While there are many benefits to cloud computing, one group particularly well served by this technology are marketers. When it comes to engaging with audiences over the web, there are a number of attributes of cloud-based services that make them a natural fit for the technical marketers' arsenal.

Marketing campaigns are very often short term, seasonal or opportunist. The ability to create something quickly and easily and then tear it down is key. Deploying to the cloud can provide an easy route versus attempting to grow a fixed IT asset.

However, not every element of a marketing campaign is disposable, and organizations are now looking at how they can leverage the benefits of the cloud's elastic and scalable delivery models with the good practice of content management. The reuse and repurposing of content helps to avoid reinventing the creative wheel for every campaign and this is leading organizations to look at hybrid solutions for marketing execution in the cloud combined with on-premise content strategies.

It's not just the tactical nature of marketing campaigns that plays to the cloud services' strength of rapid deployment, but also the varied demand lifecycle that marketing campaigns naturally create.

These sharp peaks in computing are not generated solely from servicing web requests that successful marketing campaigns produce; they also occur during the development of the campaign. For example, a campaign with a video element will demand a peak of computing resources to encode the video to the various formats of today's multi-channel, multi-device and possibly multi-language audience.

Such a need for high-demand computing and the ability to scale on-demand recurs throughout the campaign to capture audience data, analyze it and then apply it back to the campaign. This holds particularly true with real-time product or content recommendations.

The requirement to engage in multi-channel, in the context and consistently across devices also throws another unpredictable variable into infrastructure demands. As content consumption patterns shift from traditional web pages to more multi-channel content (RSS, mobile, tablet devices, Internet TV, etc.,) consumers demand a highly personalized, relevant and dynamic web experience.

All of this is overlaid by the uncertain science that is marketing. It's very hard to predict the campaign that will ignite the audience's imagination or which video will go viral. Hosting the execution of digital marketing campaigns in the cloud enables the organization to satisfy unexpected demand by providing flexibility much greater than traditional infrastructure. This also helps decrease potential losses as campaigns can start small knowing the infrastructure can quickly scale with success.

Increasingly this ability to experiment with a lower cost to entry is not limited to the platform hosting the campaign, but the functionally that forms the solution delivering that campaign. Marketers are under pressure to stay relevant with the fast-moving expectations of the digital consumer and must provide functionality that meets a user experience that is now defined by services like Facebook.

To meet this demand, there are a plethora of boutique SaaS services offering the marketer functionality to track and engage with the audience. These tools require very little upfront investment and few barriers for the marketer to try them before committing.

The agility that the cloud brings to marketing allows organizations to take risks with a smaller entry investment. It also offers the ability to tear down or to change campaigns that are not working and to quickly scale those that are without a huge upfront IT investment.

With the practical benefits of deployment agility, scalability on demand and reduction of risk to capital expenditure, the cloud is the platform of choice for the contemporary marketer. It is at the center of a perfect marketing storm of increasing requirements around multi-channel relevance, the focus on costs in today's economic uncertainty and the need to retain cutting-edge engagement functionalities.