Microsoft Delivers Trove of Marketing Resources for Partners

Fueling the marketing engine with fresh ideas and new content is a never-ending challenge for every small business. Fortunately for partners, Microsoft has gotten the message and is delivering high-quality, practical marketing assets to help.

The resources supporting Microsoft's Digital Transformation campaign continue to grow and have become a gold mine of marketing content for partners.

Coming up with a single campaign that unifies the messaging in support of the broad range of solutions partners is a challenge in itself, and Microsoft has done an impressive job with the Digital Transformation. The campaign addresses business problems common to every organization and sets out compelling value propositions. Products and solutions are in the background -- right where they should be.

To get started figuring out which resources you can put to work, download the Digital Transformation Campaign Partner Playbook. The decks walks you through the assets, which are aligned with the four pillars of the campaign:

• Engage you customers.
• Empower your employees.
• Optimize your operations.
• Transform your products.

Each of the pillars comes with an "Internal Primer," apparently the digitally transformed name for a battlecard. Internal Primers are designed to help your team understand and put into words the business problems that your solutions can solve for clients. While that sounds like a simple concept, it has always been a challenge for tech-oriented employees to articulate business value to customers. The Primers can help everyone in your organization, not just sales and marketing, to think -- and speak -- about technology from the customer's perspective.

Vertical and SMB Primers and Messaging Frameworks continue to be added to the pool of campaign assets. Currently, there are marketing resources for manufacturing, professional services, financial services, government, retail and health care. These documents will be especially helpful for Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners developing their own solution marketing messages. Tap these documents for foundational messaging, adding the specific value that your solutions and services deliver.  

Campaign materials supporting each of the pillars include e-mails, presentation decks, brochures and social messaging -- all customizable. Messaging and assets from each of the pillars can be mixed and matched to align with your unique service lines. With all the pieces you need to execute campaigns with professional polish, you can get these rolling quickly.   

A Source of Inspiration
In addition to helping you get some quick campaigns out the door, the Digital Transformation resources also provide rich fodder to build additional content for your marketing. Applying a little creativity, every one of these resources includes material you can use to build deeper content that speaks to your value proposition. For example:

• Use the Conversation Starter questions included in each Internal Primer as the basis of a series of blog posts.
  
  
• Combine the statistics from the pitch decks with the Solution Points from a Primer to create an infographic.
  
  
• With a little expansion and imagination, the content from each Internal Primer could be turned into an e-book.

Over the past few years, Microsoft's through-partner marketing has improved dramatically. The Digital Transformation campaign is another step in the right direction. The messaging is business-problem-focused and benefit -- not solution -- focused. There is valuable content for every partner in these resources. Just the fuel you need to get that marketing campaign revved up and out the door.

How are you using Microsoft's Digital Transformation marketing resources? Send me a message and let's share the knowledge.

Posted by Barb Levisay on April 20, 2017