I attended the Google Cloud Conference for Retail this Tuesday at Arcadian Loft, Toronto and I thought that I will share the two key things that I learnt from the folks at Google in this blog. But first, let me tell you what the conference was all about.
The conference was about Google’s cloud platform stack like Google marketing cloud, Bigquery, GTM, Google ads 360, GA360 and so on. You must be already knowing them. The event was focused on retail industry. Primarily because retail is a huge industry in North America and churn humongous amounts of data from its digital and physical retail operations. It is a big challenge for Marketers, operations and IT heads to harmonize the data between all these systems and have the accurate numbers across all the platforms.
Also, since the capacities keeps on changing, for example on Black Friday, it is expensive and time consuming to deploy infrastructures to handle the suddenly-increased load. That’s where cloud comes to the rescue. Having the systems like POS, databases, ERPs on cloud solves both the problems. With these systems moved to cloud, we have the data harmonized everywhere with pin point accuracy and server capacities for peak times can be tweaked at the click of a button.
Sounds simple right? But no, moving to cloud is not that easy. Reason being, the departments that make this happen generally work in silos and have different objectives.
1. Marketing and IT need to work together
Imaging you as a Digital marketer want to move your DB to Big Query and want to present fancy Tableau reports to you CXOs. Can you do it without moving your IT systems from in-house servers to cloud and expose your company’s sensitive data to Tableau without IT’s help? The answer is no. These are ITs responsibilities. And the problem is that IT and marketing have completely different objectives. Though both digital marketers and IT access the same systems to do their jobs, a Digital marketer is responsible for bringing healthy traffic, lead and conversions, whereas, IT is responsible for maintaining uptime. There are a very few leading retailers in Canada who have so far cracked it like The Home Depot, Loblaws and Carrefour.
2. A new breed of Digital Marketing Agencies: Specialized in Cloud, automation and AI.
I remember the times (early 2000s) when marketing agencies used to be Creative, and PR and Digital used to be their extended arm. Then the picture changed when google and Facebook attacked us and Digital marketing agencies become the talk of the Marketing Managers' towns. They started offering clearly distinguished services like PPC, Social media marketing, Content and Online PR. They called themselves ‘Full-service’ agencies. However, as the market grew, they started specializing in these arms. In the recent Google Cloud conference, I saw a new breed of agencies that specialized in creating an omni-channel experience for their clients and transforming them to ‘Digital’. They call it ‘Digital Transformation’. I can see the need for such agencies from a retail company’s point of view. To ‘Digital transform’ your company you need a very complex and varied set of expertise like: IT, SQL, Database management, Data science, HTML, development and of course digital marketing. A typical digital marketing agency doesn’t have this expertise. Even the ‘Full service’ ones. That’s why the need for a vendor that specializes in tech comes into the picture. Here are few of the services these agencies typically specialize in:
Marketing automation
AI
Big data
Data science
Tag management
Data analytics
Database management.
Customer Lifecycle management
Internet of Things (IoT)
These agencies are partnered with google and are ‘Google Cloud Certified’. Rubikloud and Bluecore are few of the examples.
So, go ahead and explore the Google Cloud website and Google Marketing Platform for more and do share your thoughts in the comment section.
Thanks