Execute your marketing strategy with Office 365

 At Intelogy, we’ve seen more and more organisations asking about Office 365 being implemented, most recently into marketing teams. As the Marketing Manager at Intelogy, it made me think about how I execute marketing with Office 365 on a day-to-day basis. What applications do we use to execute our marketing strategy? All will be revealed in this blog. I wanted to share how Office 365 has become an integral part of our marketing strategy development. 

Outlook

Perhaps the most expected application to be used, and one that probably goes without saying, Microsoft Outlook helps to notify people about day to day activities through emails, meeting invites and scheduling events.  

But what other features are there to help deliver on marketing in Office 365?  

Microsoft Forms

We’ve introduced using Microsoft Forms in Outlook. With Microsoft Forms, you can create surveys, quizzes, and polls. You can add these forms to Outlook messages, and easily see results as they come in. This allows us to be more innovative with our marketing, as we can collaborate on ideas, test the team on their knowledge of our marketing plan, as well as running A/B testing internally through polls before going external. We can also send surveys to our clients through Microsoft Forms and Outlook, helping us improve our Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction.  

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams plays a huge part in the execution of our marketing strategy. In a blog published last year I spoke about how Teams makes a difference in marketing. If there’s a new campaign or product to be marketed, all content – whether it’s an image, spreadsheet, link or document – can be shared through one application.  However, it’s no secret that Microsoft have put a huge emphasis in developing this application, so there’s a lot that’s changed since my initial blog. We moved from Skype for business to Teams as soon as we could to take advantage of integrated telephony and conferencing features alongside our content and collaboration.  Teams makes our processes more efficient as we have access to our team and team’s activities all in one place. 

Microsoft Planner

The integration of Microsoft Planner with Teams crucial for a marketing team with tight deadlines. As with every marketing team, getting contributions from busy operational colleagues can be difficult, so overseeing each task through Planner makes deadlines much more manageable. 

Yammer

Whilst we have several Yammer channels, with a team constantly on the move, Yammer is a great place to share news and upcoming marketing campaigns. Whilst Teams provides us with collaboration for smaller focus groups, Yammer is a great cross-company communication tool. Each member of our team can digest information in their own time, share their thoughts as well as sharing our latest campaigns with the wider environment – a key attribute to any organisation looking to increase their brand awareness. 

Yammer is a great place to bring each department together on a less formal platform. We also have a channel specifically for continuous improvement, helping us to learn from previous projects, to increase on our client’s satisfaction and willingness to recommend. Essentially, our continuous improvement channel helps us to maintain and exceed our client’s product and service expectations and the product and service received. 

OneDrive

Perhaps the application that made me realise how much I use Office 365 for marketing and inspired me to write this blog, OneDrive is a what keeps me working on the go, in the office, and at home. For example, this week I attended an event in London on the future of marketing. Whilst listening to a presentation on this subject, I was able to take notes using OneNote, then type these notes up into a document in Microsoft Word on the train ride home. What’s more, I did this all on a tablet whilst saving to my OneDrive, making these files available on all my devices. 

Conclusion

These applications can easily be taken for granted, but I struggle to see how we would have a collaborative working environment without Office 365. We’ve used many of these tools in our marketing and communications activities for a long time, but in isolation. Bringing them together in the Office 365 cloud has boosted our ability to work collaboratively and flexibly. Whilst Office 365 is the norm at Intelogy, there are some organisations yet to reap the benefits. The advantages listed in this blog are not exclusive to marketing teams – each Office 365 application is widely used by all members of our organisation.  

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