Traditionally Microsoft has invested large marketing budget towards bringing together customers in-person and telling the ‘solution story’, whether that be through storytelling of the strategic vision, or demos of solutions in action. To scale this storytelling and demo experience within healthcare, Vertic was tasked with creating a digital solution that would get customers as close as possible online to that offline experience.
Vertic’s belief was that the offline event experience cannot simply be put online in a ‘lift and shift’ manner. Humans will not sit behind a screen and watch multiple hours of keynote presentations like they would offline, because of interactive aspects of human to human in-person events that break up that monotony. Our strategy therefore was to create an experience that would be specifically tailored for the digital medium.
The opportunity for Microsoft customers to save time and money from viewing keynotes and content online – at times most suitable for the user – outweighs the desire to see Microsoft or Partner individuals in-person. Furthermore, having the content from the event available in both long-format video but also repurposed into short-format content such as infographics, meant an experience that was relevant to the user’s availability and consumption preference. The streaming world has taught us that “appointment viewing” is not the priority like it was in the past, and so enabling a user to segment content that was most appropriate to their needs and challenges, before being directed to the most appropriate part of the digital experience, enabled users to have a more customized and relevant experience.
Using the one digital experience for pre-event engagement, promoting thought-leadership content, while driving demand generation for the event - as well as a post-event follow-up channel for sales and partners to track customer interactions -, the solution catered towards top-funnel, mid-funnel and lower-funnel stages of customers’ information journeys.
