SAP Concur provides spend management software solutions for businesses around the globe. With products for travel booking, expense management, invoice payment, and more, SAP Concur is one of the best-known names in the employee expense management software field. The SAP Concur marketing team creates multiformat content for international audiences across a variety of channels, including a robust social media program, managed as a shared service by the Digital Marketing team.
Industry: Financial Technology
Teams in Opal: Digital Marketing, Field Marketing
By the Numbers
Challenge: Content Across the Globe
As a large, multinational organization, SAP Concur needs to be active in many major markets around the world. One way they build their brand across the globe is by creating high-quality social media content for its regional teams in 17 geographic markets. To accomplish that goal, their centralized social media team prepares at least two posts per week for each market – and plans most content two months ahead.
As potent as the SAP Concur social media program is, managing localizations for 17 different regions proved difficult. Before centralizing the creation and approval process in Opal, social media was handled by various stakeholders around the world, and the corporate team lacked oversight into most content being published until after it was already live. Without Opal, the central social media team would have needed to create each piece of content, handle localization, work through feedback, and collaborate directly with each regional team individually and without a formal process.
Localization & Visibility
In 2017, SAP Concur began using Opal to manage content for each market in the context of the brand as a whole. But, adoption truly took off in 2020 after the organic social motion was centralized within the corporate Digital Marketing team. The visual nature of Opal proved intuitive for working on content at-scale. Ultimately, the platform enabled SAP Concur to review, approve, and publish approximately 375 social assets each month. “The secret sauce of Opal is that you can work in bulk,” Kelly Rigotti, Vice President of Digital Marketing, explained.
However, that was just the beginning…
Opal’s free-form planning space – Boards – upgraded the process of preparing content for regional markets. Boards was launched in 2022 – and SAP Concur made use of it immediately. The social media team created a board for each of their 17 markets where monthly content could live. Sharing each board with the regional team provided a consistent space to collaborate on their content. Rather than spending excess time using chat and email to swap links to moments, both teams knew exactly where to look for content and feedback.
By bringing planning, production, and localization into Boards, the SAP Concur team worked more efficiently. As a result, the team was able to spend approximately 30% less time producing regional content every month.
After the content is reviewed and approved by the local teams, it is scheduled on the shared Opal calendar, reducing clutter. This central view empowers the digital stakeholders to easily see when their posts are going live, and allows leaders to see how the entire SAP Concur social media presence is appearing in the market at any given time. Showing up consistently around the world is key for supporting the integrity of the SAP brand. The cross-market visibility provided by Opal is crucial in ensuring that messages are in-sync and the brand stays aligned.
The combination of Opal Boards for collaboration, plus the Opal calendar for visibility, proved to be a game-changer for SAP Concur. “Bottom line: We couldn’t manage anywhere close to 17 markets without Opal,” Director of Organic Content and Engagement Rebecca Dolan said.
Repurposing Top-Performing Content
Beyond just meeting the appetite for high-value B2B content throughout their markets, the SAP Concur team also leverages the Opal platform to repurpose their top-performing content, which is key to the demand-gen aspect of their social strategy. Opal’s enterprise-grade software integrates with SAP Concur’s social publishing platform. With that connection in place, Opal’s robust tagging system feeds into the publishing platform where it is used to automatically generate URL tracking so that the team can analyze content performance across analytics tools. In that way, they can easily identify which content converts the best, and then it’s just a quick duplication in Opal to recycle it back into the queue or add it to other markets’ content boards. This enables their strategists to identify top-performing assets to be re-used across markets. By organizing their work in the platform, finding these assets has never been easier. Since all content is planned in Boards, Opal serves as a source of truth for all of their content.
As of now, 50% of all content put into production is re-purposed from past work. For a shared service team that produces all content themselves, the ability to identify and easily reuse top content allows them to both scale top converters globally while also getting back valuable time. “The process of recycling content has improved dramatically,” Dolan said. “We’re looking to scale our use of top-performing content even more.”
Results
Better communication across teams, full visibility, countless hours saved in localizations, and superior content repurposing – SAP Concur achieved all of this.
“We wouldn’t be able to run our social media program without Opal – that’s not an exaggeration,” Rigotti said. “This program and Opal have a very real impact on our demand gen.”
The outcomes speak for themselves. However, there’s one more thing that the SAP Concur team appreciates about the Opal platform: like many of our customers, they helped shape it. “The Opal team takes our feedback into account,” Dolan said. “We even had the opportunity to try features like Boards in Beta.”
When professionals around the world experience the SAP Concur brand on social media, they’ll consistently see compelling content. That all begins in Opal.