About Company
About CompanyMicrosoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company that has its headquarter in Redmond, Washington. It develops, licenses, manufactures, supports, and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers.
Founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4th, 1975, Microsoft started to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for Altair 8800. Also, since the 1990s, Microsoft has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies in May 2011 for $8.5 billion and it has also announced its plans to acquire LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in June 2016.
Microsoft is market dominant in both the office software suite markets and the IBM PC-compatible operating system (as of 2015). The company also manufactures a wide range of other software or desktops and servers, and is active in areas like the digital services market (via MSN), the video game industry, internet search (with Bing), and mobile phones (Windows Phone OS and the operating systems of Nokia’s former phones).
The acquisition of devices and services by Nokia to form Microsoft Mobile Oy marked the company’s re-entrance in the smartphone hardware market, after its previous attempt, Microsoft Kin.
Products by Microsoft
Their best known software products are Edge web browsers, internet explorer, Microsoft Office suite, and Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. Their flagship hardware products are the Microsoft Surface tablet lineup and the Xbox game consoles. They are the world’s largest software maker in terms of revenue and among the world’s most valuable companies.
The word ‘Microsoft’ is equivalent to ‘software’ and ‘microcomputer’.
Business Objective
The objective of Microsoft was to engage with senior IT and business decision-makers in order to make up its position as a thought leader in the industry.
They wanted to come up as a thought leader in the field by creating a comprehensive and targeted format along with engaging senior IT and business decision makers better via content marketing.
Strategies Adopted
1. Leveraged LinkedIn:
In order to achieve this objective, the company joined hands with LinkedIn and tried to leverage the breath of marketing solutions portfolio of LinkedIn to fabricate a stable and consistent content marketing campaign.
2. Be Future Ready community:
‘Be Future Ready’, an exclusive by invitation only community was created. This community acted as a dynamic hub for information sharing, engagement along with dialogue between senior decision makers and Microsoft.
3. Slideshare:
In order to allow the community and consumers to engage with content while still being on LinkedIn, a Slideshare channel was launched and Slideshare content ads were leveraged.
In order to advocate the wide Microsoft portfolio, the Microsoft company page was set up.
Results Achieved
- The brand familiarity of Microsoft score rose by 68%.
- There was a 43% increase in the purchasing probability after successfully leveraging LinkedIn.
- Be Future Ready group has over 7,140 members with one-third opinion leaders and influencers.
- The Microsoft Company pages reached a mark of more than 2, 50,000 followers.
- Microsoft leads in the market among its competitive set in terms of Content Marketing Score on LinkedIn as well.
Learnings
With these results and highest region engagement metrics, Microsoft now has the highest score in content marketing as compared to their peers in India.
- Comprehensive content marketing approach: This helps us to conclude that the strategies and approach adopted by Microsoft is a comprehensive one in terms of content marketing.
- LinkedIn platform provides relevant audience: The approach has actually helped the company to drive engagement with a very filtered and highly relevant audience which is provided by LinkedIn platform.
Here’s a video of Jyotsna Kakkar, CMO, Microsoft India, talking about how they reached IT professionals from LinkedIn content marketing campaign
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How do you think content marketing strategies can help you gain familiarity for your company? Share with us in the comment section below!
