of target webinar attendees achieved the desired webinar outcome by signing up for the beta product
of trial users accelerated their buying journey by watching the product- related webinars
SAP HANA Cloud Services webinars last year 23,000+ attendees
Name: SAP Canada
Headquarters: Toronto, Ontario
Founded: 1989
Employees: 10,000+
Industry: Technology
SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software, with technology that touches 77% of the world’s transaction revenue. SAP’s machine learning, Internet of Things and advanced analytics technologies help turn companies of all sizes in all industries into intelligent enterprises. With a global network of customers, partners, employees and thought leaders, SAP helps the world run better and improves people’s lives.
SAP Canada is part of a global software company that serves 200 million cloud users through various enterprise solutions including SAP HANA, a cloud-based business data platform that processes transactions and analytics.
“Many people say that data is a superpower because it allows us to have greater insight and impact, but you need the right tools to take advantage of the data. This is where SAP HANA Cloud Services comes in,” said Dominika Dodson, Digital Solutions Training Specialist at SAP Canada.
SAP Canada’s digital strategy team creates engaging, value-add experiences for cloud services customers including websites, videos, blog posts, webinars and more to drive product usage and adoption. The company’s goal is to create an excellent digital experience from the point customers first hear about its products through their entire journey. To achieve this, SAP needed a digital engagement solution to support customers at various stages.
Limited resources put a strain on content creation
Before SAP Canada implemented the ON24® Platform, the company didn’t have much customer education content available around its product lines because the content was time consuming to produce and update. It was also a challenge to concisely communicate new features when they were rolled out.
SAP Canada needed a solution that would enable it to deliver an engaging, comprehensive customer experience and support customers through the product awareness, consideration, onboarding, implementation and adoption stages. It was important that the platform chosen could communicate product changes, gather customer feedback, answer questions and drive customers to get hands-on with their products faster. The company decided to purchase the ON24® Platform to address these issues.
Four creative purpose-built webinar series drive engagement and product adoption
Today, SAP Canada uses ON24 Webcast Elite to engage customers by producing and sharing educational content through various webinar series. The company’s How-To series consists of 60-minute live tutorials focused on a specific topic. The webinars are demo-heavy and use the screen share feature so that presenters can visually communicate information, enabling the audience to better understand the products. The How-To series has helped SAP Canada efficiently produce and update customer education content at scale.
The What’s New series, which includes five product managers who share release information about different products, has been a huge success. Because SAP is a global company, it’s difficult for speakers to be available at the same time. However, with ON24, SAP can integrate pre-recorded video demos into its webinars with ease. The webinars are live, but the speakers can record their videos in advance so they don’t have to go on camera in the middle of the night. This series has enabled SAP Canada to concisely communicate product updates to its audience.
The Learning Mission series features 10 on-demand webinars that become available when a customer first purchases a product. The customer can then register for all of the 15-minute sessions at once. This on-demand format helps SAP Canada save time on content creation with the use of evergreen content. Viewers can pause the webinars and try out the product workflows themselves, too.
“It’s great that with ON24 you can customize the audience experience and take it to the next level to wow your customers,” said Dominika Dodson. “It’s been fun to develop a formal onboarding certification program with this series. When someone completes the last mission, we send them a congrats email and people post these on LinkedIn.”
Last year, SAP began to run the Data Defined Talk Show webinar series to kick off a new product launch. The company wanted to get people excited, so it traveled around the world to meet the development and engineering leaders behind the product, then ran their videos in the webinars. The talk show used the ON24 video capabilities to showcase the minds behind the product in an authentic way. SAP Canada also used the webinars to get people to sign up for product trials.
In 2019, SAP Canada ran 69 webinars to support its SAP Analytics Cloud product, which drew over 19,000 attendees. The ON24 Digital Experience Platform’s ease of use, flexibility and scalability enabled SAP Canada to produce large volumes of dynamic, customer-centric content and grow its audience.
Dominika Dodson, likens this to filling up Los Angeles’ STAPLES Center.
“When you imagine filling up an arena with your webinar attendance, that’s really cool,” she said.
The Data Defined Talk Show webinar series also boosted customer engagement by drawing over 4,000 attendees to 22 webinars. 35% of the attendees registered for SAP Canada’s Data Warehouse Cloud Beta Program, and 20% became product trial users. The webinar series also boosted morale within the company.
“It helped our leaders feel proud of their work. One of the engineering leaders said that during his 20+ year career with SAP, he’d never had so much fun,” Dodson said.
Our products are complex and they change all the time. If we were to create courses or blog posts, they would take so much time to update. Webinars through ON24 enable us to push out so much content and teach people so many things really quickly.
DOMINIKA DODSON
DIGITAL SOLUTIONS TRAINING SPECIALIST, SAP CANADA
