Microsoft Learn
Penetration and Product Marketing Strategy for Microsoft Learn Certifications
April 2021
Client:
Context/Project Background:
Team Members:
Methods:
Microsoft Canada: Microsoft In Education Team
During the Marketing Accelerator Program, my team and I were tasked with a case assignment from the Microsoft in Education Team to increase the importance and awareness of Microsoft Certifications around audiences including students, faculty, and recruiters. This is in order to increase the number of people completing certifications via Microsoft Learn. This included focusing on one segment, creating a product marketing strategy, defining actionable tactics and engagement initiatives, and ensuring that strategies were feasible and scalable across many institutions.
Jose Chicas, Victoria Wong, & Gigi Seifelnasr
We used Microsoft Powerpoint, Secondary Research, Zoom, and Google Drive in order to collaborate remotely and present our ideas in an organized and clear manner.
Process:
As none of us had previously used the Microsoft Learn Certifications interface before, it was an exciting time to first dive into the dashboard and play around with some of the modules to get a better idea of what Microsoft Learn had to offer.
After understanding the benefits of Microsoft Learn and its certificates and understanding the needs of different demographics, we decided to target our campaign towards university students in their final year who were looking to gain or learn about specific technical skills they might need to graduate.
Through this we realized that microsoft needed a LEAP recommendation that enabled students to learn, engage, aspire, and prepare with Microsoft Learn. Our recommendation consisted of two components to engage students at Simon Fraser University, a hack-a-thon called Microsoft Certify and short seminars called Microsoft Bytes. Using Microsoft’s existing Microsoft Learn Ambassador program to run these events, we provided a strategy that was efficient in resources but impactful.
We produced a final deliverable that was feasible and effective as we thought through our own university experiences and picked engagement initiatives that were the most impactful.
My Role:
Case Competitor, Marketing Strategist
As someone who loves diving deeper into specific topics I supported my team in doing secondary research for the analysis. I played a pivotal role in researching and understanding what challenges Microsoft faced with their current marketing initiatives, brand strengths they had that could mitigate these challenges, and better understanding the pain points and motivations of our target market.
I also played a large role in creating talking points for my teammates for our presentation in addition to helping brainstorm the recommendation.
Reflection:
Our strategy changed and morphed many times over the course of a few weeks and we used the feedback we got from our program leads to further improve our presentation. A few days before our final presentation to the client, we decided to switch to something that was more feasible and this definitely put us into time crunch mode. However, it made us work under pressure and produce a final strategy that was feasible and something that we were very confident in. We really had to understand and reflect on what would entice third and fourth year students to want to engage with and complete Microsoft Certifications. While we first started with bigger, not as feasible ideas, we then realized that there were resource and cost constraints that we had to take into consideration. Therefore by researching existing frameworks and resources Microsoft Learn had in place to already promote their certifications, we did our homework to get a clear understanding of how we could use those resources but change them to drive awareness and conversions on campuses.
