Building community: Kloud’s roadmap for building relationships and giving back to the customer community

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Establishing credibility

Information saturation is the reality of the modern marketplace. Buyers are more informed than they have ever been and digital content makes it easier than ever for business decision makers to come to the table informed of the scope of their issue and appraised of the solutions available.

For a partner, digital marketing represents an opportunity to establish yourself as a thought leader in your space, driving customers to your business who already have an idea of what you do, how you do it and how it can be used to help their business. In 2015, Hubspot noted that companies publishing 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5 times more traffic than companies that published 0-4 blog posts.

Kloud, an early cloud partner founded by two former Microsoft employees, adopted an approach to digital marketing focused on empowering their employees to add value back to the community. With a sharp focus on transitioning customers to the cloud, Kloud has intimate understanding of the problems customers face when making that transition.

Kloud interview

Kloud began as one of the first cloud partners in Australia and has since expanded to over 200 employees through pure organic growth. Kloud, now a subsidiary of Telstra, began as a server migration partner, working with customers in Australia to move workloads to Azure and Office 365, and has since added a wide portfolio of managed services to their offering, including support services, strategic consulting services, and consumption-based managed services designed to keep customers “evergreen” with the latest and greatest technology.

Nicki Bowers left Microsoft with a mission to help customers overcome their apprehensions about the shift to public cloud services. They assisted in customer migrations of workloads to Azure and Office 365, and performed SharePoint transitions and Skype for Business implementations as well. Kloud’s engagements have a strategic component – their consultants work closely with the customer to understand where they are in their maturity cycle, customizing their implementations to gradually move the customer to the cloud while educating them on the value such a transition has for their business.

“We knew right away that we wanted to add managed services to our portfolio. Initially, we worked to provide managed services exclusively for customers we migrated to Azure but that part of our business has since grown to new customers for whom we have not done the implementation” – Nicki Bowers, Managing Director

Building your digital platform

“We have developed a successful blog as part of our digital marketing strategy and are at the stage now where we get about 5,000 hits per day” – Nicki Bowers, Managing Director

Kloud’s blog was built out across the last three years and focuses on providing high-level technical information to new and existing customers. For existing customers, Kloud’s blog offers an avenue to consume free content to help them get the most out of their cloud services.

For new customers, the blog stands as testament to the thought leadership and expertise among Kloud’s consultants – who are encouraged to write for the blog and post both on Kloud’s site as well as their own independent blogs and properties, building their employees’ reputation alongside Kloud’s.

Empowering your workforce

By empowering their consultants to blog and generate value-added digital content, Kloud created more than a marketing engine. They developed a system enabling their customers to learn from the mistakes and successes of one another, and a platform for consultants to share their knowledge with each other, with the organization, and with current and future customers.

“One CIO looking to move to Office 365 came to us after having read our blog and said ‘Why would I want to work with anyone else when [Kloud] are the thought leaders in that market?’”

Nicki Bowers, Managing Director of Kloud, has one major suggestion to other partners looking to accelerate their digital marketing impact – be authentic.

“Effective digital content is all about being authentic and providing content that is actually useful to customers and potential customers – not just marketing-speak.”

By enabling their consultants to thrive while building out their brand and providing valuable digital marketing content, Kloud has created a culture of giving back that permeates their organization and the broader partner community.

Kloud’s digital marketing touches all parts of their organization, maximizing the knowledge they can share with their customers and establishing themselves as a trusted advisor with new customers looking to transition to cloud services or invest in managed services to support their existing deployments.

This approach to digital marketing is cognizant of a lifetime customer relationship, and does as much to retain valued customers as it does to drive new opportunities to the door.

Kloud has built their digital marketing properties over 3 years to get to where they are today, focusing on providing content that speaks to customer issues. By building user groups in every state in their local market, Kloud provides digital content that speaks directly to their customers, backed by local examples of their solutions and services in action. By empowering their consultants to share their posts via their own personal blogging channels as well, Kloud drives additional traffic to their own blog – making it a one-stop shop for customers seeking solutions and thought leadership.