Improving your Brand with Azure Services.
A content-based online brand presence is becoming increasingly vital. Regardless of industry, your business will gain the majority of audience awareness and market share through your website, app, and the content you share to address anything from industry trends to audience pain points.
Building that presence, of course, can be complex. Without a comprehensive backend structure and strategy, you risk a lack of integration and consistency that ultimately minimizes the positive effects digital marketing can provide for your brand.
That’s what makes Azure Services so valuable for any businesses looking to build brand awareness and use online tools to grow their customer base. Microsoft’s suite of cloud-based products offers a variety of tools specifically designed to help you improve your brand presence in an integrated, sustainable way.
Your Website: Building the Structure
The hub of any modern marketing presence is your brand’s website. Here, you can share valuable information about your business and industry. But perhaps even more importantly, it’s also the place where you can collect your audience’s contact information for further, more targeted marketing efforts.
All of that means you absolutely have to get the website right. Build it the right way, and your other initiatives tend to fall into place. Azure’s Web App Services can help you accomplish that goal.
The platform is especially beneficial because of its continuous improvement emphasis. In the age of agile and DevOps, developers have begun to realize that websites are not static. They need to be constantly scaled and improved in order to reflect changing audiences, industry trends, and business capabilities. Web Apps allow you to make updates to your website faster, scale them more easily, and use integrated analytics to account and adjust for trends and errors.
Following Audience Trends With a Mobile App
Your second step when looking to build a digital brand presence should be to consider a mobile app. The mobile application system has become one of the biggest industries around the globe and for good reason. In 2016 alone, consumers around the world downloaded almost 150 billion mobile apps to their smartphones, tablets, and other devices.
With an app, you can offer a more comprehensive brand experience to your audience than a website could. Push notifications allow you to stay in your potential and current customers’ minds, helping to communicate important messages and promote limited offers.
To help you get to that point, Microsoft offers two Azure services specifically designed to enhance mobile app deployment. One is Mobile Apps, a development tool that supports all major programming languages and operating systems. Features like corporate sign in, offline data sync, and dynamic scaling make this tool vital to increase your mobile reach.
Meanwhile, the Azure Notification Hub adds a crucial communication element to your app experience. Broadcast your push notification to millions of consumers, or tag individual audience segments for more personalized notifications. The simplicity of the services makes this platform intriguing even for coding novices.
Pushing Visual and In-Depth Content in Real Time
Modern digital marketing has to be based on content. Audiences are increasingly cynical regarding ‘traditional’ promotional messages but will engage with content that answers their pain point or provides actual value to them in other ways. This type of content also helps to convince them to give brands their contact information and become leads, allowing for more targeted and effective follow-up marketing.
Building the actual content is one piece of the puzzle. But to be effective, you also have to find dynamic ways to get it in front of your audience. That’s where Azure’s Content Delivery Network enters the equation. It allows you to push your content quickly, efficiently, and to multiple platforms.
Simply pushing written content, of course, might not be enough. Audiences increasingly demand visuals, from infographics to videos. Azure Media Services helps you not just host your videos, but also play them back on your website and other owned properties.
One nuance that’s important to consider in this environment is live streaming. Foregoing pre-packaged video for a live experience has entered marketing mainstream, from webinars to virtual company events. the above-mentioned Media Services platform offers a live and on-demand streaming package specifically designed to help your brand enhance its visual presence using these new technologies.
Using Bots to Enhance and Personalize Audience Experiences
As an experienced marketer, you might have noticed the recent rise of bots. As brands continually strive for a more personalized and dynamic customer experience, they have turned to AI-supported automation to answer audience questions and direct them toward the desired outcome.
According to Business Insider, the global chatbot market is experiencing rapid growth. Reducing operating costs, they are expected to reach $1.23 billion in revenue by 2025. About 45 percent of end users now prefer chatbots in dealing with brands, while 80 percent of marketers plan to use the capability by 2020.
Building a bot to enhance your marketing and customer service capabilities may seem complex. Azure’s Bot Service seeks to make it easier. The platform supports all major chat networks, from Facebook to WhatsApp, Skype, and texting. Developed bots have built-in agility and machine learning capabilities; in other words, they will be able to learn from their own interactions with your audience to provide smarter, more comprehensive, and relevant messages over time.
Analyzing Your Efforts to Maximize Success
Finally, building a comprehensive brand presence is not possible without a continuous improvement mindset. Experts are not born, and no website or content strategy can be perfect from the beginning. Instead, any marketing strategy has to include a framework of benchmarks and analysis to spot wins as well as areas of improvement.
Unfortunately, analytics tend to be fragmented. Because of the variety of services used, you might end up with data silos in which information is collected, but not integrated. Moving your analytics solutions to Azure can help to mitigate that potentially serious problem.
Microsoft’s suite of products has a number of platforms available to aid in your analytics. For instance, Application Insights helps you monitor your app’s performance, while Insight and Analytics look out for your IT infrastructure. But what makes Azure so powerful is to pull multiple data sources together.
That’s where Power BI Embedded shows its value. The platform allows you to not just pull in all the relevant data from your various Azure tools, but visualize it to create dashboards that allow you to make decisions and updates in real time. The result is a more accurate, flexible, and integrated analytics strategy that can actually help you improve your brand presence over time.
How to Improve Your Brand Presence With Strategic Azure Implementation
When it comes to enhancing your digital brand presence, it’s tempting to begin the process with marketing tactics. Sure enough, email marketing and social media ads can help you get some more visitors to your website. But if you don’t get the backend structure right first, those visitors will be unlikely to actually turn into customers and generate revenue for your business.
That’s what makes Azure Services so valuable for the brand building process. The above tools are just some of the many platforms your brand can utilize to build a better structure, enhance audience awareness, and maximize your presence in the digital space. To learn more about them, and to start the process of implementation, contact us.
