How to Market and Sell SAP Using Social Selling Techniques on Facebook

Learn How to Market with Facebook

Do you run the marketing efforts for a SAP partner ? Do you need more highly qualified and engaged leads? Were you aware of the amount of marketing already being done by major SAP Partners on Facebook? Though Facebook is looking at changing certain indicators, like page followers, on Facebook Business Pages, for now, these indicators remain a good measurement yardstick for social selling effectiveness and how much effort SAP Partners have invested in their Facebook marketing efforts.

SAP Partners - Social Media Savvy Competitors

Let's take a look at a few of the major SAP Partner Facebook Follower and Like Counts:

Tata Consultancy Services

• 704,412 people like this
• 707,195 people follow this

Infosys

• 845,861 people like this
• 844,902 people follow this

WIPRO

• 1,462,437 people like this
• 1,457,120 people follow this

Accenture

• 624,636 people like this
• 42,894 people follow this

IBM

• 1,078,146 people like this
• 1,088,818 people follow this

L&T Technology Services

• 38,134 people like this
• 38,484 people follow this

Then there is SAP itself

• 1,102,011 people like this
• 1,107,877 people follow this

This is just a small sample of the SAP partners you can find on Facebook. We have 932 more self-declared SAP Partners who have visited our website, which also has a substantial following on Facebook. We've also helped several of them with their lead generation efforts using the Inbound Marketing methodology.

Not Just a Vanity Metric

Many people may say these social media engagement metrics are just vanity metrics and don't mean they are enjoying success with Facebook marketing. Au contraire! When done properly, with a fully formed marketing and sales funnel, these numbers can mean sales. In fact, in most cases, you can track how many sales each 'like' actually generates.

Generating Social Sales Results

These numbers also indicate the degree of effort that these companies have put into their Facebook marketing efforts. Being a social platform, it means that it has taken significant investment in terms of people spending time interacting on the platform.

These Numbers Also Result From Facebook Paid Ads

Increasing page likes is among the many different Facebook Ad types and objectives available. No doubt, all of these companies have spent and are spending significant sums of money promoting their page. They do this because Facebook has proven itself to be an effective platform for reaching key decision makers.

SAP Go to Market Content Strategy

All of these SAP Partners are also finding that it takes increasingly more high quality content combined with a paid ads strategy to achieve a positive Facebook Ads ROI. Why? Because Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, wants the platform to be both the go-to place for people to socialize online as well as for companies to use it for more than just an ads platform.

What Does It Take To Successfully Advertise on Facebook?

If you're one of the many aspiring social sellers out there, I would like to tell you it is simple and will require few social selling tools. It is, if you spend enough of your valuable time on the platform. However, I want you to know the reality of the situation - it takes a lot of time and effort to get this right, as well as continuous testing and optimization. So let's get to the how to:

Prerequisites

• Setup and complete your Facebook Business Page
  • You will need artwork for this for the banner, at a minimum
  • Get your page validated by Facebook
    
    
• Create your Facebook Business Manager Page
  • This is where you will do most of your advertising work
    
    
• Create and install your Facebook Pixel
  • You can create this from within your Facebook Business Manager
  • Once installed, you can use the Facebook Pixel Helper, a Chrome Extension, to verify if it is installed and working correctly

• Decide on which events you will want to track
  • Modify your Facebook Pixel to support the events you want to track

• • There are a number of pre-defined events you should consider using
    
    

• If Doing E-Commerce, connect your data-feed
  • This typically requires a paid subscription to a data feed provider.
    
    
  • This can be done manually but that is not really feasible if there are frequent changes or large volumes of data.

• • There is a connector for this within SAP Hybris.
    
    
• Assign people with the right roles to your Business Manager
  • You will need to do this on the actual page as well
  • This typically has a few hiccups

Plan Your Content Strategy

Understand that you're expected to engage people on Facebook.

That means:

• Create and post content frequently
  
  
• Tell people who you are and why you do what you do
  
  
• Engage with people
  
  
• Did I tell you video is all the rage?
  • Videos that are interesting are useful
  • Facebook live events typically do much better but do take both some technical setup (but not very much) and you really can't outsource this.
  • You might want to consider ecamm live for this, though your laptop and Facebook will suffice.
    
    
• Groups are an advanced, yet potentially highly effective use of Facebook
  • Many celebrities can get 100,000 people to join a group.
  • Groups can be both open and closed, free and paid.
    
    
• If you're a Hubspot user, which I highly recommend, you should already have connected your Hubspot system to Facebook
  • You have within Hubspot a calendar for planning and monitoring all your Facebook activities
    • You also can tie your Facebook efforts back to content on your site.
    • The Facebook Metrics in Hubspot are perfectly focused on those items you need to care about with regards to using Facebook as part of your Inbound Marketing Strategy.

Define and Design Your Funnel

This is How to Market Using Facebook

Once you have your Facebook Page sat up, your Facebook Business Manager created, and your Facebook Pixel installed and events created, you are almost ready to start spending money on ads. Just one final step - design your funnel.

Facebook Market Segmentation Best Practices

Within Facebook Analytics, which you can access from within your Facebook Business Manager, you set up and track your audience through each stage of your sales funnel. I recommend you keep this funnel small, limited to 3 levels, Top, Middle and Bottom.

Finally, you should create an audience from each stage of the funnel you just designed. Initially, these audiences may not have many members, but with time, and a properly executed Facebook ads strategy, you should see each audience grow.

These audiences are where the gold is.

For it is these audiences which you can use to create lookalike audiences, the Facebook magic sauce to selling SAP using Facebook as part of your integrated SAP marketing strategy. This is how you take an existing customer list, which should be the type of people you are trying to reach, combined with the value of each customer, and create a statistically similar audience. This is information that Facebook's Machine Learning (ML) system can make good use of to help quickly focus your message on just the right audience. This makes marketing SAP using Facebook far more effective.  It's how you enable your potential customers to find you so they can buy sap services online.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

If you've ever clicked on a webinar within Facebook, say by Dan Lok or one of the other guru's, you will have experienced the phenomenon of your Facebook feed repeatedly showing ads from the same person, as well as other similar advertisers. If it seems it bit much, it is because they have not put a frequency cap on how many times you see the advertisers ads. Don't do that. I recommend you put a frequency cap of about 1 to 2 per times a day. Be responsible, don't irritate people. You will achieve the same results at a lower cost if you do this correctly.

Don't Be Afraid to Experiment

Because there are so many different Facebook Ad Types available, you should not be afraid to experiment. The key to success, in my experience, is to work from the sale backwards.

Online Sales vs Complex Sales

If your business model can be executed entirely online, your Facebook Ads Strategy will look very different from one in which the final sale requires Face-to-Face interaction, such as complex SAP sales. If all of this sounds like more than you want to chew on yourself, you can always get help by reaching out to us.