The modern market is full of tools that cover different digital marketing aspects. Even though there are really great solutions out there, many businesses look for more coherence between the tools they use, and that’s not always possible if you work with software that provides limited integration possibilities, or no integration at all.
Well, take note that if you’re a part of the Microsoft ecosystem, you can actually build an entire digital marketing flow within the suite. Let’s explore what the options are and how you can use them to conduct your marketing operations effectively.
Key concepts
Before diving into the options, let’s first make a little digression to see what’s digital and what’s Microsoft about these days.
What does digital marketing encompass?
Digital marketing encompasses all marketing operations that are carried out by digital means. These include search engines, social media, email, and websites that help connect with customers and prospects.
History of Microsoft
Microsoft was founded in 1975 and began as a small company with quite an ambitious objective: to bring a computer to every desk and home. From its first product, it has been continuously evolving.
Over the decades, it transformed from a software company into one of the most authoritative technology providers that offers hardware, cloud services, and potent business solutions. This includes tools that can help marketers operate in the digital landscape. Let ‘s check them!
Tools
1. Microsoft Project
Microsoft Project will bring order to the chaos of simultaneous and complex marketing campaigns with tight deadlines and budgets that pretty often feel overwhelming.
Microsoft’s project management tool helps with campaign planning, resource allocation and management, progress and deadlines tracking. By adding your tasks, you will get a detailed timeline of the entire project from start to finish.
Project offers many benefits, but these are the crucial ones for digital marketers:
- Campaign planning can get more strategic thanks to clear visibility of dependent stages and activities and easy identification of resource constraints.
- You can see at a glance the right order of tasks and ensure smooth execution with fewer bottlenecks.
- By gaining the view of team workloads, you can improve resource management and avoid burnout within a happy and healthy team.
- Reporting becomes more informative and efficient thanks to customizable dashboards with metrics and overall progress toward goals.
- Stakeholders can get visual updates in campaigns and projects anytime.
Microsoft Project can be integrated and synchronized with other Microsoft tools. The only drawback is that Project can be hard for beginners, which may lead you to look for Microsoft Project alternatives.
2. Microsoft Clarity
Do you need to know what users do on your website? Microsoft Clarity can help with that!
This tool will provide you with analytical insights into how users behave through heatmaps, session recordings, and metrics. You can explore where visitors click, how far they scroll, and what elements might confuse or bother.
Clarity is great because it shows you real user interactions, not just plain numbers like other digital analytics tools. With its help, you can discover if users do the rage-clicking (click repeatedly in frustration), dead-clicking (click non-interactive elements), or if they get distracted by non-essential content that can be removed.
Why are those insights important? They can help optimize the website for a better user experience and conversion. For example, if you discover that users aren’t scrolling down enough to see the content that is actually important, you might redesign the page layout so that they can see it while landing.
The top combination indeed is Clarity and Google Analytics, as it gives you a 360-degree overview of website performance. While Google’s tool tells you what’s going on, Microsoft’s tool shows you why it’s going on. Thus, this toolkit can help you fix problems or gaps and improve conversion rates. Outside of the Microsoft world, there’s also a great alternative, Attention Insight.
3. Microsoft Copilot
For content creation tasks and projects, Microsoft Copilot can become your AI-powered writing assistant.
Copilot’s advanced AI technology will help you generate ideas, create content drafts, and further refine your writing. It doesn’t have to replace you as a content writer, but it will speed up the process for creating blog articles and social media posts, email campaigns, press releases, briefs, and other content types.
Marketers who use Copilot usually like it because of:
- Brainstorming possibilities for content ideas. You may simply provide a certain topic, and Copilot will suggest which areas to explore.
- Creating first drafts of marketing copy that you can further refine based on your needs and preferences. This allows you to start with a basic idea and creatively build up on it.
- Summarizing long content to extract key points.
- Adapting and repurposing the same content for different channels without starting from scratch for each one separately.
Any marketer will agree that Copilot can’t replace human creativity and strategic thinking. At least, yet. However, it can become a valuable assistant that allows you to focus on more sophisticated activities while the AI handles the routine.
4. Microsoft Advertising Keyword Planner Tool
Getting the right keywords is essential for the success of search engine marketing. You may have probably not have known, but Microsoft also has a tool for that. The Microsoft Advertising Keyword Planner Tool can help you explore the terms your specific target audience is using to find products or services like yours.
It’s quite similar to Google’s keyword planning tool but focused on the Microsoft Search Network (e.g., Bing, Yahoo, and AOL). It provides valuable insights for both paid and organic search strategies.
With this tool, you can:
- Research keywords that are relevant for your business and monitor metrics like search volumes, competition levels, and suggested bid amounts.
- Explore keyword opportunities, including long-tail ones that has less competition.
- Get bid estimates to help you budget for paid search campaigns across the Microsoft network.
The data from the Keyword Planner Tool will be useful both for paid search campaigns as well as content marketing initiatives in general. Just as any other keyword tool, Microsoft’s one will let you know what your audience is looking for, and create content that meets their needs.
5. Microsoft Publisher
Since marketing is not always exclusively digital, you may sometimes need print materials to complement online efforts. Here’s where Microsoft Publisher can help.
How is it different from Word? Word is primarily designed to work with text documents (with certain basic graphic elements). Publisher is more apt for layouts since it combines text and graphics. You can use it to create:
- Brochures and flyers for events or prospective clients.
- Printed newsletters that can present the digital version.
- Cards for mail campaigns.
- Business cards and letterhead.
Publisher is very easy to use. You don’t need to be or hire a graphic designer to create good-looking materials there. The program comes with templates and tools that allow you to design visuals quickly.
You may find the app useful to align digital and printed materials in terms of quality and branding across all channels.
6. Microsoft Outlook
As a corporate employee or just a regular millennial user, you most probably have used Microsoft Outlook at least once in your life. How can you leverage it for digital marketing operations?
- Communicate with clients and partners through an organized email hub.
- Schedule and track marketing tasks within the Outlook calendar.
- Configure reminders to follow up on leads.
- Organize contacts into lists for targeted communication.
Outlook is deeply integrated with all the Microsoft tools. Therefore, you can easily attach documents from OneDrive, arrange Teams meetings, or use Outlook data with Dynamics 365 for advanced customer relationship management.
The tool comes with email templates that can save time while sending similar messages to different recipients. You can even create your branded templates for follow-ups or newsletters to further personalize them for each recipient.
To bring it all together
Digital marketing operations require using many digital tools that many times can be somewhat disjointed. Microsoft tries to address this issue by providing a unified, scalable, and tightly integrated set of solutions.
So, if you want a coherent workflow, with Microsoft, you can bring the digital marketing flow into one connected universe. Try the tools and see for yourself.
