Tomorrow (Tuesday, August 31) at 2pm Eastern, I’ll be presenting a MarketingProfs webinar, “Marketing in the Cloud.” Sponsored by Citrix, it’s an updated take on my post about marketing in the cloud from a couple of years ago. I’m writing this last minute, but if you catch this in time, you can join the event for free by registering here.
Since my original post, marketing in the cloud has come a lot more down to earth, been fruitful and multiplied. Hundreds of more software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications have been released for marketers in every category imaginable (and many new ones!). Analytics, SEO, PPC, social media, email, virtual events, post-click, etc.
It’s dizzying, empowering and intoxicating. Marketers have more choices of software, with more capabilities and more competitive alternatives, than ever before. We’ve entered a Golden Age of marketing technology.
Adopting these applications as subscription services in the “cloud” — whether you call it SaaS, on demand, web-based, hosted, whatever — offers numerous benefits:
- easy to try with demos, trials, flexible contracts, and zero integration
- easy to buy: no up-front capital investment, no rigid capacity planning
- leverage the economies of scale of the application provider
- your application software is always up-to-date, no painful “upgrades”
- your application is available anywhere, any time, on (almost) any device
- a single point of support — the SaaS provider is fully accountable
- freedom from IT — your budget, your timeframe, your decision
And while there are also concerns about adopting SaaS applications — reliability, security, and “exitability” — many of these considerations are relative to equivalent risks in traditional on-premise software. We’ll discuss some of the ways to mitigate them. My post last week about The Age of Disposable Software proposed one way to fully embrace the freedom and fluidity of the new cloud era.
Anyway, here are my slides for the presentation — whether you make it or not to the webinar, I’d love your feedback:
P.S. To my many friends who develop marketing software — forgive me if I didn’t include you in the “walking tour” (or running tour, actually) of cloud-based applications. There are hundreds and hundreds, and I could only grab a few, almost at random, to make my point to the audience of the enormous breadth and depth in this space.
