Connected Marketing

Key challenges for consumer goods companies

• Reaching Empowered Shoppers and Consumers

  Today's consumers rely on abundant product information, including price, availability, reviews, and special offers. To better cultivate product champions, build 1:1 relationships with purchasers, and adapt product supply to meet fluctuating shopper appetites, consumer goods companies need to blend new technologies, such as digital marketing and social networking, into their marketing programs.

• Building Shopper Loyalty with Promotions

  Traditional consumer promotions are declining in effectiveness. New technologies, such as Microsoft Tag, offer opportunities for consumer goods companies to target coupons digitally and inexpensively, as well as to create robust promotional campaigns.

• Managing Trade Promotion Complexities

  The costs of trade promotion average 17 percent of revenue for consumer goods companies. What's more, these funds are often dispersed throughout a sales organization, leading to challenges in managing, monitoring, and tracking the expenses. As more trade-promotion tactics become digital, increased visibility, accountability, and compliance become possible.

Microsoft solutions

Microsoft solutions for Connected Marketing help consumer goods companies build more personal, relevant, and engaging relationships with empowered shoppers. The solutions focus on achieving this goal by delivering a more compelling return-on-investment (ROI) model for marketing resources and targeted branding strategies in a range of key areas:

• Digital advertising

  Microsoft advertising solutions empower consumer goods companies to better connect with consumers and shoppers across multiple touch points, from PCs to mobile devices, through Web, in-store, and in-the-living-room experiences.

  Microsoft has created the most robust digital environment available with a full spectrum of offerings, including online advertising, search, instant messaging, e-mail, online communities, media partnerships, mobile phones, MP3 players, and interactive game consoles. With flexible pricing on a variety of ad options and an opportunity to combine search and display, digital advertising solutions can help improve overall site traffic and increase ROI.

• Mobility and Microsoft Tag

  Microsoft Solutions for Mobility enable consumer goods companies to engage with consumers in meaningful and creative ways via mobile phones and to measure the effectiveness of those engagements. With Microsoft Tag, companies can use colorful, two-dimensional tags to turn cell phones into "sell" phones that assist in the promotion and sale of products.

  Creating rich experiences for connecting with today's consumers is possible with Microsoft's robust portfolio of application development tools. Companies can reach shoppers wherever they are, whether online, at a kiosk, on a mobile phone, or on a gaming device.

• Digital asset management

  Microsoft and our partner ecosystem give companies the tools to efficiently collaborate and access digital media assets, from work in progress to the preparation and delivery of content.

  Microsoft Digital Content Management Toolkit (DCM) is a collaborative, digital asset management solution that extends Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The solution builds on existing technology investments and helps companies create an end-to-end content production system accessible to disparate teams. In addition, DCM easily integrates with Microsoft business intelligence tools, giving management insight into production details.

• Marketing analytics

  Microsoft Solutions for Marketing Analytics provide a comprehensive platform for aggregating, managing, and analyzing large amounts of data, allowing you to effectively measure brand loyalty, awareness, affinity, and the success of individual marketing elements. The Microsoft platform is based on a client-servers-services infrastructure that embraces a complete and unified user experience-including rich functionality on the desktop, mobile devices, and browser-based Web tools-that provides broader reach within organizations.

  Microsoft's business intelligence solutions give companies the tools to analyze business data from multiple, varied sources and share that information throughout the enterprise.

• Marketing automation

  The marketing automation capabilities included with Microsoft Dynamics CRM give consumer goods companies the ability to deliver impactful marketing campaigns and consistent communications.

  Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Marketing provides marketing professionals with robust data-cleansing and segmentation tools, leading campaign management features, and insightful marketing analytics to increase the effectiveness of marketing programs, improve efficiencies, and better track key metrics. Microsoft Dynamics CRM business software provides a holistic, comprehensive set of marketing capabilities so you can target your customers effectively.

• Web 2.0, e-commerce and beyond

  Microsoft provides a complete platform for building a fully functioning campaign and corporate Web sites. Software from Microsoft gives consumer goods companies the ability to harness the new capabilities in Web 2.0 and e-commerce systems to implement interactive Web sites that provide customers with rich, consistent, and intuitive user experiences across browsers and devices. The Microsoft Web and e-commerce platforms provide all the technology and infrastructure assets a consumer goods company needs to create, host, deploy, and maintain an online presence.