Microsoft created the BizSpark program to get hot tech startups interested in Microsoft hosting products during the early stages of their businesses, turning today's young tech startups into tomorrow's successful, Microsoft-loyal tech businesses.
Microsoft hired Attention to create a social campaign that would increase BizSpark conversation in social channels, drive traffic to the BizSpark landing page, and most importantly, increase signups.
Through social listening, Attention identified that while CEOs and CIOs were a key target for BizSpark, conversations about BizSpark in social channels were primarily among the developer community, the hands-on talent often tasked with assessing and recommending tech vendors.
Our analysis also uncovered that the developers who were talking about BizSpark weren't discussing many of the program's most attractive business-building features. Instead, their conversations focused on immediate, value-driven needs that the program could meet in the near term.
Drawing inspiration from in-joke t-shirt culture popular among developers, Attention created a "coder t-shirt" campaign to deliver those value-driven benefits to developers with an authentic voice in the social channels they frequented most.
The resulting campaign was an immediate success, meeting program goals for signup and outperforming benchmarks for all previous Microsoft campaigns in social channels. The success of the campaign led to a phase 2 extension, using the look and feel of the t-shirt campaign to further promote BizSpark program through social content, infographics for tech influencers, and even real t-shirts coming to a tech event near you.
