rather than paid media. Some vendors are
PostRank, Radian6, Wildfire, ViralHeat, trackur, strutta etc.
Virtual Events
A virtual event is an occurrence of people gathering together where some or all of the attendees
are not physically in the same location but are connected in a common environment. The common
environment might be one of many types but is usually enabled through the use of computers and
the Internet. Some vendors are Critix Online, WebEx, Altus, Unisfair, 6connex, Yugma, VirtualEv-
ents365, Adobe Connect etc.

Cloud Marketing
Post Click Management
Post-click marketing is emerging as a recognized practice that aims at improving sales and mar-
keting results by focusing on website visitors when they respond to online marketing activities
such as pay per click advertising, HTML e-mails, and paid searches with the objective on increas-
ing conversion rates. Some of the vendors are Google web-site optimizer, LiveBall, unbounce,
SeeWhy, Dapper etc.
Marketing Automation
The name given to software platforms designed for marketing departments and organizations to
automate repetitive tasks is Marketing Automation. Marketing departments, consultants and part-
time marketing employees benefit by specifying criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes
which are then interpreted, stored and executed by soft-ware, which increases efficiency and re-
duces human error. It was originally called email marketing automation. Some of the vendors are
Eloqua, Marketo, Demandbase, Pardot, marketbright, SilverPop etc.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using email. In
its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email
marketing. It usually involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or dona-
tions, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Email marketing can be done to ei-
ther cold lists or current customer database. Some of the vendors are Exact Target, Constant
Contact, MailChimp, Emma, Bronto Software etc.
Cloud computing is a transformative technology that is expected to have a revolutionary impact on
the business of marketing. By mashing disparate technologies and content platforms, cloud mar-
keting empowers marketers to
 create unique campaigns,
 efficiently scale to support viral campaigns,
 lower marketing distribution costs, and
 support their corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives.

Cloud Marketing
2. Platforms of Cloud Computing for Marketing
Cloud computing breaks down and disseminates bits of information so they can be reassembled
into more complete narratives. It delivers unprecedented cost efficiency, scalability, agility, inde-
pendence, interoperability, reliability, and security. It's made feasible through the deployment and
interoperability of three platform types: software as a service (SAAS), platform as a service
(PAAS), and infrastructure as a service (IAAS). Brand marketers leveraging cloud marketing will
derive significant benefit from those platforms and gain a competitive advantage. Here are some
examples.
SAAS: Accelerating Content Distribution and Marketing Efficacy
SAAS over the Internet eliminates the need to install and run applications on consumers' com-
puters. This creates major implications for marketers as consumers move off their personal com-
puters (PCs) and onto the portals of brands and software providers.
Hasbro(It is an American multinational toy and board game company. It is one of the largest toy
makers in the world.) teamed with Google to launch an online version of Monopoly. The game
board leveraged Google Earth application programming interfaces (APIs) to provide users with
unprecedented scale and interactivity: They can "own" any street in the world.
Instead of playing the popular game only on PCs, it is elevated to the cloud and becomes device-
agnostic, enabling users to enjoy the game from their computers, smartphones, tablets, etc. In do-
ing so, Hasbro can significantly expand its reach while reducing its distribution costs.
Advertisers should watch that trend as other traditional software providers move toward SAAS.
For example, the Apple iPad's functionality will be powered in large part by its Internet connec-
tively rather than by its operating system and software. As consumers move online for their soft-
ware needs, including desktop publishing, photo editing, and tax preparation, new models will
emerge, enabling advertisers to target consumers via the software providers' sites.
While the Apple iAd looks compelling, so do future cloud computing ad-targeting services. Soon,
even ad production, creative development, media planning, asset management, and marketing
research will be moved to the cloud.
Channel marketing and B2B marketing are some of the biggest beneficiaries of cloud marketing.
Cloud training sites and intranet portals will serve as conduits for disseminating video tutorials,
whitepapers, marketing tips, and collateral.
Companies will manage their B2B communications with customer relationship management solu-
tions such as Sales-force.com and email solutions such as Constant Contact—both popular SAAS
solutions.
PAAS: Speeding Up Marketing Innovation and Collaboration
Many brands have embraced cloud marketing, which delivers content without walls. Cloud com-
puting is platform-agnostic, and marketers can easily integrate unique content and technologies to
create innovative mash able campaigns and applications.

Cloud Marketing
For the launch of its Ford Fiesta, automaker Ford developed a microsite,
www.FiestaMovement.com, chronicling the adventures of 20 teams of agents to reimagine the
way Fiesta gets advertised.
Those agents travel to major metros, stage events, create blogs and vlogs (video blogs), and
tweet about their experiences and the car. The microsite serves as a platform to integrate those
social-media channels.
Via social APIs, it also mashes up Google Maps and Foursquare locations. Best of all, the plat-
form promotes crowd-sourcing by allowing consumers to vote for their favorite "agent missions"
and campaigns. Serving as a PAAS, the microsite not only aggregates and enhances user-
generated content but also disseminates it to all the other integrated social-media environments.
In that sense, Ford has created a world of content without walls.
Pepsi fuses cloud marketing and CSR with its site RefreshEverything.com. Consumers, busi-
nesses, and nonprofits submit applications to secure funding for their ideas that will have a posi-
tive impact on society.
Applicants with the most votes are elevated to top section pages. The site demonstrates how
crowdsourcing and mashable cloud technologies bring together apps from YouTube, Google
Maps, Facebook, and blogs and comment plug-ins.
Similarly, services such as WebEx and GoToMeeting leverage the cloud to provision Web and
video conferencing. Best of all, companies embracing those tools for their marketing and sales
efforts are also supporting their CSR initiatives, because those services reduce the need to travel,
the carbon footprint, and greenhouse gas emissions.
IAAS: Cutting Costs and Improving Efficiency
Enterprise cloud computing is the only logical computing infrastructure to support viral and large-
scale marketing campaigns because of its pay-as-you-go cost structure, scalability, reliability, and
security.
A major consumer snack foods company launched a viral online promotion with coupons and a
giveaway. The viral nature of the offer, combined with a generous giveaway, led to a wildly suc-
cessful Internet branding campaign.
However, the success of the campaign took its toll on the client's traditional infrastructure. The
dramatic increase in traffic caused the website to collapse and affected the performance of the
client's corporate network.
The snack company could have avoided that debacle by developing the campaign's assets on on-
demand cloud technologies. In fact, virtualized cloud resources can provide up to 95% percent
cost savings compared with traditional data-centre services.
Information technology and marketing are under siege by new ideas, technologies, and demands.
Cloud marketing is disrupting traditional marketing models and creating unique opportunities and
efficiencies. Marketers who leverage cloud marketing will become the new royalty of marketing.

Cloud Marketing
3. Why SaaS
Why SaaS Marketing is Most Beneficial
After having taken to market both SaaS (starting in 2002) as well as traditional on-premise soft-
ware solutions, here are some of the significant differences between the two models as it relates
to marketing.
Focus on the business buyer
One of the biggest changes in marketing SaaS vs on-premise software is the makeup of your tar-
get audience. While IT departments traditionally had a lot of influence over the software buying
decision and acted as gate keepers, cloud solutions today often allow you to deal directly with the
business problem owner and end user to make the decision and subscribe to your service (this
obviously depends a great deal on the complexity, integration and scope of the solution). One of
the biggest factors in the adoption of cloud solutions is that business users can activate the solu-
tion quickly, often without having to rely on slow IT resources.
For many applications, this will allow you to bypass IT in the early stages of adoption or alto-
gether, depending on your solution. This is especially true for stand-alone, point solutions that
don't require integration into on-premise or other cloud solutions.
Re-focus messaging from product to buyer
While more direct access to the decision maker and buying authority may simplify the decision
process to some ex-tent, it requires marketing to better understand the underlying business prob-
lem the cloud solution is solving. Technical specs, speeds and feeds are now much less impor-
tant, even irrelevant, to the buyer as they are often entirely encapsulated and "hidden" in the
cloud.
What matters to the business user is the business value the solution delivers, the process it helps
automate or en-able, the cost it reduces or the opportunity it unlocks. In addition to your unique
business and functional message, make sure to also embed a unique version of the “generic”
cloud value proposition (lower cost and complexity, higher flexibility, faster on-boarding, seamless
scalability, etc) into your marketing message and make them relevant and specific to your offer-
ing.
Create buyer personas
For many software vendors who have been selling traditional on-premise solutions to customers,
this focus on the business buyer and their unique requirements should not be new. The move to
the cloud, in combination with dramatically changing buyer behaviors, however, requires a more
sophisticated approach to marketing. It requires a crystal clear definition of your target segments,
target buyer personas, and the typical journey your buyers take from problem to buying decision
to actual purchase. This path needs to be made painfully easy for prospects to travel along. With
powerful content assets that lead, just like breadcrumbs, from problem to solution.

Cloud Marketing
Simplify content marketing
Content marketing (combined with robust marketing automation) allows you to scale and put
much of your inbound marketing efforts on "auto pilot", and "cherry pick" the leads you want to en-
gage with directly, when they are ready to talk to you. While there are many steps in the decision
process and many buyer personas that influence it, I have found that simplification is key to suc-
cess. Especially if your marketing and sales organization is new to content and buyer centric mar-
keting, don't be tempted to build the perfect system that, for example, captures 8 granular buying
stages, 5 buyer personas, across, 5 market segments. Creating compelling content for the inter-
sections of all these dimensions, you might be looking at hundreds of assets to be produced and
deployed. This will easily overwhelm even the most sophisticated marketing teams.
Highlight pricing model advantages
Pay as you go or subscription models enabled by cloud services allow buyers to adopt your solu-
tion much more quickly as they don't have huge upfront license fees to worry about that are often
Capex, require justification, and many levels of sign-off. Instead, the monthly subscription pay-
ments can often fly under the radar and get paid without the intense scrutiny of big, lump sum
payments, making it easier for buyers to pull the trigger.
Highlight SaaS trial advantages
Cloud solutions make it easy for you to showcase your solution and make Trial or Freemium ver-
sions available as an offer and call to action that can be immediately provisioned. You can, for ex-
ample, make a time limited (e.g. 1 month), concurrency limited, (e.g. number of parallel projects)
or feature limited (e.g. disable premium features) version of the solution available in a self-service
provisioning model and upsell later.
With software as a service, you can even see what features your trial users are actually using and
are most interested in, and incorporate this information into your marketing and sales response (at
the individual user level, lever-aging marketing automation - you can even build feature usage into
your lead scoring model to indicate sales readiness).
This insight into actual usage patterns allows you to fine-tune and reality-test your marketing mes-
sage in a way that was previously impossible or cost prohibitive with packaged software. These
insights, by the way, also enable you to create different, more granular subsets of your offering
that you can provide to different segments in a way that was economically not feasible in the tradi-
tional on-prem model.
Address SaaS related concerns proactively
Cloud applications often face objections regarding data privacy (for example with companies in
Europe), regulatory compliance, legal concerns, service availability, and other issues (especially
with prospects in the late majority segment).

Cloud Marketing
4. Cases in Point
Citibank
The company is a 200 year old bank. Both technology and data are the backbone of any financial
services business. Citibank regularly maps the patterns of customer purchases to identify trends
and then uses that to categorize its customers to be able to deliver a different, possibly a more
personalized experience to each type of customer. So, better technology, such as cloud comput-
ing can help improve its functionality significantly.
Shopper’s Stop
Retail as an industry, both from the traditional brick and mortar side to the new dot.com side,
lends itself very well to targeting, specifically contextualized targeting, which starts with a loads of
data. And technology is the enabler for this. Shopper’s Stop analyze their data to identify trends
across customer demographics. Then they categorize customers based on shopping habits and
pitch a new product or a promotion based on this analysis. Their success speaks for their method.
Britania
A niche campaign run by run by Britania is a case in point. Technology in this case enables them
to target a specific group of end point consumers and enter into a rewarding engagement with that
target group. In a category like theirs, the direct customers they are actually dealing with are retail-
ers and not the end of the line customers. They have 6000 direct customers and a staggering 400
million consumers. Britania points that it is here that they use the digital space to build engage-
ments such as an online community that talks about health. Reach comes cheaper for them
through other mediums such as television. Technology in this case creates a connection between
creator and consumer.
NIIT
Dealing with a very different model is a company such as NIIT Ltd. NIIT is trying to straddle both
worlds because the company provides an educational, knowledge service; where the consumer is
not the customer. The consumer is a 17-18 year old who is leaving class 12 and getting into col-
lege while the customer is his father who is a digital mi-grant, if at all he is digital. In such a case,
while NIIT uses the latest of technology in terms of its service, offering a cloud campus for its flag-
ship three years long GNIIT course, it has to use two different mediums to reach its consumers
and customers. While the consumer is completely digital, the customer or parent has to be
reached through traditional means such as print and television advertisements. An example of
technology helping is their curriculum sup-port program, which was launched in 2005 with 100%
print advertising and moved completely to digital marketing in 2008. Today, 60% of their advertis-
ing spend is on digital platforms.

Cloud Marketing
5. What It has for Future
Big Data + SaaS = Better Marketing
Web applications which aggregate vast quantities of publicly available data and turn it into useful
information for customers for a fee are a natural progression of software-as-a-service. These Big
Data applications or BDAs, as some are calling them are already starting to appear.
"Big Data is based on three Vs - Volume, Variety and Velocity," says Yvonne Genovese, an ana-
lyst at Gartner. "Volume means there is a lot of it. Variety means that there might be text, video,
pictures, audio, not just numbers that fit into the columns of spreadsheets. And velocity means it is
being generated very rapidly."
Big Data Use Cases
There are plenty of use cases for Big Data analysis when the data is proprietary, generated and
owned by a particular organization. In the music business, companies have album art, sleeve
notes, music and so on. This is Big Data. Or project management companies probably have vast
amounts of paper and digital records of their projects. It would be very useful for these companies
to be able to analyze it and get nuggets of info from it.
Other use cases for Big Data include drug research, credit card fraud detection, sports perform-
ance management and even crime prediction (A California-based company called PredPol ana-
lyzes police crime data to predict where and when crimes are likely to be committed, so that police
officers can be dispatched there before the crime takes place.) Some dating sites and job-finding
services (another type of match making) are also known to use Big Data analysis.
Very large organizations generate massive amounts of data about their products which they can
analyze on their own Big Data platforms for marketing purpose - for example, to create sales pro-
motions or customer retention programs. But smaller companies don't generate the same volumes
of data, and even if they did, the cost of the computing resources required to process it "quickly
and repeatedly," along with the cost of sufficient storage resources, would likely be prohibitive.
That's where BDAs come in. They are uniquely placed to offer Big Data analysis-as-a-service for
marketing purposes because they can offer three key things:
 Computing resources
 Data
 Analysis algorithms

Cloud Marketing
6. Companies Providing Such Services

Conclusion
30
Saumya Verma
MBA, Class of 2013
Department of Management Studies
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee
Roorkee (Uttarakhand) - 247667
India.
E– Mail : saumya.eck@gmail.com
Blog : www.saumyaverma.com
LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/saumyaverma
Facebook : http://fb.com/saumya.eck
Twitter : https://twitter.com/saumya_verma
To be a good marketer, one should collectively use the Social Media Marketing and Cloud Market-
ing services along with other internet marketing techniques. This will really add on to the existing
holistic marketing process and result in significant sales.

References
31
1. http://www.yukaichou.com/marketing-gamification/5-dominant-techniques-social-media-marketing/
2. http://www.compukol.com/blog/social-media-marketing-defined/
3. http://www.b2bmarketing.net/knowledgebank/social-media-marketing/case-studies/case-study-ibm-turns-
its-sales-staff-social-media-
4. http://digitalstrategies.tuck.dartmouth.edu/assets/images/B2BSocialMedia.pdf
5. http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2317615
6. http://www.business2community.com/content-marketing/what-is-content-marketing-5-0464495

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