SAP Partners with Facebook to Offer Enhanced Audience Engagement Platform

At its TechEd and de-code conference held in Berlin this week, SAP announced a partnership with Facebook that will allow SAP customers to leverage Facebook's Custom Audiences targeting capability and reach consumers more effectively through the social network.

Facebook's Custom Audiences solution allows marketers to use first-party data to connect with their customers, while SAP's Customer Engagement Intelligence suite uses enterprise data and customer buying behaviors to help marketers build targeted campaigns. By combining the capabilities of the two solutions, the companies promise to deliver more accuracy and depth of functionality without sacrificing scalability or cost-effectiveness.

While Facebook brings its sophisticated set of advertising and retargeting algorithms to the table, SAP brings the power of SAP HANA, Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president and head of corporate business development and strategic ecosystem at SAP, says. Together, the solutions can not only help marketers reach existing customers with more precisely built and delivered campaigns, but also enable them to pinpoint and connect with entirely new audience sets.

"We can take anonymous profiles from Facebook and put them into SAP HANA to deliver predictive propensity models and figure out who's willing to buy what. It's all about delivering the next level of analytics to our customers and helping marketers think ahead and build better campaigns," Ichhpurani says.

Campaign effectiveness can also be measured in real time, according to Ichhpurani. "Marketers will be able to evaluate how campaigns are performing on the fly, which means they'll be able to make adjustments on the fly as well. With social media, things move quickly, and the solutions that marketers rely on have to keep up," he explains.

For SAP, the partnership represents a move toward providing its clients with omnichannel customer engagement solutions that help businesses create relevant customer interactions throughout the entirety of the customer journey.

"It is clear that SAP wants to help marketers improve the accuracy of their campaigns and provide the granular, closed-loop ROI analysis that is often challenging in digital campaigns," Blake Chandlee, vice president of partnerships at Facebook, said in a company statement. "We have a common goal of helping marketers reach the right audiences at the right time," he added.

SAP's announcement comes less than a week after IBM announced its new partnership with Twitter, representing a growing trend that suggests closer ties between the enterprise and social media. "Social media is becoming an increasingly important channel for audience engagement, and Facebook's powerful reach made it a logical choice for our partnership," Ichhpurani says.

In addition to the new partnership with Facebook, SAP has announced that it is working with Samsung on enterprise mobile and Internet of Things strategies for its customers in the retail, oil and gas, finance, and healthcare industries. Among the first joint projects is an enterprise mobile application development platform that invites developers to build applications for any of SAP and Samsung's connected solutions.

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