Audience-Tailored
Communication

 

Great communication should be well crafted, but it also needs to be relevant. We specialize in making technical content interesting to non-technical audiences—and that means taking the time to understand what they care about, what keeps them up at night, and what level of detail is appropriate to their role.

 

 

“Engaging communication doesn't start and end with content. We strategize, build tools, create visuals, and craft messages tailored to your audience.”

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Language Your Audience Understands

There’s a big difference between technical and business audiences, even when you are talking about technical products. Our content practice is geared toward helping our clients bridge that gap by expressing the value of technology using the terms, metrics, and results that business decision-makers care about, whether they run a mom-and-pop shop, or work for a large enterprise. Here are a few examples of our audience-specific expertise.

CMO Audience. We’ve been working with Microsoft on engaging marketing business decision-makers since 2012. We started by developed messaging decks that distill Microsoft’s key technical offerings in terms of the problems faced by CMOs. We then engaged in a multi-year project to identify trends in digital marketing, capture the attention of CMOs with high-level thought leadership, and manage a content campaign to place articles and infographics in marketing channels including trade publications, websites and industry organizations.

Startup Audience. We work to help Microsoft’s startup-focused teams hone their communication to and around the tech startup audience, including assisting the class of startups incubating at Microsoft’s Seattle accelerator in up-leveling their messaging. Our consultant met with startups to identify the business benefits of their technical innovations, coached them on presenting these to stakeholders and investors, and provided each startup with a unique story that they could place with press or use in their marketing materials. We then engaged in a content campaign to help message the benefits of using Microsoft technology to the startup audience.

 

 

Content Where People Can Find It

We take the time to understand your overall strategic goals with every content management project, and architect sites to fit your users’ existing workstyle as closely as possible. When this involves SharePoint, we use every trick in the book—and a few we’ve developed ourselves—to customize the user experience and functionality beyond what’s usually possible. Here are a few examples.

Onboarding and Training Portals for Employees: We’ve developed several sites for new-hire onboarding, internal training, and job support content. In one example, a team at Microsoft had a giant, difficult-to-use repository of job-related content. Based on our knowledge of how the users were interacting with the content, we designed and developed a user friendly architecture and custom filter system that allows users to search for training and content based on their specific role within the organization. In another project, we recommended turning a messy, error-prone onboarding tool into a polished, professional SharePoint site instead. We were able to replicate the core look and functionality that the team was accustomed to while providing a more robust back-end to support better reliability and performance.

Event Management Support for Speakers: Our client’s job was to provide engineer speakers to events worldwide, but the team was using an unwieldy system of spreadsheets and documents to manage the process. We designed and developed a SharePoint site to keep track of the speakers and events, which could easily be managed by speakers themselves, or their admins, depending on the team.

Design that strikes a chord

Clean, readable design is essential to making any content more engaging. But at MediaPlant, we go the extra step to understand the audience’s mindset and make stylistic choices that resonate with their values. Here are some examples of that process in action.

eBooks for Small Businesses: Developed for the SMB audience team for the Microsoft’s US Subsidiary, these 12-page eBooks explained the benefits of cloud technology in real world business scenarios. We illustrated them by implementing Microsoft’s brand graphics at their most hip and playful level to express the quirky, person-to-person nature of small business.

Readiness Content for Busy Sales Teams. A Microsoft product team engaged MediaPlant to create new field readiness materials so its sales teams could position the product against competitors in the enterprise device space. The existing materials the team was using were wordy, complex, and—according to anecdotal feedback—boring. To simplify the complex messaging and drive audience engagement among busy, on-the-go sales teams, we created a unique illustrated competitive discussion guide as an interactive PDF document. The content was such a hit with the field that we were asked to develop a printed comic book-style version, followed by succeeding rounds of interactive training.

Are you ready to better connect with your audience?
We’ll help you tailor communication to them, whether that means crafting the right message to make an impact, making creative design choices that resonate, or using the right medium to engage end-users.

Contact us