The global brand synonymous with the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office suite among many is now the champion of making a digital leap and migrating to cloud computing.
Project Goals
Although social media are such an important part of our lives we still find it difficult to engage people in important conversations, specifically those about complex topics such as digital transformation, cybersecurity, or cloud computing.
Knowing that over 60% of Business Decision Makers in the MEA region are active on LinkedIn, we wanted to leverage this channel as a thought leadership and relationship management platform.
Our mission was to design and implement a strategy exploring the opportunities LinkedIn opens up to businesses these days.
What We Did
For the past year, we have been working with Microsoft senior decision-makers and sales executives all over MEA. We have crafted and managed a social selling and advocacy programme. This involved:
- Building stronger and more visible personal brands of the participants on LinkedIn.
- Delivering meaningful content sought by Microsoft clients.
- Running B2B digital lead generation campaigns.
Scope 1
We began developing the programme in collaboration with various members of the Microsoft MEA team. Them the start, it was important that the agenda was engaging both for the participants as well as the audience; the stakeholders of the digital transformation and cloud computing markets.
The programme involved training, guidance, and consultations all aimed at improving the visibility and relevance of messaging.
Scope 2
Creating much stronger personal brands for the programme participants on LinkedIn involved:
- Optimising their personal profiles and visibility.
- Refining their participation and discussion to build relationships with their audiences.
Consequently, all these efforts have paved the way to the execution stage where our social heroes started sharing quality articles and social media posts.
Scope 3
Our Social Heroes’ engagement on social media resulted in collecting and converting leads. This engagement attracted clients to ultimately allow Microsoft to schedule face-to-face meetings and discuss the clients’ needs.
Scope 4
We have also planned and executed lead generation campaigns where we shared more than 10 ebooks relevant to our audiences, explaining the concepts of digital transformation and cloud computing as well as all enabling technologies standing behind them. These lead generation campaigns were executed both on LinkedIn and on Facebook as paid campaigns and helped build the sales funnel managed by the participants of the program.
The programme has been continuously running since August 2017 and has been extended several times due to the overall success of the campaign.
