Marketing: How we see it

Microsoft technologies provide the ultimate canvas for creative marketing.

Marketing is changing. It’s still about attracting new customers, retaining old ones, and differentiating you and your products from the competition. But it’s also about knowing your market and your customers deeply. It’s about giving customers truly unique experiences that blend the physical and the digital. And it’s about managing operations more effectively to run better campaigns and get the most from resources.

Companies that take advantage of the latest technological tools and capabilities are best positioned to address the new reality of marketing and win among customers who have more options and more distractions than ever before.

However, the reality is that most marketing departments are fragmented by the technologies used to support the customer experience. Different marketers use different tools to build different campaigns and programs across different aspects of the customer life cycle. This creates myriad inefficiencies inside the marketing organization and, perhaps more concerning, a disconnected and fragmented customer experience. To make matters worse, each system typically has its own reporting, but nothing rolls it up into one report so the CMO can understand overall impact, effectiveness, or opportunity.

Despite this disconnected marketing reality, four technology megatrends are influencing the industry:

• Data and insights are enabling better decision making—particularly when data points can be connected from increasingly diverse sources and made easily available to people across an organization.
• Mobile connectivity has outstripped wired users. Marketing leaders need to consider how they engage with their customers, from B2B solutions tying customers and suppliers more closely, to engaging ads and apps that display well and are compelling on any form factor.
• Social computing has become an important strategic platform, providing an opportunity to enhance customer experiences and track, analyze, and effectively react to communications that affect brand value.
• Cloud platform underlies it all, reducing the cost and time to innovate and deliver new products and services, making companies more agile.

61%

are more likely to buy from a brand that allows them to touch and feel the products – in a store or online.

82%

say multi-screening makes them more efficient.

The opportunity that marketers have is to create unique experiences for their customers, experiences that show up across their customers’ multiple devices and engage them both online and in the physical world. A globally-minded devices and services approach enables marketers to deliver a consistent customer experience wherever people are—at home, at work or on the go—and throughout the customer journey. Microsoft is unique in that we deliver not only business-class devices and services, but also a broad range of consumer services and extensive advertising capabilities. Our products look the same, work in the same ways, and deliver new value when used together.

Grow and understand the business
By tapping into all of the data available to marketers today, know customers better—and use that knowledge to grow business. Customer insights and marketing analytics open up business and facilitate decisions with impact. With Microsoft business intelligence (BI) solutions employees find the hidden potential in data, uncover new insights by meshing internal data with globally available data, predicting future opportunities and anticipate customers’ needs by identifying critical behavioral patterns.

Execute the marketing agenda
Ultimately a marketer’s focus is outbound—making the right customer connections at the right time in the right place. Imagine devices, services, and advertising platforms that deliver unique customer experiences bringing brand promises to life. Innovative ad experiences—such as those using Kinect—blur the lines between physical and digital experiences for customers and make anytime, anywhere connections. Create powerful in-store displays and shop-anywhere capabilities to deliver a differentiated experience to customers. Build a high-availability, socially enabled website or campaign microsite with the power and agility of the cloud. Plus, build and deploy mobile line-of-business apps more quickly and easily—to keep specialized marketing workflows moving even when marketers are in the field. Social tools provide an additional channel to reach and inform customers with the latest news while honing marketing strategy to perfection. Dynamics CRM enables management of social marketing—alongside and integrated with traditional marketing campaigns. It becomes easy to execute and monitor campaigns across channels, including traditional, online, and social media, while maintaining visibility and control of resources and results. It also brings together real-time data and behavioral analysis across leads, prospects, and customers, along with campaign budgets and integrated financial performance, thus single-sourcing customer engagement. Social media within the organization allows marketers to find experts, share information, and connect real-time. Imagine how much easier it can be to earn loyalty or head off crises with rapid responses to social chatter.

Manage the business of marketing
There is no room for inefficiency in today’s marketing organization. With focus on internal and extended operations, marketing tools need to allow for great planning, flexible execution, and quality measurement that never gets in the way of daring and engaging creativity. With intelligent advertising tools, unify planning and execution on a single platform for campaign and marketing resource management, making it easier to align the customer experience with your brand promise. With powerful workflow and collaboration tools as well as digital asset management capabilities, marketers focus on being creative and not getting bogged down with day-to-day tasks. Plus, intuitive reporting and real-time intelligence can help you measure, refine, and optimize results using a single source for maximum impact.

There is a new customer reality: savvier customers with more demands and more ways to engage. Microsoft offers both the customer reach and the enterprise-grade solutions, bringing marketing execution together to drive global scale and impact.

Microsoft Enterprise Team

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