Best Practices For Marketing To Buyers “In The Cloud”

The Forrester Blog For Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals.

“Cloud computing” is a very hot topic, and like social media, subject tomuch debate about “what is cloud computing?” and “what does it mean for business?” Simply stated, cloud computing lets your customers and potential buyers take advantage of services and resources delivered as an online utility. Buyers get the benefits of using your technology without worrying about the technical details as much as they would if they implemented software inside their data centers. The benefits can include : lower capital investment, faster implementation, reduced risk, proven security and improved scalability to handle the increased amounts of data. Purists believe that true cloud computing requires large scale sharing by infrastructure/application providers and their consumers alike.While my colleagues at Forrester try to sort out the market and make it easier for IT buyers to decide where to invest, I’d like to explore the idea of marketing to customers in the cloud.

B2B marketing needs to embrace the cloud. Most executives see marketing as a large discretionary line item in the corporate budget. During tought economic times, that “discretion” gets cut more often than not. Marketers perpetuate this short-sighted perspective when they focus more on program and campaign spending and fail to invest in the capital or IT support needed to make marketing execution more efficient and the results more visible to the organization.

Continues @http://blogs.forrester.com/