Nisha Baxi talks about Marketing Insights at Microsoft^®

Video Transcript

My name is Nisha Baxi and I am a marketing manager at Microsoft and I’ve been with the company for three years. There are a lot of things that I’d like to share with young adults about the marketing field and the marketing profession. I actually got started at a pretty young age. I guess I always had an inkling that I was going to go into the profession. I remember giving my dad a call and I said, dad, I think I want to do women’s studies in sociology. And he said, oh, I think you mean marketing. And I was like, what? Really? And he said, yeah. This is something that’s been interesting to you your whole life.

Since I was 12 years old I’ve been reading books on like sales and marketing. But for some reason I got excited. I don’t know why a 12-year-old would read a book about marketing, but I was always fascinated by the concept. Marketing is a fantastic discipline if it’s something that you are willing to delve and understand into from end-to-end. And I think I was only able to do that by learning and taking classes in college that pertain specifically to the subject. And then also by reading books and doing these sort of things on my own every day. It’s about creating that extensive network. It’s about meeting interesting people that are doing interesting things that you love or things that you want to get into and sharing – being open with them and sharing with them what it is that you want to do because everybody wants to be successful and everybody wants to be part of that success story. People want to help you. What can I do from a marketing standpoint to get them excited about building for Microsoft? And then the second part is, once we actually get them to say yes, what are some of the marketing campaigns and programs that we can do with them in order to get them excited and to also get more people to use the product. So user acquisition strategies, growth marketing, growth hacking. These are things that we hear about all the time. So how are we driving more people, and new people, to actually be using these products? The sky’s the limit.

It does not matter where you go to school, it does not matter what your parents have done and what other people around you think that you should do. It’s all about what you are excited about and what interests you and just learning on your own. One of the big movements right now in marketing is, how do we generate a significant amount of users and how do we regenerate a significant amount of growth with these particular products? And so there is a lot of really interesting reading material, there’s a lot of different ideas that people have on ways to do that. From a marketing perspective it’s really, really important, and I can’t stress this enough especially for people that are just getting into the discipline, is making sure that they know how to acquire users. Marketing is only as important as getting people to use your product.

And traditionally that would be – the engineering team would build something and then the marketing people would say, okay, cool, give me whatever it is you built and I’ll find a way to make it go viral. I will put together this crazy launch campaign and that’s the end-all be-all. But one of the things that is often overlooked is finding a way to integrate some of these viral marketing components into the product from the get-go. So building that into your plan basically.

Relationship marketing is super important. So whether that be working with people outside of a company or inside the company, it’s just as important for somebody in marketing to have good relationships with the sales team, good relationships with the engineering team, the development team, with the board, key executives, because a lot of times – marketing is like this special discipline that is sort of a cross between the two of them, and being able to bring them together in a way that makes sense.

And so I would say that if there is any skill that needs to be developed for any marketer, it’s being able to develop those relationships. And then being able to use those relationships in a way that would make sense to grow both the product and then also to be able to increase your user base.