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How Content Marketing Campaign Helped SAP To Achieve 9 Million Impressions

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Sap-logo                   About SAP

SAP is a German software corporation company that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. SAP is headquartered in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, with regional offices in 130 countries. The company has above 293,500 customers over 190 countries. The company is a component of the Euro Stocks 50 stock market index.

When Xerox intended to exit the computer industry in 1975, they asked IBM to migrate their business systems to IBM technology. As part of IBM’s indemnity for the migration, IBM was given the rights to the Scientific Data Systems (SDS)/SAPE software, reportedly for a contract credit worth of $80,000.

Five IBM engineers from the AI department (Dietmar Hopp, Klaus Tschira, Hans-Werner Hector, Hasso Plattner, and Claus Wellenreuther, all from Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg) were employed in an enterprise-wide system based on this software, only to be told that it would be no longer necessary. Rather than rejecting the project, they decided to leave IBM Tech and start another company.

In June 1970, they founded System analyze und Programmentwicklung (“System Analysis and Program Development”) company, as a private partnership under the German Civil Code.

Their first client was the German branch of Imperial Chemical Industries  in Östringen, where they industrialized s mainframe programming for payroll and accounting. Instead of storing the data on punch cards mechanically, as IBM did, they stocked it locally. As a result, they called their software a real-time system, since there was no need to prepare the punch cards overnight (for this reason their flagship product carried an R in its name until the late 1990s). This first version was also a stand-alone software that could be offered to other interested parties.

Approach

We are a cosmopolitan organization with an extremely matrixes marketing department. One of our core marketing competencies is that we go to market by industry wise, fine-tuning both our products and messaging for 26 vertical industries,” said Ginger Shimp, Marketing Director.

Often, she combined; they also message at the sub-industry level. SAP, which is a global business operations and customer relations software corporation, has marketing teams that are focused on content augmentation, demand generation, social media, paid media, and events, among others.

In this campaign, SAP came up with 19 industries that hit across the array.

“We have retail and consumer industries. We have utilities and public sector enterprises,[and] financial services industries like banking and insurance. We have manufacturing industries, healthcare life sciences type monopoly, professional services industries … construction. We had oil and gas, utilities, wholesale distribution, just across all trades up and down the supply chain,” she said.

Challenge

The challenge for this campaign was to evolve industry-precise content to fill a full campaign reaching out to these groups.

A major confront of this “digital transformation”-The themed campaign was how to rise above the noise in the marketplace to reach these people with valuable content.

“We did this by speaking in the language of our customers and prospects,” Shimp said. “How do we apposite into that mix and what help can we offer? That’s where the industry specificity really came into play. Digital transformation breaks each industry in a unique fashion.”

She explained that it is a different set of resolutions depending on the industry, analyzing what stage of growth the company is in, and what their legacy products are.

Shimp and her team overlooked at all of the discrete tech and data trends in customer’s industries and comprehended that “digital commerce was really in its formative years. We saw this campaign to help our customers adopt the digital future by splitting the knowledge we’ve forgathered by helping so many clients who are at every stage of the drive.”

With such a huge campaign leaning on a wide band of customers, another challenge was making sure it didn’t spin out of control. Especially considering this campaign deficit in having numerous different agencies operating alongside Shimp, some writing distinct content, and others evolve themes that would envelop the entire campaign.

“You could fancy with so many industries, you could very easily wind up with distant campaigns. We really wanted to seize it together,” she said.

At the same time, Shimp wanted to be knowledgeable of the evident (fact) that “we couldn’t surpass our boundaries and we enforce to make sure we were very tightly aligned with our firm messaging contained by our campaign messaging.”

With so many people working to execute, putting up distinct landing pages, email messaging, event signage, remaining nuture on the desired message was vital.

For example, she said, “the industry team has had to reach out and talk to the solutions (results) teams and get their expertise when we were designing different pieces of the messaging to make sure that we were on right track.”

Campaign

Molding the content was the first step according to Shimp, and “we authored 19 industries with a complete complement of business-specific white papers, videos, infographics, blogs, surveys, presentations, email promotions, and more by developing different digital hubs.”

Healthcare Landing Page

1_healthcare_landingpage

Each industry was personalized for the particular onlookers while still keeping a persistent look and feel, she said, “Which was fundamental because we also preferred to appeal to the ecosystems of each and every industry.”

By tuning the messaging over a hot subject like digital transformation particularly to respective industry, the company was able to uniquely appeal to each customer audience, and testify to the benefits with examples from their own ecosystem.

“We adhered to the buyer’s campaign in terms of targeting the host of assets we had developed. We also worked to guarantee that we played various ways in which people consume instructions,” she said.

Not only did the team fabricate this content, but they built it out to plea to different preferences for digesting information. According to Shimp, this campaign coated“email, tweets, blogs, LinkedIn status updates, posts on the SAP Community Network, radio, virtual events, in-person events, outbound and responder follow-up [calls], Accounting-Based Marketing, and distinctive account meetings

Step #1. Always serve the individual customer

“Digital hub landing sites People’s ability to communicate in real time, not only with each other but with businesses … that’s growing and developing,” Shimp said.

This staggering ability to connect and follow in the present digital age convinced SAP that customers had to be given those alternates through immediate access to content and data. From their outlook point, Shimp and her team saw how business procedures are becoming harmonized across all functions.

“What that means is connected networks, memory platforms; those are providing that instant access. It’s right here, it’s right now. We hear about real time. What we’re observing is there’s almost a step up from real time. How do you convey that? That was what we were after,” she said.

In this far-reaching campaign, it was vital not to lose sight of the individual customer. Then, work out from there.

“We have an array of sight, and pick a single customer. Not only … for what that customer is doing, but what those customers are doing and what that customer’s supply chain is doing,” said Shimp.

Part of operating with an individual customer outlook is figuring out how they want to digest the content you’re moulding.

2_tedtalk

“Some people, they need something memorable that feels live … so we did videos. We had our experts giving talks in the class of that TED talk format,” she said, briefing that they also created video versions of white papers because frantic senior executives might not take the time to sit down and abstract a 20 to the 30-page whitepaper.

“They can digest a four-minute video. They can forward that to somebody else and say, ‘See what’s behind the curtain here,’ if you will. That person would be the one to download or extract the full whitepaper,” she said.

Digital blog post

3_digitalist_blog_post

That would hopefully lead to some content investigation, which would have the senior executive dept. come across thought leadership pieces put out on blogs; executive-level PowerPoint presentations were posted up on SlideShare, or even attending an event.

Healthcare content offering

4_healthcare_content_offering

Examples of the offers and assets created for this operation were:

  • The primary offer of digital industry whitepapers
  • Executive analysis of infographics, as well as use case infographics
  • Video white papers
  • Executive presentations
  • TED Talk-like videos where business leaders share their perspective on digitalization
  • A “Digital Readiness” quiz – an industry-specific questionnaire
  • Blog posts, 10 per industry released in Forbes, the Digitalist, LinkedIn and graduated through SAP social channels
  • Five tweet cards per industry
  • Industry forums

All of the discrete platforms were initiated from an original white paper, unique for each industry, and grew out from there.

Step #2. Find underutilized sources of indispensable knowledge

One of the predominant assets for this campaign was in-house talent, according to Shimp.

“We hire sensational people. We really do. They’re so conversant,” she said. The only challenge was “nailing their feet to the floor and getting them too fluent what they know.”

Shimp and her team started to enroot the content and decided that the white paper was going to be the influential piece of this campaign, where “just about panoptic we need to know will have been captured in the whitepaper. From the particular, we could really go to town from a marketing outlook,” she said.

Everyone working on, or near this campaign, “is a chief of our own industry from a marketing outlook,” she said.

Shimp is currently accountable for two industries, but at the time she only had one.

“So I would not contemplate making an assessment for one of my colleagues. That’s their area of ableness .While we’re all remarkable marketers, once you paint us with our own area, that’s what winds us up and gets us working,” she said.

One of Shimp’s colleagues tendered to contribute to the campaign since he was managing on one with a similar topic. He brought a renewed perspective, she said.

They wanted to run the campaign with industry meticulousness, and then back up to show the customer what digital industry meant overall, or more broadly. He recommended flipping that model and originating with an extensive message that would keep narrowing to a point.

“Both of them are valid. We’re pleased that we did both ways,” she said. Nothing went wrong with running this campaign capsized from the rest, she quoted, but it was always out of synchronized. Even though that approach didn’t lead to anything, it was a perfect lesson, she said, because they learned that the campaigns work best set to the same model.

Step #3. Give content time to resonate with customers – and the bottom line

We tried to boil the ocean,” Shimp said. “We thought that it’s mandatory to run the campaign in six months. What we’re seeing is we really need to execute the campaign for a better period of time.”

There was so much content to strengthen and push out, it wasn’t able to get done in such a short amount of time, she said.

“We have this immense information and we don’t want to hold it hostage. We want to appeal it from the rooftops. We want to just parachute it on a peak of the mountain with bullhorns blasting this great fact for people to consume,” she said.

That craving has to be balanced, Shimp added.

“On the other hand, we got shareholders. So we indeed need to sell some software along with the way and we need to create demand,” she said.

She and her team determined to drip out smaller bits of ungated content, to drag people in, and torment more valuable content.

“Some of our ideas were precisely free. You do not have to enroll to get this information. Then we would just hold handy to our vest some information so that we had a way of judging who was actually engrossed so that we can put them in a nurture queue,” she said.

Step #4. Continually evolve the campaign

“We’re continuing to analyze because we didn’t drop all of the productions at once. New productions were coming in,” Shimp said.

It’s been vital to remember that one business can’t necessarily be compared with another, she added, and they are currently evaluating the accumulated results.

“We’re looking at how we can take the campaign, parse it up and pull it into account-based marketing,” she said. The goal is to go into those particular accounts, and interpret how to bring relevant information to customers in a tailored way that will deeply resonate.

Results

“Not astonishing, we would love to rest on our laurels. Fairly we’re all tired,” Shimp joked. “The late nights and the sob and OD’ing on brew and sugar and going without sleep. We still had a blast doing it. We’re a bunch of marketing techies over here.”

The results of those sleepless marketing sessions are the following:

  • Over 30,000 blog views
  • Over 9 million impressions
  • Over 1,060 total blog referrals
  • Over 500 total downloads
  • 7,200 total video views
  • A 21% of wide cross-industry share of voice (the goal was 10%)
  • Over 5,900 total engagements
  • Over 300 infographic views

Marketing generated opportunities (MGO) valued $3,675,000. MGO’s are new opportunities created from marketing leads that have been recognized by sales and transformed into opportunities, according to Shimp.

The marketing touched pipeline (MTP) valued $50,037,709 in this campaign as well. MTP comprises all open opportunities that have at least one qualifying marketing activity after the opportunity conception date.

“You want to be in it for the lofty haul,” Shimp said. She added that a key piece is that “the communication doesn’t just mean to customers and potential customers. We have to do it internally as well. We have over 68,000 employees. We need enormously every single person moving in the same focus.”

According to Shimp, the CEO of SAP has an aphorism that directed them in this campaign – “you abridge everything, so you can do anything.”

“That’s what we’re trying to do. Streamline this as we drive it out to all of our network and our peers so that everybody’s got this particular message and the drumbeat gets louder and louder enough. I’m looking for a deafening disharmony,” she said.

Creative Samples

  1. Healthcare landing page
  2. Thought leader “TED talk”
  3. Digital blog post
  4. Healthcare content offering

The results of those sleepless marketing sessions are the following:

  • Over 30,000 blog views
  • Over 9 million impressions
  • Over 1,060 total blog referrals
  • Over 500 total downloads
  • 7,200 total video views
  • A 21% of wide cross-industry share of voice (the goal was 10%)
  • Over 5,900 total engagements
  • Over 300 infographic views

Marketing generated opportunities (MGO) valued $3,675,000. MGO’s are new opportunities created from marketing leads that have been recognized by sales and transformed into opportunities, according to Shimp.

The marketing touched pipeline (MTP) valued $50,037,709 in this campaign as well. MTP comprises all open opportunities that have at least one qualifying marketing activity after the opportunity conception date.

“You want to be in it for the lofty haul,” Shimp said. She added that a key piece is that “the communication doesn’t just mean to customers and potential customers. We have to do it internally as well. We have over 68,000 employees. We need enormously every single person moving in the same focus.”

According to Shimp, the CEO of SAP has an aphorism that directed them in this campaign – “you abridge everything, so you can do anything.”

“That’s what we’re trying to do. Streamline this as we drive it out to all of our network and our peers so that everybody’s got this particular message and the drumbeat gets louder and louder enough. I’m looking for a deafening disharmony,” she said.

Creative Samples

  1. Healthcare landing page
  2. Thought leader “TED talk”
  3. Digitalist blog post
  4. Healthcare content offering

Image credits: SAP

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Shubham Gowda

3 thoughts on “How Content Marketing Campaign Helped SAP To Achieve 9 Million Impressions”

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