CMOs are under increased pressure to show tangible return for their marketing spend while delivering on an expanded customer agenda. Providing a high-quality experience across multiple channels on a consistent basis is difficult, especially with competitive noise. To keep marketing efforts moving, some leaders have turned to cloud as a technology differentiator.
Cloud solutions are gaining steam for their ability to support sophisticated platforms and systems. Many organizations use cloud-specific marketing platforms-as-a-service, which are expertly configured process layers that sit on top of an organization’s existing cloud system. Just about any cloud platform will work with this kind of PaaS platform, be it software as a service, platform as a service or infrastructure as a service.
How do marketers get the most out of these systems for their buyer’s journey? We offer 3 ideas:
- Start with Analytics: 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. Capturing data at these decision processes enables an even deeper and granular approach to successful marketing.
- Optimize Ad 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. All this is far easier when there is a platform to watch the effectiveness of this spend and help marketers gauge whether more should be spent, or if the program should be pulled.
- Aggregate Your Customer Service: Having 30 tabs open to respond to customer challenges is not the most efficient way to get things done. A PaaS platform dedicated to driving customer buyer’s journey outcomes is far better, by aggregating customer data, flagging common issues, cataloging client service histories, and quickly sharing, refining and pushing solutions across channels. Sometimes, customers want to be heard much more than they want to see your fancy marketing message.
With these insights in mind, marketing can finally take its efforts to the next level with customers feeling heard and marketing executives in control. It’s the best of both worlds.
Get Started
Are you looking to connect the cloud to your buyer’s journey? Speak to a sales specialist today at sales@perficient.com and download our portals guide below for more on-point information about customer experience.
Today’s organizations must be more connected to their customer than ever. As the buyer’s journey evolves, leaders must also adopt the right technologies to influence positive business outcomes. This post is a part of a series focused on helping enterprises develop the necessary strategies and best practices to better connect with their customers. Check out the other blogs in this series.
