Always-on content and paid social media marketing with Microsoft

Push marketing is a technique where companies use big ads and attention-grabbing claims through TV, radio and print, focused on short-term wins rather than long-term relationships with customers.

This is still an approach that you can use today. With the increasing popularity of paid social media advertising, it can lead to spikes of attention which is great in the short-term.

However, these are spikes of engagement. And the nature of a spike is that it can suffer significant drops, leading to periods where there is no engagement at all. In that ‘downtime’ another brand could win their attention, one that markets more consistently over time.

As we see with our own clients, the best examples of success comes when they use multiple channels to address all points of the customer journey, resulting in long-term relationships with customers.

In a good content marketing strategy, there shouldn’t be spikes of high engagement crossed with low engagement. There should be constant level of engagement, which fosters a greater sense of community and brand awareness.

Always-on content marketing with Microsoft

We help deliver always-on marketing with the Microsoft Developer Experience group. Since 2013 we've worked with the Microsoft DX social and content teams in content marketing, looking to create engaged two-way relationships with their audiences.

Specifically it’s for the Microsoft Developer and IT PRO communities, where we look to drive increasing month-on-month driving more traffic to their channels and grow an increasingly active community interested in the opportunities Microsoft has developers.

Below is an example of work I’ve helped with creating for Microsoft DX. These are blog posts which don’t relate very much to Microsoft, but is instead content designed to engage a unique developer community. In this case those who had a computer back in the 80’s and 90’s and had fond memories of anything retro – namely Spectrum and Commodore.

The Spectrum and Commodore posts link to content designed to encourage engagement – to the extent my own personal Twitter name is used in the social media post @MSDevUK put out.

For the Spectrum article – this is the type of response we got. 

Always-on paid social media marketing with Microsoft

As time has gone on we've combined content creation with a long-term always-on paid social media strategy which has delivered big dividends in terms of traffic for Microsoft sites as well as community engagement and exposure.

We work closely with the Microsoft DX content marketing teams, defining which content should be promoted and seen by a community larger than their existing one through various social channels. The creation of a regular stream of content and paid-social advertising for their blogs is now a powerful combination, keeping a community constantly engaged.

As we’ve mentioned in an earlier post, marketing to developers is different, one of the reasons being is that it isn’t so much about sales transactions. In particular for Microsoft, it’s more of a relationship marketing strategy. One of the goals is to get developers to use its tools (which are often free) and build apps on different platforms.

All businesses need to think about long-term, always-on marketing

Businesses big and small should think about keeping an always-on relationship with customers and hitting them at different spots in the customer journey. Consistent levels of success ensure that a long-term relationship is being built and maintained.

Want some more tips on how to properly engage with an online B2B community? Here’s a post from Managing Director Mark Pinsent that has some great advice.