Marketing help for smaller businesses
By Alan R. Earls
Microsoft Office Live Premium helps you organize and manage marketing campaigns.
In Summary:
| • | Experts observe that marketing can be a big challenge for smaller businesses. |
| • | The adManager, Contact Manager, and Project Manager functions within Microsoft Office Live Premium can help. |
For most business people, "marketing continues to be a mystery," according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. Under the SBA's definition, marketing "deals with all the steps between determining customer needs and supplying them at a profit." In other words, coordinating specific information about your customer, company, and product, and helping to supply the connections that can turn that information into real business.
"Small businesses face the same pressures as large enterprises to continuously improve their offerings, raise their market profile, attract new customers, and generate repeat business," says Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president for Microsoft Office Live. "However, they typically lack the in-house IT expertise and dedicated technology budgets of big companies."
Marketing success can come from having the right tools and the right information—and a little help from Microsoft Office Live Premium. The most comprehensive offering from among the Internet-based Office Live services, Microsoft Office Live Premium is tailored to the needs of small businesses. It encourages business owners to put their business online, making many capabilities more accessible so they can conduct business from anywhere. In particular, Microsoft Office Live Premium includes capabilities that can enhance the development and deployment of marketing efforts by making it easier for online customers to find the company, and by better managing customer contact information and making it easier to plan and implement marketing campaigns.
"Office Live helps small business owners close that competitive gap by giving them an affordable, comprehensive package that provides everything," says Jha. These capabilities are embodied in adManager, Contact Manager, and Project Manager.
adManager
"In terms of pure marketing programs, adManager is probably the best example [of how Office Live Premium can help], as it allows small businesses to easily and effectively manage keyword advertising campaigns," explains Louise Rasho, senior manager of marketing communications for Microsoft Office Live. Keyword advertising links ad messages to specific words or phrases and is sometimes called "pay per click" (PPC) or "cost per action" (CPA). For example, says Rasho, adManager can help generate text ads for your business that appear on the results pages of major search engines.
adManager works with Microsoft adCenter, an underlying service that delivers and places subscribers' keyword ads on Live Search. In addition, adManager helps users manage and optimize search advertising strategies by setting up a monthly budget and the maximum "cost per click," so users can track results and adjust the program for maximum effectiveness. In fact, Rasho says, adManager provides "at a glance" visibility into which search engines and keywords are driving the most traffic.
The adManager interface is so powerful and intuitive that it's even easy to target messages to specific cities or regions. Above all, it eliminates the need to hire expensive agencies or contractors. After an initial setup fee, you only pay when a customer clicks through to your Web site from your keyword ad.
Contact Manager
Microsoft Office Live Premium Contact Manager can help you organize your business contacts and track customer interactions so you can maintain a running dialogue with each customer. More important, it gives your entire organization a single view of the customer, meaning that everyone has access to the same information.
Rasho observes that small business owners have the dual challenge of distinguishing their company's offerings from their competitors' while also serving customers well with more personalized service. To meet those challenges, Contact Manager can generate marketing tasks that deliver leads and initiate sales tasks (such as making follow-up calls) that can help salespeople actively manage the sales cycle. Its reporting and tracking capabilities give everyone a "real-time" shared view of the customer as well—based on roles and permission, users see the most up-to-date and relevant customer information.
Contact Manager can be configured to send e-mail alerts about new customer opportunities to the appropriate people within the company. It includes a dashboard as well as information on accounts, contacts, opportunities, products, and relevant business documents.
Project Manager
Microsoft Office Live Premium Project Manager helps you stay on top of marketing project timelines and milestones, track progress, and keep your team informed of project status and individual deliverables. "You could use the Project Manager to track progress on the coordination of a marketing campaign, including developing a project plan to get the creative work done, finalizing the media schedule, launching the campaign, and monitoring the results," says Rasho.
She adds that users can plan, track, and update their marketing program's progress in a central, shared online location. From the projects tab, users can quickly set up projects, track component tasks and milestones, coordinate project teams, and track and analyze program status. Specific projects, tasks, milestones, and issues can be edited in datasheet mode and filtered and sorted by a variety of fields, such as My Tasks, Due Today, Active Tasks, and Assigned To. Supporting files can be attached to provide additional documentation and project details.
Geared for small business
"We've heard from thousands of small business owners that they feel much more confident and are noticeably more competitive as a result of having a Web presence," says Jha. "Small businesses in particular need that kind of agility as they are evolving and growing so quickly. When they use Office Live, these customers are not intimidated by the service because it's easy to use and doesn't require training or consultants."
Alan R. Earls is a contributing writer for Momentum, the Midsize Business Center newsletter.
