SMAC (short for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) is an emerging paradigm in the business world, following close on the heels of the emergence of a full-blown Internet economy. It refers to a symbiotic integration of the four major pillars of digital transformation, namely - Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud, which has a potential to revamp the way we do businesses today. 

The Whole Truth 

SMAC is a redefined marketing approach which discourages usage of traditional cost-intensive marketing approaches and aims to adopt smarter marketing strategies like:

• Leveraging social media: SMAC discourages usage of traditional marketing avenues like TV ads, print ads, newsletters, billboards, etc. and encourages adoption of newer avenues like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. for promoting businesses. These social networks have a humongous reach today, cutting across almost every section of consumers. Not to mention the low overhead cost (social media costs a 10th of what conventional marketing costs).
• Focus on mobile avenues: As per recent surveys, about 60 to 80 percent consumers prefer mobile gadgets for accessing online services. So it goes without saying, that businesses need to adopt mobile-first strategies for their marketing efforts.
• Targeted marketing efforts: As they say, data is the new oil. The historical data gathered from traditional marketing approaches can be leveraged for optimizing future marketing techniques by predictive analytics. By effective analysis of various customer profiles, marketing efforts can be suitably concentrated towards customers with a high ROI, thereby bringing down the cost of customer acquisition and retention significantly.
• Adoption of Cloud: Moving services to the cloud can bring about a greater agility in rendering services to the consumers. It is also cost-effective, as businesses need not extensively invest in the upkeep of extensive physical infrastructures. 

But Watch Out For...

The various challenges in implementing SMAC. As with any technology, data security and privacy remain one of major concerns for SMAC. Extensive use of social media can aggravate risks of data leakage all the more. Cloud adoption could be another source of contention, given the inherent risks involved in the process of moving to the cloud.

There's More...

It is interesting to note that: SMAC models emulate the platform model (create and pull), as against the pipeline model (create and push). This helps businesses in making utmost profits - by maximizing footfalls and minimizing the incurred costs.

And finally...

Each pillar in the acronym SMAC can add great value to a business, but no one strategy can fit all organizations. The leaders need to revisit their organizational goals and come up with the most suitable strategy. Success will be realized by those - who don’t just react to the SMAC phenomenon, but also transition swiftly to it.