microsoft education
In 2017, Microsoft Education wanted to improve its presence in the education market. This meant honing its story, placing its products in the context of user needs, and engaging multiple audiences in education: School Leaders, Educators, IT professionals, Students and Parents, and Higher Education. Working with POSSIBLE, I developed a comprehensive content strategy plan to improve Microsoft’s storytelling, better communicate with target audiences, and improve messaging and presentation of Microsoft’s software and hardware offerings in the education space.
HOMEPAGE
We created a Homepage to achieve three purposes: tell the Microsoft education story and its benefits to educators, provide key Microsoft offerings in the context of audience needs (like STEM courses), and highlight the benefits of Microsoft devices.
The page follows a hierarchy that tells this story while weaving in specific benefits of Microsoft education to the target audiences.
navigation
A key task we had was to clarify and target specific audiences. Working with Microsoft, we focused on five key audiences: School Leaders, Educators, IT professionals, Students and Parents, and Higher Education. Those audiences became our primary navigation. Each audience had a specific landing page, and detail pages supported the offerings for that audience.
AUDIENCE LANDING PAGES
We created one landing page for each audience, which followed the model of the homepage: tell the Microsoft education story, highlight key benefits to the audience, and present relevant software and hardware in the context of the audience’s needs.
The result was a series of landing pages that told a version of the Microsoft story most relevant to each of the targeted audiences.
audience detail pages
Beneath the audience landing pages, we created audience detail pages around a specific topic relevant to the audience. For example, we created a pafe for teachers focused on “Technology in your classroom”.
These identified key audience needs within that topic, presented the benefits of Microsoft software and hardware for the audience around that topic, and showcased specific products that could help with that audience need.
For example, for Technology in your Classroom, we created a section of content Preparing your classroom, stating how Microsoft products could help with this process in general, then highlighting key products that could aid in that specific audience need.