How To Enhance Your Marketing Strategy Once SAP ICC Certified
In part one of this blog, we discussed the basic marketing tasks to complete that may help increase customer engagement and generate future leads. We also learned how many partners fail to take advantage of easy to complete tasks and don’t receive the full value of the certification program. In part two of this blog, I will take you through SEO (key wording), social media, and video / written testimonials marketing strategies in more detail. These tasks may require additional marketing resources, but is worth the time and effort to maximize your return on investment (ROI) from your certification. Please review the blog one recap below before continuing to read. You can read the full part one blog here LINK.
From a marketing and sales perspective, you always want to create content that will reach your targeted audience. The real question is, what methodologies, interactive material, and channels should you be using to capture that audience? In this case, as an SAP ICC certified partner, you want to target SAP customers. Understanding a little more advanced marketing methodologies such as search engine optimization (SEO), can help position all future content to reach and capture a much larger / targeted audience, such as SAP customers who are looking for certified solutions.
Key wording
I want you to imagine you’re an SAP customer and you want to find a specific add-on solution that helps provide an extra level of functionality to your existing SAP solution. I don’t know about you, but the first thing I do when I am looking for more information on a subject or product, I Google it. More specifically, I type in targeted keywords or sentences to find what I am looking for. This is “key wording”. Creating great SEO content in 2017 has so much to do with keywords, but also so little to do with them. Google wants content made for humans. However, you also have to tailor the content for search engines like Google. This can be an extremely difficult distinction to make.
In most cases, people will read the basics on key wording and try to overstuff keywords in an effort to rank higher in Googles search results. In previous years, this might have worked. However, Google quickly discovered what users were doing and developed Google's Penguin algorithm, which can decimate your listings on its search engine results pages if you try using this strategy. You don't want that. What you want are not only exact-match keywords in your article, but also Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords.
Google's Hummingbird engine uses LSI as a way to determine the similarities between words and phrases. For example, "best add-ons for SAP that effectively integrate" would be semantically similar to "top add-ons for SAP that successfully integrate." LSI keywords are relevant and similar keywords that make the writing more organic in nature.
So what’s the appropriate strategy? Make your content keyword-centric, but don't use the exact keywords over and over again. Use a healthy ratio of 70 to 80% LSI keywords to the 30 to 20% of exact match keywords. What you want is your content to sound natural and organic, and not have to force keywords. But you also want to ensure that similar phrases to your primary keyword appear enough times.
If you’re wondering what specific keywords your audience may be typing in. I highly recommend, investing in Google Analytics. This tool will give insight on this matter and additional factors that should be considered when creating new content. Now that you have a basic overview of key wording, I bet you’re wondering why this is important for you to know as a certified partner? As we speak, SAP customers may be using specific keywords or phrases to try and find certified solutions. I encourage you to consider this topic next time you’re creating a company blog, newsletter, social media post, YouTube description, anything you think Google may pick up. Understanding what specific keywords your ideal customer may be typing in, will higher your odds of customers finding your website and potentially contacting you for more information on your certified solution.
The best advice I can give is to be genuine when writing content, but be aware of the different keywords prospects are typing in on Google and craft your content appropriately. With over 200+ factors involved in Google's core algorithms, it's easy to get overwhelmed. If you stick to creating original and quality content, with topics emphasizing your solution being SAP ICC certified, you'll increase web traffic, increase the amount of quality leads, reach a new audience, and move up in Google ranking over time. Not overnight, but over time.
Video / Written Testimonials
As many of you know, customer testimonials written or video build trust. Whether your customers are raving about the specific pain-point your solution has solved or about the great service you gave, they tell the story of a positive experience with your products and business. I highly recommend you create a new customer testimonial with an emphasis on your company being SAP certified, which allowed for a shorter implementation time by X amount, created a since of trust from the start, saved on overall project costs, etc. You can even show what specific integration aspects and product version were tested to your viewers. This is a way to showcase your expertise in systems integration and helps build an overall company credibility. A customer testimony builds enormous amounts of trust prior to that initial prospects inquiry call.
Social Media
If not done properly and maintained, social media can be extremely damaging for company’s image. However, social media channels can be an effective way to push newly created content, testimonies, newsletters, blogs, press releases, etc. to an industry specific audience. For example, say you have just written a brilliant blog on the importance of choosing a SAP ICC certified partner over a non-certified partner and you only publish this blog on your company’s website. Unfortunately, you are limiting the total amount of potential views and potential prospects by only releasing your content on one channel. Additionally, social media is a great way to engage with customers, give them company updates, see industry trends, and reach a much wider audience. Social media accounts take time and effort to grow an industry specific audience. However, once built up, these channels are an extremely cost effective way to communicate the latest updates from your company. Don’t forget to take some time to update your social media bios, cover photos, links etc. and acknowledge your recent certification with SAP ICC.
Thank you for reading part two of “Recently SAP ICC Certified? Learn How to Enhance your Marketing Strategy”. I hope you've learned how to take full advantage of all the benefits SAP Integration and Certification Center has to offer. For a final recap of this blog, please view the interactive Prezi here. If you would like more information on SAP Integration and Certification Center, please email icc-info@sap.com. Stay tuned for my next blog post in May!
- SAP Managed Tags:
