Defining a Cloud Marketing Strategy? Here Are Some Tips

There’s no doubt that you need a good cloud marketing strategy if you plan to sell cloud services to your clients successfully.

The cloud services market is becoming quite saturated nowadays, with even the more traditional IT service providers waking up to the benefits of selling (or reselling) cloud services, particularly in relation to the ongoing commission streams that the latter can provide.

Here are five tips to help you define your cloud marketing strategy:

1. Find a niche

The cloud services marketplace is a busy one. And every cloud service provider is competing with both small independent providers, and big names like Microsoft, complete with their huge marketing budgets.

As such, the best strategy is to find yourself a niche. What exactly are you providing? Are you specializing in particular cloud services or looking to market an “all in one” solution? Whatever you do, try to find a unique selling point of some kind to help you stand out from the pack.

2. Decide on your target market

You won’t conduct your cloud marketing effectively if you don’t know who you are marketing to! So, you need a specific objective.

The nature of cloud services means you can market them to anyone, anywhere, but this doesn’t mean that a “scattergun” marketing effort will win you results. You need to define your target market, perhaps by focusing on a vertical market, or simply by concentrating your efforts on offering personal service to businesses in your local area.

3. Highlight cost benefits

Cloud services are almost always sold on a subscription-based, “as a service” model, which usually gives you the ability to advertise a temptingly low “from” price. However, smart business people are also wise to the total cost of ownership (TCO), so do your math and make sure that your cloud services really do offer cost benefits over “on-premise” systems when worked out over a sensible timescale.

4. Choose your initial marketing methods

The key part of defining your marketing strategy is ascertaining what marketing methods you’re going to use. You can always experiment and change things as you go along, but you must decide what to do first, and what to spend your initial marketing budget on. Give this the time and thought it deserves.

5. Be ready to address objections

Not everyone is convinced that cloud services are the way forward. Some people are still traditional in their technical thinking and need convincing.

It makes sense to pre-empt some of these objections and have good answers ready. You could perhaps even build an FAQ section on your company website that addresses these objections in advance. These days, people will want strong reassurances about privacy and data security. If you give them these before they even ask for them, you will already be one step ahead.

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