So, your organisation already has Google Cloud provision – perhaps set up at enterprise-level, or by IT. Brilliant!
Less brilliant, though, if Google Cloud was set up without marketing in mind and your business is devoting it to other organisational priorities. This often results in a really difficult situation for marketers, where the C-suite believe that their brand is fully cloud-enabled and can’t understand why their marketing teams are still unable to fulfil their potential. Cloud that’s set up without marketing objectives baked in from the start often makes effective use of data in a marketing context next to impossible.
What to do in this kind of situation? Of course, you could take the approach of continuing to put a case upwards to senior management, but if IT are resistant – perhaps fearing attempts to wrest control of what they see as ‘their’ Google Cloud set-up, this can take a lot of time and persistence and may still meet with failure or heavy compromise.
Merkle sees this situation on a relatively frequent basis, and it’s one of the reasons we developed our Rapid Audience Layer (RAL) solution. This is a product that’s designed by marketers, for marketers, and it plugs neatly into existing Google Cloud strategy at any brand – so that IT can keep their current structure but the marketing team also get to play, without disruption of the status quo. It’s an easy and quick-to-set-up means of tackling the situation where marketing is not the business priority within an enterprise GCP project.
RAL can also act as an effective bridge for your business away from a legacy platform and towards an integration of Google Cloud, or simply as a means to accelerate creation and accessibility of marketing-ready data. It’s highly cost-effective, enabling a rapid test-and-learn approach – we always aim to fail fast and small so as to head for speedy wider-scale success in meeting objectives.
RAL can be seeded with data and accessible within weeks, not months – it’s perfect for situations where budget is constrained or a particular marketing question needs to be addressed, as you can start small and grow as and when required. If your IT department cannot provide the resources/funding to stand-up a separate, marketing-oriented data management environment, RAL could be the solution – it shouldn’t require heavy IT resource to get started and will allow your business to retain their existing data management arrangements, whilst still giving your marketers the luxury of access to the right data and sandboxes to get tackling their own pressing issues. To assist with this, RAL is extensible and will integrate with existing marketing tech, as well as an extant Google Cloud, if present.
If you’d like to see how RAL might be able to help your organisation, get in touch.
RAL can also suit other scenarios – see my next blog in January for how RAL can support organisations which are mature and capable already in their data management. RAL can also help businesses which are just dipping a toe in the waters of data management, see our previous blog as well as those whose legacy data provision is no longer meeting requirements, read more here.
If you’d like to read more about how RAL was used by one of our clients to link to their existing Google Cloud platform, you can find our case study here.
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