Case Study: SAP

Community Network Webcasting Series

CHALLENGE:

Leveraging Community Conversations and Leads

With 170,000 customers and 1,200+ partners worldwide, SAP is a global leader in business applications, analytic applications, enterprise mobile applications and SME. Its SAP Community Network (SCN) is the social network for the more than two million SAP professionals. Its mission is to deliver social innovation, social commerce, social intelligence and social insight to SAP customers, partners, employees and independent experts.

The community network was established primarily to facilitate conversations, i.e. two-way dialogs, with these targets. Community directors also discovered at the onset that there was a thirst in the community for information about industry megatrends:

• Mobility
• Business analytics
• Cloud computing

In addition, community members began asking to become leads, in effect. Though the community was not designed as a lead generation vehicle, participants started requesting information about SAP solutions.

Thus, network organizers needed a communication vehicle that would address thought leadership topics, as well as facilitate ongoing communication and conversations, while also capturing leads to better harness the community in terms of revenue.

SOLUTION:

Thought Leadership Webcasts

The solution identified for SAP is a series of thought leadership webcasts powered by ON24. The webcast series is a joint effort between the SCN and SAP EcoHub, SAP’s online solution marketplace. The common objective is to expand reach and generate leads and revenue by engaging with and leveraging the vibrant SAP community.

The webcast series targets customers, prospects, partners and individual influencers. The webcasts are a powerful demand generation solution, meeting all of the marketing team’s requirements in terms of better reporting; immediacy of communication, both pre- and post-event; greater capacity; and availability of on-demand viewing. An added bonus was that ON24 provided the pricing structure that SAP needed.

Community network managers describe the ON24 service offering as:

• Reliable
• Flexible
• Providing a superior user experience, with excellent attendee support
• Able to easily handle presentations and other content
• More advanced, with features such as social media widgets

RESULTS:

Exceeding Expectations with a Robust, Reliable Platform

By leveraging ON24 Webcasting Platform 10, SAP created a program that is exceeding all expectations in terms of numbers of registrants, attendees and leads captured. The conversion rate averages 40%, including on-demand viewers, which is much higher than the conversion rate of previous virtual communication initiatives.

A critical business need organizers identified is the reporting component. With ON24 reporting analytics, they now know who registers, where the registrants come from and what sources yield the most registrants and attendees. Because of this valuable intelligence, the quality of the leads is far higher, while the cost per lead has decreased.

The webcasting series has also broadened the reach of the community network, reflecting a
greater variety of roles, titles and industries.
The next step in SAP’s webcasting program is to promote the webcasts via social media and track responses back to a specific medium.