Introduction
These days digital marketing is playing a key role to attract customers for all the different types of businesses. Marketing is no more only a key player for B2C business growth but it also plays an important role in B2B business as well.
An important aspect which large organization seeks is acquisitions and mergers an option with the companies for better business growth which returns higher revenue and scale up their customer band.
Therefore there is a valid use case in which different subsidiary companies( business units) in the organization has their own marketing strategies to achieve their marketing goals and generates leads.
This Use case is applicable across different business units under one parent organization and therefore the customer database across different business units should be differentiated with business units.
This will provide an advantage to the organization as each marketer in business unit will work on their own strategies with their own customer database.
The questions will come in our mind that how the customer database will be differentiated as we have one database in the system.
The blog explains on how the SAP Marketing achieves the requirement.
Scenario
One organization has multiple subsidiary companies which does their marketing independently to their customers. Each subsidiary companies customers will not be visible to other subsidiary companies as their will be internal competition might occur and business revenue will be impacted.
Solution
SAP Marketing Cloud provides a strong feature of Marketing area which will used to restrict the customer base across multiple subsidiary companies. The marketing areas restrictions are assigned at business role level in SAP Marketing and hence the restriction can be applied to the users who are assigned to that business roles.
Therefore, the business users who are assigned to Marketing Area Say - ABC can only see the customers who are assigned to marketing area ABC only.
But how the marketing area can be assigned to customers? What are the different ways which is available to assign the marketing area ?
So here is the answer:
There are couple of ways by which we can assign the marketing area to the customers( Contact). All the different ways which I will mention are OOTB ways and hence easy to assign the marketing area to the contacts.
Odata Service: SAP provides OOTB API to upload the contact database from different systems such as SAP CRM/ERP/Commerce/C4C. Each API will have the field Marketing Area which can be send to SAP Marketing using standard integration.
But what if we don't have any standard integration API call and there is a possibility that contact data will be uploaded using manual csv upload.
This is a very common scenario wherein the contact data will be uploaded using csv files.
Lets take an example: There is a trade fair which is running and the sales person created a manual list of customers. These customers needs to be fed into marketing system with their contact details to run a campaign.
Now the csv file has a limitation which doesn't have the marketing area field due to which if the data is uploaded in the system will not be shown to the correct business users, However when the campaign will run, the system will ignore these customers.
To overcome this problem SAP has provided multiple ways to assign the marketing area to the customers:
- Using Application Job: There is a application job- Enrich Customer data with Marketing Area. This job will assign the marketing area to the customer. The input to this job will be the target group which contains the contact Id. Another input will be the Marketing area. Please note that the job should be run by the Administrator. The target group will be of Live target Group type.
- Upload the Marketing Permission: If the Marketing area usage is activated for campaign then the marketing permission needs to be updated as per Marketing Area and therefore it is mandatory to upload the marketing permission as per marketing areas. This is another way the marketing area can be assigned to Contacts. Please note that the csv upload can be used to update marketing permission.
- Interaction: Marketing Area can also be assigned to Contacts with uploading the Interaction record. Interaction record consists of marketing area field which is utilized to enrich the contact database with the marketing area. The marketing area field is available in Interaction csv file.
- Enrich Corporate Account: Contact data can be assigned to the marketing area if the linked corporate account is assigned to Marketing area Make sure that the corporate account id is filled in the corresponding contact data record. The contact data will be enriched with the same marketing area which is assigned to corporate account.
Conclusion
So the above ways we can use to update the Marketing area to the contacts using csv manual upload. SAP will provide a solution in near future wherein marketing area will be part of csv upload but till then with the above ways we can enrich the contact data with marketing areas.
