As consumers become more and more immune to advertising, companies have begun to shift their focus to content marketing, seeking to earn the right to discuss products and solutions by building relationships with consumers first.

This means developing and implementing a content strategy, offering valuable and interesting content that meets consumers’ needs.   Those companies that recognize the need to change their approach to succeed in the new consumer-driven, digital world are seeing tremendous results.

Business Innovation from SAP

SAP, with its Business Innovation site, is one of them.  Yes, I’m talking about this very site that you are on.  The Business Innovation site is quickly becoming one of the top blogs for industry news and trends around the topics of mobile, cloud, big data, analytics, sales and marketing, human resources and more.  It was developed with the goal of meeting the information and educational needs of early-stage buyers and helping businesses learn how to run better through innovation.  And it’s working.

This site has already received 347,709 unique visitors, 395,478 visits and 574,676 page views since its launch just seven months ago. Visitors are engaging with the content, which is created by both SAP employees and external authors, and spending almost five minutes every visit.  Even more impressive is the statistic that 29% of visitors come to the site from organic sources and 6% come from social sharing.

Content Strategy

You can see how the site is increasing awareness, but what is it doing for SAP in terms of conversion? Well it’s driving traffic to SAP.com through appropriate calls-to-action where visitors can register and explore SAP solutions in greater depth.

SAP has also been recognized for its pull marketing and content strategy by Fast Company, Digiday and others.  Fast Company called the company “an integrated marketing and communications machine” while Digiday stated: “It’s not just the sexy brands like Red Bull creating content. Enterprise software giant SAP is in on the game.”

Data Visualization

To present the success of the site, SAP’s content strategy team has chosen to use data visualization to display the performance results of the site in the most effective and efficient way. The team presents a monthly infographic [shown below] to demonstrate the power of pull marketing and the Business Innovation site itself.

To learn more about how content marketing can help you company run like never before, here are some great articles to get you started:

• 5 Steps to Achieve Content Marketing Success [Slides]
• The Content Marketing A-Team
• The Content Marketing Bucket List
• 31 Easy Ideas To Create Content Your Customers Want