SAP gets jiggy with Facebook for omni-channel B2C retail
- Summary:
- Whoda thunk SAP would create a partnership with Facebook to help discover and target potential customers based upon the Golden Segment? That's what's happening.
SAP today put a stake in the coolness ground by announcing an integration with Facebook for omni-channel marketing aimed at the B2C space. The solution is in proof of concept mode with planned delivery for Q2 2015 - think June 2015. What does it do? From the blurbs:
...the company is planning to combine insight with customer engagement to help marketers deliver increased precision, new audiences and more conversions. By using Facebook’s scalable Custom Audiences targeting capability, which enables marketers to onboard their first party customer data to effectively reach those people on Facebook, with SAP solutions for customer engagement, it is anticipated that businesses will be able to run simple by quickly and cost-effectively scale their campaigns and commerce initiatives. This solution is envisioned to also provide a closed loop that can track campaign performance from impression to revenue with a higher degree of precision.
During a presentation demo and follow Q&A, Marc-Oliver Klein, area product owner LOB customer SAP said:
One major piece we have on this area is audience targeting, it's high volume segmentation engine that can work through unstructured data and the databases of our customers or a customer database to really come down in seconds to a golden segment. We then take the audience segment and use the Facebook Audience Expansion API to create look alikes on Facebook. So we ask Facebook to find people who match the [golden segment] criteria which were selected. Facebook has very strong capabilities to do this matching algorithm....We then go ahead and create a campaign on Facebook.
This is an interesting idea because SAP is mashing up order data the customer already owns with social media likes. It should therefore avoid some of the shortcomings we've already observed in the Facebook recommendation engine which currently tends to throw a lot of false leads from bots and therefore wastes campaign funds.
During the demo we saw that SAP appears to have access to Twitter data but the company said for the moment, most of its customers prefer to concentrate upon Facebook promotions. The company concedes that in some B2B campaign scenarios, it would be useful to apply similar logic to LinkedIn campaigns but this is not something SAP has under development today.
My take
- I like how SAP is thinking about targeting. The drag and drop nature of the solution goes a long way towards putting power in the hands of campaign managers.
- I was initially skeptical about this solution because limiting to SAP's own customers seems too narrow. Instead, we suggested that SAP might also consider integrating data from other CRM's like Salesforce.com, which is often seen in SAP customers but which might open the door to non-SAP customers.
- To that extent, SAP needs to consider whether this solution should be offered in different varieties so that it can be put into the hands of a much larger market than its global customers. That would inevitably mean marketing different editions for different market segments. However, it would give SAP a way of discovering new audiences for this stand alone solution.
- Assuming SAP takes the road we are suggesting then it will be interesting to see how they go to market and how pricing is hashed out.
Disclosure: SAP and Salesforce are premier customers at time of writing.