With cloud-based tools, business owners can send the e-mail campaign, track who responds, scale the capacity of their landing pages on-demand and measure real-time and post campaign performance without the need for costly creative, management, and IT experts.

Furthermore, business owners and contractors can now do even more with their marketing campaigns. Determining what days are best for delivery of e-mail campaigns (and even what times of day) are now standard reporting metrics. Also, discovering what types of devices (e-mail clients, cell phones, tablets) audiences use are analytics that will allow you to adjust your creative formats in future campaigns. Similarly, identifying exactly who is (and who is not) clicking will allow you to prioritize and segment your distribution lists accordingly.

The true payoff, however, is that cloud marketing technology enables all of this activity in standard browser-based environments and does so on off-premises servers—eliminating the need for dedicated infrastructure and specialized in-house staff. Bottom line: you can do all of this and still focus on construction projects, not managing more people.

 
Drastically Lower Costs

The cloud also drastically changes the way construction companies pay for their website hosting activities, services and marketing campaigns. In a sense, the cloud allows companies to consume these services much like they consume electricity. Instead of having traditional fixed costs associated with website hosting, companies can now scale their hosting services up or down depending on various times of the year when more activity is needed or not needed.

Because everything takes place in the cloud, they pay their cloud service provider accordingly, depending on whether it’s a month where more marketing activity has taken place. In much the same way a homeowner pays a higher utility cost to heat their home during the winter, a business owner would only pay a higher cost for e-mail and website hosting services in a given day or month when there was a special promotion taking place, or the need for more bandwidth to handle increased web traffic during the peak build season or trade show.

On the surface, cloud marketing may sound like another buzz-term, but considering the power that cloud marketing offers, combined with e-mail, social media and website administration can do for a business, it’s a must-have in today’s world of limited budget, limited staff and expense avoidance.
 
Mark Reino is the CEO of Merit Mile Communications, a marketing communications agency. The firm takes on business planning and consulting assignments, as well as creative services engagements such as branding and custom web development—all designed to fast track the business growth of its client partners.