[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]“SAP Live Industries” was recently recognized with a Killer Content Award based on the diverse mix of assets created for the campaigns, as well as the impressive results the campaign generated. Covering 25 industries (19 in North America), the segmented campaign drove more than 3,000 inquiries and a whopping $23 million in pipeline opportunities.

To learn about the strategy behind the campaign, as well as the execution, we caught up with one of the 17 B2B Marketers To Follow In 2017, Ginger Shimp, about her perspectives on demand generation, content marketing, and all things marketing.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator border_width=”3″ el_width=”50″][vc_column_text disable_pattern=”false”]

What are some of the top priorities for you right now in your organization?

My top priority for this year is to focus on our net-new audience—those without any SAP footprint. Living in an “always-on” digital world requires us to prime the demand generation engine with a constant diet of fresh assets.

We also have to be cognizant that our prospects come in three different “flavors”:

• Technical Users, who function as advisors;
• Middle Management, a.k.a. key influencers; and
• Executives, or decision makers.

So, we need to create content that appeals to each of these flavors while keeping in mind that we need to address versioning—either for industries, lines of business (IT vs. ops vs. finance vs. sales, etc.), size of company, geography or by which partner is involved.

In particular, we need to be hyper-vigilant about speaking our prospect’s language. For a very simplistic example, we may talk about a professional services firm, but we speak about a financial institution, a healthcare organization or an automotive company.

Further, we need to acknowledge whether our prospect has had any interaction with us. This is an example of how the buyer’s journey is typically represented in terms of asset alignment:[/vc_column_text][mk_laptop_slideshow images=”8945″ animation_speed=”3000″ slideshow_speed=”20000″ pause_on_hover=”true” animation=”flip-x”][vc_column_text]The difficulty is that this thinking is very linear, whereas in the digital world, fresh content is a constant requirement and our buyers are hyperlinked, jumping in and out of the journey at nearly unpredictable points.

We can’t control where, when or how they’ll encounter our content, so it’s incumbent upon us as marketers—as ambassadors of our brands—to ensure each and every one feels welcomed by our message.

Otherwise it’s just so much digital landfill.

So our challenge this year is to appeal to the right person—without disenfranchising others who may encounter our content. And, since we are focusing on those net-new audiences, we need to be particularly cognizant of speaking about what matters to them in language that resonates with them.

It comes back to the messaging. Anyone who’s heard of SAP likely knows that we have this amazing software product called SAP S/4HANA^®. But someone without a relationship with SAP doesn’t care what we call our product. They care about solving their problems. Thus, we need to be able to understand all their pain points and help them triage the situation and prioritize the potential solutions. We can’t do that if we’re talking about ourselves.

What new technologies or approaches are you either rolling out now or are excited about checking out in the future?

The best thing about marketing technology is always having something to learn, something new to try.

I’ve been doing a lot of research about how people like to consume information. While some are inveterate readers, others are more visual and some learn by conversation (video stands in as proxy here), while others are more auditory learners.

We all know that white papers are a big draw, as are research reports. We have blogs that we can use to target the three tiers I mentioned earlier (decision makers, key influencers, advisors). And for those who are pressed for time and need to get to the point quickly, we have presentations that we load onto Slideshare.net, tweets, LinkedIn updates, etc. So it’s safe to say we have the readers covered.

We have infographics and E-books for visual learners.

For the conversational learners, we have a variety of videos. Last year, we experimented with video white papers, TED Talk-style videos, customer testimonial videos and more.

We also dipped our toes into podcasts for those auditory learners. What I’m really interested in this year is how to increase our reach and conversions with podcasts.

• According to the 2016 Edison Research Infinite Dial, online radio listenership has increased by 35% since 2005.
• Additionally, podcast listenership has been on a steady rise since 2006—in fact, it’s grown by 25%.

The key is not to just do the podcast and call it quits, a “one-and-done” kind of thing. We want to use the transcript to create social content; not just a blog, but a whole blog series. We’ll isolate a snippet and drop the MP3 file directly into the blog. We might use a snippet to help create a multi-media infographic. Perhaps we’ll drop part of the episode into an E-book, or stream it directly on Twitter.

One key for us is to take heed of what our CEO, Bill McDermott, tells us. He’s a big believer that “leaders must lead.” He feels that we cannot—must not—hold valuable information hostage from the world. So, while we will put some information behind a gate (we do owe it to our shareholders to drive demand for our products), we balance that by sharing much of our learnings freely with the public. In this way, we seek to secure for ourselves the undisputed hegemony of the market.

 How are you seeing expectations/goals of B2B marketers change in the current business climate, and how are you and your team responding? 

Digital transformation is all around us. The Internet of Things enables us to connect to and follow almost any device or asset. Connected networks and in-memory platforms provide immediate access to a stunning array of data. Business processes can be harmonized across all functions and departments. You can respond in the moment. Because you are armed with real-time insight into your most pressing questions. Digital transformation is about how technology profoundly improves the performance and impact of businesses. Note: For SAP, this spawned our Live Business concept, the ability to do business live and in the moment. It’s a step-up from “real time”.

The key for marketers is to get the seminal asset created quickly and cost effectively. This is the mother lode of information and we always keep this behind a gate; no one gets it for free.

Once we have this created, we run it through our “digital chop shop,” creating derivative pieces as fast as the speed of thought.

These derivative pieces will be the first things that our prospects see and that’s why I say we start at the end—with the white paper (or video, website or whatever you choose)—and then work backwards to create the remaining content.

Let me give you an example from our 2016 Live Industries campaign:

We began with that seminal piece of content, which was laden with valuable insight: SAP’s CEO and Chief Transformation Officer co-authored a white paper on value creation in a digital economy. This became our starting point.

First, we versioned that single white paper into 25 industry-specific assets. Next, we created 10-20 blogs, two infographics, five tweet cards, podcasts, videos and webinars from each industry paper.

Working with our industry sales team, who were a tour-de-force in their own right. We created pitch decks to explain SAP’s digital transformation story to each industry, a “TED Talk,” a one-page summary, 25 industry-specific white boards to train the sales team on how to pitch the pitch (on a whiteboard) and 25 value surveys to see where people were in their digital journey.

Thus, our single white paper spawned an excess of 650 snackable, socially sharable, digitally native content pieces.

But we didn’t stop there. Because we knew we had to connect with prospects who had never had a relationship with SAP, we had to establish ourselves quite firmly as thought leaders. The key to this was begun in 2013 when SAP started openSAP, an enterprise MOOC platform for massive open online courses (MOOC), hosted at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, and provided to the public free of charge. While the MOOC concept is already quite popular in academia, SAP is one of the first companies to adopt it for business-related training purposes. We worked with openSAP to develop separate sets of courses focused on digital transformation and tailored for IT users, IT leaders and business leaders.

Our marketing team uniquely activated each industry with a full complement of industry-specific white papers, videos, infographics, blogs, surveys, presentations, MOOCs, email and social promotions—all housed within unique digital hubs.

Are there any new campaigns or content pieces your team has created lately that you are especially proud of? 

Video white papers. A video white paper summarizes the salient points of our white paper, enticing viewers to download the full paper—or encouraging senior executives to forward to key influencers or advisors to download.

Now that we are a few months removed from B2BMX 2017, can you share any key takeaways you’ve been able to bring back and apply to your business? 

Our CEO has been telling everyone he’s met for the past year or more that you must “simplify everything so that you can do anything.” We took that to heart in order to pull off our Live Industries campaign by assembling a Tiger Team. We did this by asking for volunteers. Keep in mind that this campaign was in addition to our “day jobs,” so anyone who had too much on his or her plate was not forced to join.

Then we established various work streams such as social media, tele-enablement or building out landing pages. A work stream lead would marshal the process for all the industries, thus realizing economies of efforts. We also work with some fantastic third-party agencies, most notably Yesler and Kern, as well as a myriad of in-house resources.

At the end of the campaign, we all retreated to our regular jobs having truly learned to “build bridges not silos.”

How are you sharing and implementing learnings from our event and other sources with your team? What is most successful for you from a collaboration standpoint? 

My VP, Michelle Cooper—the visionary and driving force behind this campaign—is amazing at providing opportunities for us to share information. One of my colleagues who was absolutely key in creating the campaign (we never could have done it without Mandy Lin) also attended the B2BMX event and together we shared a write-up about the experience. Michelle immediately circulated our report to the North American Marketing team. Also, I’ve been speaking at several events across the country about our journey, and Michelle’s arranging for me to speak internally, which is flattering but quite scary because we hire some of the most phenomenal marketers. Another means we have of sharing information is via our internal collaboration tool, called JAM. Initially it helped us speed dissemination of key milestones and completed assets, as well as to keep version control under tight reign. Now it’s enabling us to benchmark our new program against last year’s performance.

We’ve set the bar pretty high for ourselves. To paraphrase the inimitable Bette Davis from All About Eve, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night year!”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]