Businesses cannot hope to optimize their customer reach without focusing on the four pillars of modern business ecosystem that comprises of Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud (SMAC). Any business strategy that takes into account these four elements is bound to succeed due to maximum reach at optimum overheads.

Modern technologies and availability of smart phones have changed paradigms of communications and forced marketing managers to redesign their campaigns and methods of communication with the prospects. It would be practical to look at each of these four parameters to understand their significance.

Evolution of social media

Modern businesses can leverage social media to enhance their brand image, brand awareness, and customer engagement. This important medium is also effective for generating leads and understanding customer preferences in a realistic and reliable way. Face book, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Instagram, and many more popular platforms can be harnessed to get real-time information about trends, feedbacks, and sentiments about the products. Generation of ‘likes’ on these media platforms helps businesses gain insights into customer behavior patterns. In addition to this we can also generate customer reviews and ratings to sharpen marketing inputs and focus on product development.

Mobile – driving modern marketing from the front

Mobile phones can be great tools to improve understanding of customer locations, browsing trends, product preferences, and more. Mobile readiness is the buzzword of business websites and one should focus on the compatibility of website with modern mobile devices. It is observed that customers tend to move away from websites that need to be zoomed in to browse. Mobile is a major driving force of ecommerce industry and is going to gain huge importance in years to come die to increasing ownership of smart-phones. No business strategy should undermine the importance of mobiles.

Improved decision making with modern business analytics

Exponential growth in volumes of data had also lead to improvement in data processing technologies. With the advances in technology we have more efficient data generation and analytics tools at our disposal. Data science, big data, and state of the art visualization technologies have improved organizational capabilities to great extent in comparison with the traditional methods of data collection and interpretation. Current analytics have not only accelerated data generation process but these are also more efficient in providing vital inputs for designing future marketing strategies.

Efficiency and elasticity of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the principal facilitator of business processes with its wide service offerings. Infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), and software (SaaS) are the few cloud service models that are extensively adopted by organizations. The list is expanding and we now also have XaaS to avail everything as a service in cloud computing. Cloud services are highly scalable and accessible. These are also preferred due to their utility based payment methods. Cloud computing facilitates many advanced solutions for improving and streamlining business processes. With help of cloud storage, businesses have been able to reduce huge infrastructure related expenditure.

SMAC synergy

While looking at these forces, one must not take an individualistic approach because all these factors integrate to offer a synergistic combination for improving business processes. Social platforms are used for undertaking marketing as well as data generation and analytics. These are compatible with mobiles as well as traditional internet enabled machines. Accessibility of social media improves its overall use by modern generation of smart phone users. Cloud is an all pervasive platform, which supports analytics, mobiles and social media.

Social networking is no more a mere sharing platform, businesses can benefit from wide array of analytics to chalk out their strategies. Power of smart phones has not only improved sharing and communication abilities of users but has also given a big boost to ecommerce sector with a great proportion of buyers using smart-phones for online shopping.

In order to exploit the advantages of SMAC, enterprises should devise strategies to integrate all factors into each other by leveraging the latest technological solutions. SNAC is purpose driven amalgamation of wide spectrum of functionalities that can offer great value to customers. It should be viewed as a single platform.

SMAC is a globally accepted stack of vital aspects of modern technologies and is poised for a great leap in coming years. It can be adopted by businesses from all verticals and of all sizes to improve their customer orientation for more meaningful marketing strategies.