SAP Concur Pivots Marketing for Uncertainty

uncertainty

Jennifer Rodriguez and her marketing team were three months into their 2020 campaigns when the door slammed shut on normal life.

With angst over stay-at-home shifts quickly turning into fears of collapsing commerce, she and her peers at SAP Concur Solutions knew that the unprecedented times called for an entirely new type of response.

Ultimately, Rodriguez, Senior Marketing Manager for Global Integrated Marketing, and her team would pause their in-market campaigns and pivot multiple times to design and deploy three empathetic, supportive and informative campaigns that aligned to where customers and prospects were in the pandemic cycle of  business disruption: responding, recovering or reimagining.

Andrew Gaffney, President of Content4Demand, spoke with Rodriguez for a closer look at her campaigns in a case study at the B2B Marketing Exchange. SAP Concur has been a Content4Demand client since 2016.

Early in 2020, the SAP Concur marketing team recognized that they had to make immediate changes: move in-person events to virtual, plan based on audience need and behavior, and pivot to appropriate content for this new and fluctuating business environment. A key part of the content pivot was new messaging that reflected a new approach to audience conversations and aligned the SAP Concur story around challenges customers were facing.

By March, the sales and marketing teams came together and committed to being a resource for customers.

“Our goal was to reaffirm our brand while changing our context and messages to be one of compassion and humanity, to let our customers and prospects know that we cared about what they were going through,” Rodriguez said. “We really felt this was a time for listening and understanding and finding ways we could help.”

The first campaign, developed with Content4Demand, began in May 2020 and focused on helping customers respond. It included content such as a list of 7 Best Practices for Weathering Unexpected Change.

Image courtesy of SAP Concur

The October 2020 campaign reflected what the market was doing: adjusting. The content focused on helping organizations establish flexibility and resiliency to keep their business moving forward, such as the E-book Transform Finance Processes? In This Environment?

Image courtesy of SAP Concur

In April 2021, as vaccines started going into arms and restrictions opened, SAP Concur pivoted again to empower businesses as we start to move out of pandemic disruption, for example Empower Your Business in the New World of Work.

Image courtesy of SAP Concur

This piece aligns recovery to digital transformation, and digital transformation to solving the challenges that SAP Concur can help solve.

The pivoting will continue for the SAP Concur team as 2021 progresses and companies further adapt to a less restrictive but forever changed workplace.

B2BMX attendees can watch the case study on demand here, or read more about How Has the Pandemic Changed B2B Marketing Strategies?

If you’d like to have a discussion with our experts about how we can help you and your team develop content marketing that adjusts to your buyers’ needs, let us know.

Tonya Vinas

As Vice President of Content Strategy & Services for Content4Demand, Tonya Vinas oversees the agency’s team of content strategists and works across content-creation and delivery functions to ensure on-point, quality content services. She has more than 20 years of experience in B2B content development and formerly worked as a business and news journalist. When she’s not driving marketers to push the content limits, she’s cooking, reading about global trends and the economy or taking a leisurely walk in the valley parks along Lake Erie.

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