In a nutshell This is the story of how we changed the perception of SAP. Traditionally seen as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) provider, SAP actually has a whole host of innovative products. Through a 10-week social campaign, we positioned SAP as a business innovation partner. It generated the following results: • 11.1 million impressions on Twitter • 2.1 million impressions on Facebook • An increase of 42,995 followers on Twitter • 30,000 visits to the campaign landing page How did we do it? The short answer is: by listening to our audience. As part of SAP’s ‘Invitation to Innovate’ movement, we conducted a social listening exercise using SAP’s NetBase software to find out what people were saying about innovation. We took the results and turned them into an interactive heat map of the world. It showed where conversations were taking place as they happened and what people were saying. Then, we brought the heat map to life with 10 weeks of inspiring content. It started with insight from the heat map and stories about innovation. Then, toward the end of the campaign, we introduced the SAP story, showcasing inspirational videos of how the company’s helping the world to run better. The secret to its success By conducting the social listening exercise first, we were able to develop a story our audience really wanted to hear and give them content they cared about. SAP Overview SAP helps businesses run better. Its software empowers people and organisations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively. SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software, working with 251,000 companies of all sizes and industries. Business Challenges / Objectives SAP is traditionally viewed as an ERP provider but it also has innovative solutions in mobile, analytics, cloud, social and HANA, SAP’s game changing platform. However, many people aren’t aware of these. SAP faces a battle to change long-standing perceptions. The objective of this campaign was to help SAP better connect with its audience and position itself as an innovation partner. SAP wanted to connect on a personal and emotional level – not an easy task for a B2B brand. Strategy Audience: marketing, sales and IT professionals Four key elements of our strategy: • This campaign needed to get people excited about a larger demand generation campaign called ‘Invitation to Innovate’. To do this, we decided to take a step back and find out what was inspiring people to innovate in the first place before inviting them to innovate with SAP • We chose to listen to what our audience was saying about innovation to communicate with people in a more meaningful way. We listened in 53 countries across 20 languages, processing thousands of pieces of unstructured data every second to give us the insight we needed to understand our audience. We decided which channels to use with the help of social listening • We wanted to show the world SAP’s innovative streak rather than just tell them about it. As a result, we put SAP’s NetBase, part of the Social Media Analytics package, at the heart of the campaign. It helped us turn huge amounts of social media data into insight • We used inspirational SAP stories to connect with our audience on an emotional level. The videos showed how SAP is helping to improve lives all around the world. Channels and tactics Getting our audience to the World of Innovation Once we found out what channels the audience was on and what they were saying about innovation, we needed to reach them. The campaign was about changing perceptions of SAP so we started on existing SAP social channels and gained followers from our target audience. We also sent e-mails to SAP’s database of contacts to launch the campaign and drive traffic. Our data visualization map displayed results from the social listening exercise on a heat map of the world, which our audience could interact with computers, mobile devices and tablets. Getting them to engage on the site Visitors were able to select one of seven key topics to view the volume of conversations related to that category. Each country had its own statistics pop up box, showing the breakdown of conversations for each topic. This gave a really interesting view of which countries were leading the conversation in different areas, and how, for example, some countries would be more likely to talk about the topic of retail innovation more than others. The site also included individual tweets for each of categories to show the individual conversations. Even more content During the campaign, we also published blogs about what we’d found in the listening exercise and how innovative SAP solutions were helping improve lives. And we got our audience involved through fun online polls and an ‘inspirational’ playlist on Spotify. This multi-channel approach enabled us to reach a broad audience and to showcase SAP’s innovative technology to create the data visualization map. Results Changing perceptions Technology brands don’t normally get this close to their audience and this approach was certainly different to anything SAP had done before. It showed the brand in a completely different light - we weren't just churning out content on social, but giving our audience pieces we knew they were interested in. Raising awareness The campaign was also about raising awareness and we well and truly succeeded in getting people talking. Every social media channel within every country was given their own unique tracking code so we could monitor which were performing best and what message was resonating the most. This allowed us to optimise our content to get the most interaction with the audience. Starting conversations Many countries across North America and EMEA picked up the campaign. Our campaign hashtag (#betterrunworld) generated an incredible 11 million impressions on twitter and 2.1 million on Facebook. We saw followers of SAP’s twitter channels increase by 42,995 over the 10 weeks. And there were just under 30,000 views of the campaign landing page, including 8,119 unique views. This was a steady figure over the 10 weeks so we not only succeeded in getting people to the site but we kept new visitors coming each week. The bottom line This campaign was innovative and creative and brought our audience closer to SAP through increased engagement and awareness.
