More than 1.2 billion people use Microsoft products worldwide. But in our modern marketing world, consumers expect more from the brands they use. To create and inspire true brand advocacy, we must move from being a used brand, to being a loved brand.
To connect with the next generation of technology users and build both an emotional and rational connection to Microsoft, Assembly partnered with Microsoft to craft and execute a social media strategy for all of Microsoft's main social properties: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr.
Our work focused on advancing the Microsoft brand story - empowering people to achieve more. Specifically in social, we looked to grow and engage a broader millennial audience, and tell highly-relevant, high-quality stories in a more efficient and impactful way. We measured success by sentiment and conversation trends on our post comments, social engagements, traffic to Microsoft-owned properties and targeted fan growths as month-to-month performance indicators.
For Microsoft's target audience, technology isn't just a tool, but something that empowers their ambitions. And, they turn to the social space to advance and share those ambitions with others.
Knowing this, our strategy was to put people at the center of every story we tell.
We created a specific role of channel for each social property, based on usage data and channel preferences among millennials. Social content focused on the people behind achievement—not just the technology that helped them achieve it. We chose not to simply share the "how" and the "what"—but instead focus on the "why." We also focused on beautiful visuals, deeper storytelling and personal connections in a way that consistently supported and reinforced our brand message of 'empowering all people to achieve more'.
Targeted paid amplification was core to our storytelling strategy. While we typically reach gaming and tech obsessed young males organically, we were missing out on awareness among millennial females. We prioritized paid social amplification among this group, and layered interests specific to the stories we hoped to tell. Additionally, we leveraged data management platforms like Atlas and BlueKai to ensure we maximized qualified reach of our paid content, and kept relevancy as strong as possible between the brand and passion points of our desired audience.
Assembly built the guiding strategy for Microsoft's social media channels and is responsible for ongoing social content creation, creative campaign development and paid media strategy.
Since 2014, we've seen:
* More than 3 million engagements on social posts
* A 206% growth in social followers with over 15.6 million social followers as of December 2015
* Increased our post CTR by 28% YoY
* 7% growth in millennials and females in our Facebook audience
* More than 2.1 billion impressions on social content
* Drove more than 1.9 million total clicks to Microsoft-owned properties
* Our top performing Facebook post in 2015 on the Hololens received over 6.4 million video views and 1.4 million engagements
* Additionally, in 2015 Microsoft was recognized as the most influential brand in the InterBrand 50
