Microsoft Core Marketing Engineering turns audiences into customers with Dynamics 365 Marketing

Quick pivot on event management

For many companies, the COVID-19 health crisis accelerated actions they already had on their roadmaps. That was the case for Microsoft Core Marketing Engineering (CME), which manages the marketing events platform and hosts regional events. The business unit works closely with the Global Demand Center, which drives the marketing operations and corporate content. Traditionally, Microsoft’s commercial marketing business ran twice as many in-person marketing events as digital events. And it used a variety of third-party software tools to manage event planning, email communications, and attendee registration.

CME wanted to streamline event management and reduce the number of tools they used. They had already started to explore how to digitally transform processes using the company’s own technologies when the COVID-19 health crisis suddenly made remote event capabilities more critical. “With the changes that COVID-19 brought, we saw an opportunity to move quickly and bring more engineers onto the project,” says Paul Thurogood, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft.

Adopting integrated, versatile solutions

The project team decided that Core Marketing Engineering could meet all its goals by adopting Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to track marketing events, customer journeys, email communications, and customer feedback. Called the Event Management Center (EMC) internally, the unit takes advantage of Dynamics 365 Marketing to centralize event details, including registration questions and event publishing activities.

Dynamics 365 Marketing also appealed to CME because its out-of-the-box functionality makes it easy to create Microsoft Teams meetings, hold Teams Live Events, configure meeting options, and add presenters—all from within the EMC. “By using Dynamics 365 and Teams together, we’ve centralized everything for our marketers, so they no longer have to spend time navigating to an outside system when they want to build a digital event,” says Sanarya Salah, Program Manager at Microsoft.

They also use Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to automate event feedback management. Every time a marketer creates an event, an event survey will be embedded automatically at a certain point in the business process flow. When people attend an event, they will automatically receive a thank-you email with a link to a survey so that the marketers can capture feedback in near real time.

Increased reliability, decreased costs

By implementing EMC on Dynamics 365, the business unit reduced the total number of applications and streamlined the event management process. “In the past, we ran into reliability and scale issues due to the complex nature of the legacy ecosystem,” says Saravanan Arumugam, Service Reliability Engineering Lead, Events Platform at Microsoft. “Now that we’ve simplified our architecture with Dynamics 365 Marketing, we’ve got a much more reliable setup.” 

More engaging digital events, more leads

In the year before the COVID-19 health crisis, commercial marketing business teams at Microsoft held approximately 12,000 in-person events and 6,000 digital events. In a dramatic shift during the company’s past fiscal year, the unit now hosts 99 percent of its events online. The increase in digital events has also deepened and broadened attendee engagement by using enhanced meeting capabilities, such as through Teams. “We have so much flexibility with Teams for how attendees can interact,” says Thurogood. “And we’ve seen a transformation in the types of digital events we run to foster a more deeply engaged online experience.”

In a relatively short time, CME has seen a notable uptick in leads, proving that well-managed digital events are effective for turning audiences into customers. With its dedicated focus on technology capabilities, the unit drew in more attendees, new known leads who have never interacted with Microsoft, and hand-raisers (people who attend an event and then indicate they would like to talk to sales). Even once CME can host in-person events again, its marketers and other staff believe that digital events will continue to play a key role in the business.

“We quickly changed our approach to digital events, and instead of hurting business, it has actually propelled growth,” says Nguyen. “By carefully combining technology solutions in our events platform, including Dynamics 365 and Teams, we’ve enabled our marketing business to generate a 400 percent increase in attendees and a 500 percent increase in new known leads. We know customers are getting real value from digital events.”

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