Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is an important component in the modern information technology era. Organizations have been compelled to invest in technology and ensure that they have all the necessary infrastructure and capacity to run all their needs. One of the areas that has been remodeled and improved to accommodate the revolution of technology is marketing. Firms have been able to both reduce costs and increase efficiency in marketing their products. In many firms, marketing take a very huge budget and any efforts that reduce these costs are a welcome feature. Cloud computing is a new technological advancement in the recent past. It enables a firm to partially outsource IT services, and hiring them as they are required. It reduces cost, increases efficiency and saves the hiring company resources for people who are ideally meant to maintain the system. Technology has created new segments that help B2B processes. Some of the avenues through which technology has revised the normal marketing and advertising is the use of applications, increased collection of data, increased content that has made advertising a better field as well as the scalability of technology. As firms expand and most of them go global, the same is being reflected of their marketing strategies,. They are being forced to revert to global marketing practices, but are still required to retain their domestic relevance. They are under pressure to cut costs but remain effective in their chosen methods of advertising. Internet has created many new segments such as cloud computing.
Cloud computing is the setting where information technology services are offered as a public utility. Users can use the facility in three main different ways that include infrastructure, platform and software services. The model is generally a pay as you use based. Marketers are among the category of businesses activities that may benefit from cloud marketing. There are several attributes that are connected to cloud computing that enable them to have the right balances between efficiency and costs.
The first attribute is scalability. A firm can evaluate the success of failure of a certain marketing and advertising plan. The business has to develop the right metrics for their advertisement campaigns. Since the infrastructure is already available and developed, the advertiser can easily change the content. Marketing is often seasonal where some periods would involve intensive marketing and advertising, while others would have less activity. If a firm decided to invest in an entire system, there would be a lot of infrastructural and software purchasing. At the same time, experts would be required to maintain the system. Despite all the investment, the system would have several months in a year when there is little advertising and marketing. This makes cloud computing better because the infrastructure is ready and the company would only pay for the services rendered at only a certain given time. Therefore, the firm is saved maintenance and any upgrade fee. When organizations build their internal systems, they often have very little ability to change the system, unless they carry out a complete overhaul, where the old system is discarded while a new one is installed. This process is often very expensive and limits the performance of an organization because they take long to budget for a new system. Cloud computing provides a very practical solution to this trend, providing services whenever they are needed. There would be no software and hardware costs, and there would be no additional personnel who are expected to manage the system. Since the services would be sought only what they are needed, there would be better management of resources while the results would be as good as internal management of information technology. Through the scalability technique, a firm can decide to increase or decrease their marketing scope as they see appropriate.
Secondly cloud computing can be sought through collaborative practices. This is a very unique ability of the system because they are able to ensure that information from different branches are easily integrated. To connect different branches of an institution, there does not need to increase infrastructure or software. For instance, if a university was using cloud services, and they opened up a new campus, the new campus would require very little investment for it to be added to the system. The addition would only require a simple portal to be added to the main system and this would make the entire organization covered. Cloud computing would simply enable an online presence for an organization with little input apart from the initial capital. Further, organizations are always aiming at growth. As they increase in size and branches, they would have more and more data to manage. Cloud computing enables an organization to increase their data to be handled by the system without necessarily investing in infrastructure and software.
Through cloud computing, an organization gets high connectivity. It is easy for a firm to get views than if they were to carry out campaigns in-house. Cloud computing is compatible with nearly all technology, old, and new, and with nearly all search engines, phon applications. Therefore, there are no limits to the same. It is also compatible with nearly all formats of the adverts as well as versions making it accessible for anyone to access it from any device. To further improve on compatibility, cloud provides the user with a choice while accessing the adverts. For instance, a change in location from one region to another could lead to a change in language if most of the mainstream systems are used. However, the case is different with cloud, whio maintain the set standards irrespective of the location. The user could however advise the system to change with them as they travel. For instance, a traveller from Germany to England may access the ads in German, while they can still adjust it to English. The presence of cloud in an effective global scale also permits advertisers to access information that is expensive to plant online. For instance, a person searching for an institution of learning on the internet would be give different options of the institutions that are within their locality search.
In order to have a marketing system that is effective and cost conscious, there are several strategies that the firm must put in place. First, the process of ad creation should be thorough and well calculated. The advert should cut across as many societies as possible. It should be creative and capticvating to increase the number of views. While the initial investment on the advert may be slightly higher than normal, the created advert would reach out to more customers and would have a bigger impact than a normal advert that is targeted to a certain group. The advert would then be passed on to the loud team who would be advised to use all the resources that they have to link it to personalized marketing platforms such as social media and professional websites. Once in these sites, links could be provided for details in the main institution’s site on the cloud computing platform. This strategy would be cost effective because there are no new systems that would be used. It would also reach out many people due to the interest raised by the advert concept. Since cloud can handle high volumes of data, they can easily handle any form of video or graphical advert and pass it to any of their linkage sites. Through the strategy, it would possible for the advert to get the targeted 5 million hits every day.
Another strategy would be to use educative media. They should also redirect the user to the main site with organizational details. When passed to different social media sites, it would increase its availability and concurrent connections per minute. This is a very good strategy compared to the mainstream internal sites which has limited online presence and eventual reach is reduced. These strategies are very cost effective because the media used is regulated and managed by passive individuals. For instance, sharing of creative works among Facebook users creates a virtual medium compared to television and radio, where the consumer can listen and gain the knowledge, but would not pass it to the next user in its original form.
One highly important aspect of a system is its changeability. Most concepts are developed and taken out to the media and the initial marketing model has to remain for that campaign till the end. The same does not apply to cloud computing. Additions and subtractions can be made at insignificant costs, as the advert continues to run. New utility service portals to include new arrivals or even enjoining platforms would be vital in this case.
In conclusion, cloud computing is the real future for organizational information technology management. It provides users with options that were ideally unavailable to markets and users. The highly reduced costs and increased efficiency as well as reachability make it the ideal platform for marketing. It reduces the cost of initial investment as well as maintenance, making it easy for the managers to budget and utilize the available resources in a better and more satisfying way.
