Guest Post: 4 Useful Tips for Improving Your Marketing Efforts with Office 365

Office 365 is now used by a wide range of businesses from all over the world to boost their marketing efforts. Both small businesses and large corporations, such as Facebook, take advantage of its many functionalities. As Office 365 is a cloud-based solution, you won’t need to have to worry about deploying another application on your servers or installing software individually on each workstation. Another advantage of using a cloud-based office suite is that you can do your work from anywhere with an Internet connection and use any device, such as a desktop, laptop, netbook, tablet or smartphone.

Here is how you can start taking advantage of all that Office 365 offers and boost the efficiency of your marketing efforts in the process:

1. Make E-Mail Marketing Easier

E-mail marketing lets you reach both current and potential customers with targeted campaigns designed to get them to buy your products and services. As such, e-mail marketing has many advantages for businesses. It’s an inexpensive way of connecting with your target audience, it has higher conversion rates when compared to other online advertising channels, and the performance of your campaigns can be easily tracked.

Office 365’s mail merge feature can be used to simplify your e-mail marketing campaigns when you send bulk messages to a large number of recipients. It allows you to compose a message that will be sent out and personalize it with the information of each recipient that is part of your mailing list. Such personalized information may include the recipient’s name, company and e-mail address.

Furthermore, many businesses send out newsletters as part of their e-mail marketing activities. You can use Publisher, which is included in Office 365, to create and send out your newsletters. Publisher gives you the option of sending your newsletter either as a PDF attachment or as an integral part of the e-mail message that will display as soon as the recipient opens it.

2. Create Your Web App

If your business doesn’t currently have a web app, Office 365 provides you with the tools you need to easily create one. Web applications can be used for a variety of purposes, such as simplifying your internal businesses processes, publicity and branding, as well as providing more efficient customer support.

Microsoft Access is a powerful and flexible database software tool offered as part of the Office 365 suite. It comes with a variety of templates that make creating and deploying a web app simple, with minimal technical knowledge required. Templates provided by Microsoft include: asset tracking, contacts, project management, task management, issue tracking and more. There are many other third-party plugins and templates you can use with Access to create a web app which truly suits your business needs.

3. Produce Captivating Long-Form Content

Long-form content refers to content that you publish online and is longer than a standard article on a web page. It can be a tutorial, e-book, guide, an online presentation giving details about your business and the products or services it offers, etc.

Using long-form content can have many benefits, especially when you’re trying to grow your business. It lets you build authority in your niche, provides valuable opportunities to get in touch with your customers, gives you engaging content to share through social channels and can boost your search engine rankings.

Sway is a new app that comes with Office 365. It has been specifically designed to help you create engaging and valuable long-form content. One of its biggest advantages over competing apps is that it lets you create a wide range of content types, including stories, presentations, newsletters, and reports.

4. Boost Team Cooperation

Effective collaboration between teams and departments is essential to the success of any organization. Unfortunately, in many businesses, the sales and marketing departments often don’t get along too well, despite both pursuing a similar objective: creating value for customers and increasing sales for the business. This is explained by the fact that marketing teams focus on the bigger picture (analysis and processes), while sales teams build relationships with individual customers.

Creating closer and more efficient collaboration between your sales and marketing departments is important if you want your business to succeed in the long term. Office 365 comes with a wide range of collaboration features that allow different departments in your organization to work more closely together. These features include cloud-based document sharing, communication by email, instant messaging and video conferencing, as well as shared calendars or task lists.

Conclusion

Office 365 is a full-featured cloud-based business suite giving you a variety of productivity tools you can use as part of your daily operations. It’s a highly versatile business application that can be accessed from any device, so your team members can keep up with their work even when they’re away from the office.

Its many marketing features let you promote your business in an efficient, affordable and convenient way. The end result is better relationships with your customers, resulting in more sales and faster business growth.

Author Bio

Helen Eagleton, a freelance blogger from Boston, follows topics in the realm of education, technology, digital marketing, and business in general. When she’s not researching for her next article, she enjoys watching documentaries and exploring the nature. Reach her @eagleton_helen