When we talk about Microsoft, the first thing that comes to mind is Windows and Office, and for the more knowledgeable Surface. However, within the marketing strategy of the Redmond company there has also been something fundamental: the content.
From the beginning, Microsoft understood the impact that a piece of content can have on its audience. For example, 67% of B2B buyers make their decisions based on the content they read, to get to know the company before purchasing a product from it.
Few would believe that it was Bill Gates who coined the phrase "content is king", the favorite aphorism of experts in content marketing. And is that Microsoft was one of the first companies to have their own corporate blog, in 2004.
Although at first sight it might seem that Windows by itself was enough to guarantee the success of Microsoft, they knew that the perception that their users had of the company would be key to guarantee the future. And later you would understand that this success would also come to the extent that they could offer better tools to their customers.
The Microsoft marketing team knew that the public liked a good story, wanted to know about the people who worked and developed the software that ran on tens of millions of computers around the world.
The stories of others also matter
Years passed, and after two decades of Bill Gates recognizing that content is king, Microsoft's marketing strategy focused on creating stories that changed the perception of the company in an audience that saw it as synonymous with boring work of office.
With his arrival at the position of CEO in 2014, Santya Nadella has focused on enhancing the image outside the office, understanding that new audiences are related to companies in different ways. The key to success lies in developing products (hardware and software) that generate desire; minimalist, elegant, powerful, but above all, presented as tools that will help us create our own stories.
From this moment, Microsoft begins to develop tools to help small and medium-sized companies to drive the content. In the same way, they begin to design products with the visual and practical potential to attract more creative audiences. Microsoft is not very different from the company it was 30 years ago, it has always sought to give its users tools to create their own stories; but now it does it in the cloud, hence the birth of the Office 365 tools suite.
The change introduced by Nadella prompted an update in the already classic Microsoft email tools: Hotmail and Outlook, and the Surface product line was enhanced. Nowadays, these products combine a more optimal design for the web, polished the design and with them now the creation of a massive mailing program is a more complete process, from the team to create attractive postcards, to the platform for send mass emails
At the end, the Surface, Outlook and Hotmail products, together with a set of more consolidated tools on the cloud, Microsoft put at the service of millions of small and medium companies how to create and share their own stories with their own users. That is, what was born as a philosophy for creating content for corporate marketing became a business strategy.
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