November 01, 2018 Michael Mayday
It’s rewarding to see a company succeed — especially when they’re considered an underdog in their respective industry. Microsoft, for example, is a quintessential comeback story in the tech industry. It was the tech industry leader for decades until being supplanted agile companies, like Google and Apple, that were more capable of adapting to a digital age.
Today, the organization is back near the top. It’s now the world’s fourth-most valuable company, nipping on Alphabet’s heels (in May it even surpassed the Google conglomerate) and just had an excellent earnings report.
What gives? Well, a lot of hard work from dedicated employees and key investments in critical areas, such as the company’s cloud platform, Microsoft Azure. Azure, in fact, is one of the prime drivers behind the company’s growth spurt. Its cloud platform is so successful that it’s growing faster than Amazon’s AWS. That’s serious pipeline.
To us, we can’t help but think that Microsoft Azure’s marketing efforts played a critical role in an organization’s overall success. While the tech giant possesses the funds to buy their way into a market, the company’s ethos — and practicality — demanded it takes a long-term, ground-up approach to marketing that informs customers, trains partners and provides sales with the insights they need — and do so quickly. It’s a traditional, well-oiled global demand generation machine refined for the modern era and it works. Trust us, we’ve seen it in action.
Microsoft’s successes — and other growth successes — should be a wake-up call to organizations chasing global growth. Its message: growth is a team effort, and putting everything in the right place first pays off in the long run. Curious about how Azure boosted its global marketing efforts? Check out our case study explaining how they re-invented their webinars for success and register for our upcoming episode of the Webinar Best Practices Series, “Taking Your Webinars Global.”