How can a campaign impact your customer's lifecycle?

Our clients are facing unprecedented challenges to their businesses, driven by the explosion of e-commerce, new ways of working and the reorganization of supply chains on a global scale.

What is the common challenge they all face?

The answer: mobilize your customers, employees and suppliers in the same direction and provide them with the right experience, using your knowledge to be recognized as a leader.

We have developed an initiative called SAPCloud eXperience Leaders to share what other customers are doing and make our customers and all of us proud to adopt cloud solutions.

Creation of SAPCloud eXperience Leaders

Initially, the idea behind this initiative was simply to create elements to support the after-sales organization in boosting adoption and consumption, developing and orchestrating moments of contact with new customers and also in renewals scheduled for the year.

After presenting the initiative to GMs, COOs, and sales leaders, we received feedback that competitors were making a lot of noise in the market, claiming that their solutions were more impactful than SAP Cloud solutions.

Because of this, we decided to also include a media campaign to promote our great Fast Facts and Customer Testimonials that would better tell the success story of adopting new solutions.

With feedback from the Sales and After Sales teams, we thought that taking a more holistic approach to the customer journey, moving from traditional marketing (awareness and demand generation) to a more consumer-focused approach (blue box below), would make the campaign more complete and engaging.

“Helping will sell, but selling will not help!!"

Based on the adaptation of the traditional "buyer's journey" model, we started to think about the "consumption journey", since with the new business metrics, the financial approach on how results are accounted for has changed.

Now, customers benefit from their solutions over time, more aligned with their payments and usage, which makes consumption a key area for their success, and as a result, for ours too!

Seen from this perspective, the campaign concept considered 3 perspectives: Internal and Market .

So, based on this, the SAPCloud eXperience Leaders campaign was born (watch the video below).

Main Challenges

As my team was responsible for 3 product areas in Latin America (Procurement, CX, HR), we started investigating how the after-sales teams were working regarding post-sales contacts and realized that there was no integrated approach.

Based on this and all the feedback mentioned in the items above, and using the SAPCloud eXperience Leaders concept, we started developing materials to support the "consumption journey", such as Welcome Kits, Go Live Celebrations, Customer Learning Portal.

Another important aspect was how to create customer communities, as there was no platform that was interactive enough and had local language capabilities to enable interaction with customers.

Our communities (CX, HR, Procurement Connection) on LinkedIn:

Early in this process, we received special permissions to create communities on LinkedIn. The first step to sharing content was working with the community leader in the region to identify influencers to post and promote engagement, and also with our teams to identify which executives would post content.

The second step was to align the content calendar with the business priorities defined with the GMs of the product areas, so that the promoted content touched on important points that could contribute to the business.

To maintain consistency for future integration with the SAPCloud eXperience Leaders initiative, the look and feel of the community posts was developed based on the same concept as the social and paid media campaign.

SAPCloud eXperience Leaders – Materials

As I mentioned earlier, the campaign has several elements, including a paid media campaign focused on the 7 largest markets in LAC, as well as being available on SAP’s social media channels for all markets in the region.

Start of the buyer's journey:

• Paid media materials on various news sites, LinkedIn using programmatic media;

• Social media posts with Fast Facts and Customer Testimonials;

• “Call background” templates and sales team signatures inviting customers to join LinkedIn communities;

• Campaign Landing Page in Portuguese and Spanish (click to visit) with available materials;

The Customer Portal (Procurement only) was developed in partnership with the after-sales team. The focus is on customer empowerment, and the content was created and reused based on the most widely adopted solutions, identified after a customer analysis.

The portal also had a 15-class training course for Procurement professionals, including an overview, demonstrations and customer interviews.

As shown in the images above, there was a welcome email that was linked to the Customer Portal, so they could have their first contact with our solutions and train their teams.

We also developed a Go Live Celebration kit with certificates and celebration backgrounds, as this moment is usually very important for customers. All of this in local language, which is very important for a region with multiple countries.

Other materials created for the after-sales team so they could promote the initiative (also distributed to salespeople):

Campaign Results

We delivered substantial impact with the SAPCloud eXperience Leaders message. Results, which exceeded targets and benchmarks, include:

• 347,000 visits to the campaign's Landing Pages, with a total of 9,098 materials consumed, of which we had 8,970 views of video content on the landing page.

• 74 million video ads were served, with over 20 million completed views.

• The LoBs content had a good volume of interaction, with an engagement rate of 13% and 158 materials viewed/downloaded.

Our paid media campaign included banner and video ads, posted on LinkedIn with targeted accounts, YouTube and major news sites such as Valor Econômico, Folha de São Paulo, El Universal, Expansión, El Tiempo, Portafolio, Clarín, La República, El Comercio, La Nación, IT Now, among others, through programmatic media in 7 LAC countries.

Conclusion and Insights:

The main goal of this initiative was to create a set of “moments” to support the post-sales team in taking a programmatic approach to how they communicate with customers. We also realized that by bringing this concept to market, we would generate more interest in Cloud solutions, so that what started as a “consumer journey” approach could also be used as a “buyer journey” approach.

Consistency was a challenge, but we were able to identify common issues for our customers, the challenge of acquiring and delivering a good experience for customers, employees and suppliers using technology. Based on this, we created a consistent approach to touch points across all 3 product areas, also allowing us to deliver specific messages to each audience using different tactics.

The value proposition is clear to all of them: "If you embrace SAP Cloud solutions, you will be recognized as a leader, so join the 'movement' to become a SAPCloud eXperience Leader or learn more to enhance your knowledge and share your experience with others. If you do this, you will be perceived as a SAPCloud eXperience Leader."

· We still have a long way to go in terms of creating a common learning ecosystem that allows our customers to better utilize our solutions, as other competitors have created their own versions of concepts like "Disney+" with a lot of content available.

This campaign represented a great effort by the “Cloud & Customer Marketing” team to align and produce all the content with the internal areas and agencies involved.

Disclaimer: The disclosure of this content was only possible because this campaign was executed 5 years ago and is no longer active, that is, it does not represent any strategic information.

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