The marketing cloud has become a familiar term to anyone trying to drive B2B revenue in a noisy, digital B2B world. Sales and marketing teams face constant pressure to move faster and convince more people to buy. Your responsibilities aren’t limited to meeting demand for better products, services and prices. Your work as a B2B marketer starts way before that, with searches for better information and answers from top of funnel to the bottom. 

An intent-based marketing cloud is a trusted solution to address these challenges. With its wide range of capabilities, you can intensify marketing efforts and achieve business goals. B2B marketers have a lot on their plates. Putting the focus on intent insights gives you a leg up to: 

• Identify buyers in search mode
• Understand their pain points
• Create personalized engagement

Use Marketing Cloud Gather Active Buyer Insights, Launch Coordinated Response

Today, the web is flooded with buyer data, and B2B marketers yearn to exploit that information to optimize campaigns. They need valuable insights to gain deep buyer understanding and predict actions and responses. Now the marketing cloud has become the model for integrated B2B marketing. 

Because intent touches nearly everything B2B prospects do during their online journeys, it’s the foundation for the solutions within an intent-based marketing cloud. Wherever your customers and prospects are on their journeys, an intent-based marketing cloud can give the best available view of your demand generation efforts and ROI. 

Depending on configuration, the marketing cloud model delivers an integrated platform of solutions for:

• Journey management
• Email
• Social engagement
• Website activity
• Personalization
• Digital advertising
• Content customization
• Management and analysis

Another advantage of cloud computing is that marketing software can be hosted on the cloud and accessed from anywhere. Because today’s marketing can be quite complex, the marketing cloud gives you the means to keep it together with:

• Campaign insights and analytics
• Content syndication
• Programmatic advertising
• Full funnel demand generation

Never Take Your Eye Off the Data 

Raw data feeds provide intent signals that show what buyers are interested and perhaps ready to buy. A marketing cloud integrated with intent data makes such buyer intent signals more actionable by: 

• Managing and integrating data across channels and campaigns
• Normalizing and cleansing data from multiple sources
• Delivering data that is accurate, current and actionable
• Better activation and monitoring of contact-level data

Actions occurring within a marketing cloud would typically involve strict identification requirements. Cloud computing can be one of the most secure ways to store information.

Marketing Cloud Drives Better Customer Experience 

In a survey, 90% of B2B leaders say their strategic priorities depend on positive customer experience. A marketing cloud approach gives details about buyer behavior that may relate to your level of success in meeting their needs. Do they respond to certain targeted campaigns over others? Do in-market buyers search on topics that you haven’t even thought of? Are there markets you may be unintentionally ignoring because you’re not aware of their data?

A marketing cloud with intent intelligence gives better insights into buyer behavior history – past and future. Actual facts about buyer behavior helps you to anticipate future actions and responses and cultivate better relationships.

For example, imagine you browse the web about a product or a service, but stop short of buying it. The next time you log on, you’re bombarded with ads related to that or similar products. Be it social media, mobile, or email, wherever you flip through, content related to that type of product flashes on every portal. You’re surrounded by a “cloud” of relevant engagement. If as a buyer you’re looking for a solution, this could be a positive experience. 

Cloud marketing is all of a brand’s digital marketing efforts, personalized and integrated to improve a buyer’s experience. The goal is to reach buyers where they are, whether it’s on social media, checking their email or visiting a website.

Optimize Campaigns with Personalized Communication

According to the 2020 Gartner B2B Marketer Survey, 79% say personalized communication is the best way to engage with buyers. And if executed properly, it can increase the possibilities of a high-quality deal by 12%. 

“Personalized Communication” means marketers modify marketing messages as per customers’ needs and preferences. This requires marketers to understand buyer interests and develop content solutions according to their needs and preferences. 

An intent-based marketing cloud plays a crucial role in this scenario. It gives you (as marketers) access to incomparable intent insights. Using that guidance, you can create a personalized content and landing pages, improve email segmentation, and drive better responses. 

Better Insights for Engaging Content 

The role of analytics tools in the cloud extends beyond insights related to the target audience. They also serve vital information related to the content that pulls the audiences naturally. After all, content is the driving force for inbound marketing. It engages buyers and entices them to make a purchase decision, or at least another journey step. 

So catering to quality content is the key to engagement and conversions. But how can marketers determine what makes content engaging and powerful? Cloud-based data analytics tools help by identifying the best-performing content – or the opposite. Further, they can provide information about how and where customers interact with this content and how marketers can alter their approaches (via the cloud) to attract more attention.

Additional Benefits of Intent-based Marketing Cloud

• Budget- and Time-Friendly: A marketing cloud allows your organization to consolidate marketing tools and systems into a single platform. It makes these resources available across internal teams to let everyone view account-level engagement, campaign performance, forecast and refine campaigns. By combining all the data, intelligence and orchestration you need to drive personalized demand generation into a single experience, the marketing cloud saves you time and money.
• Mobile in Nature: As the marketing cloud brings tools and resources into a single platform, it empowers marketing and other teams to access these capabilities from anywhere and anytime. 
• Increases Efficiency: A marketing cloud delivers data and applications via cloud or web. It eliminates the need to install tools on user desktops, laptops or mobile devices. This helps reduce demands on the IT department. Tools and applications that are integrated into the cloud can be accessed from anywhere. Essentially, this makes data storage and distribution easier. At the same time, it reduces the burden on your IT infrastructure.
• Empowers operations and processes: With cloud-based tools, B2B marketers gain control over marketing and content. They can launch programs independently without relying on other teams, which streamlines operations. Increasing automation in marketing operations strengthens the business as a whole.

The marketing cloud serves B2B sales and marketing teams as a reliable infrastructure to connect with in-market buyers and influencers. It’s important to understand the full value of this contemporary approach. Learn more in these articles:
What to Look for in Your Integrated Marketing Cloud