How SAP adapted its webinar program to combat digital fatigue

SAP is a huge company with over 105,000 employees in more than 140 countries worldwide.  The company has 100+ development locations and more than 22,000 global partner companies. Based on revenue, SAP is the largest non-American software company and the world’s third-largest publicly-traded software company. 

SAP’s APJ marketing team has been partnering with ON24 for several years to deliver webinars and other digital events, with the help of an in-house agency that helps with set up and execution.  The agency manages all of the technical aspects of the event including set up, console design, trial runs, training presenters and speakers and day-of event management. 

With this set up, the marketing campaign managers can focus on promoting the event, building an audience, securing quality speakers, and creating content and post-event follow-up. This allows the agency and campaign managers to each focus on their strengths and not become overwhelmed with the workload of producing frequent digital events.  

“Having this turnkey environment has really helped us survive Covid,” said Len Augustine, APJ Head of Portfolio, Ecosystem & Digital Marketing at SAP. “We would not have been able to scale as quickly and as easily if we hadn’t set up our webinar environment in this fashion.”

To combat digital fatigue, SAP needed to make some changes to its webinar program and figure out how to re-engage its audience. The team came up with several solutions to drive registration and attendance to their webinars: 

• Decrease volume of events – By paring down the number of events it offers, SAP could encourage attendees to attend events by only focusing on highly relevant content that the audience wants.
• Increase event engagement – Augustine and his team made a conscious effort to make sure events were highly engaging and relevant to the audience, to encourage attendance and  participation. 
• Decrease event communications – By looking at past events, Augustine and his team could identify which event invites and reminders had the biggest impact on registration, and eliminate ineffective email clutter.
• Give the audience more control – Offering content that attendees could consume on-demand helped increase registration and attendance.  On-demand viewing has become an expectation as people find their new work-life balance.
• Decrease event length – The typical hour-long webinar is now too long to hold the attention of modern attendees, so SAP decreased the length of its events and broke quality content into smaller, more digestible sessions post-event.
• Simplify registration process – Instead of making people register for each event, SAP simplified the registration process so people only need to sign in once to access all content. This led to higher attendance numbers since people were no longer being stopped by gated pages to access content.

“We’ve backed off the number of events this year. We’ve made a deliberate attempt to make the events better. We’ve tried to make the events more engaging and more interesting to draw the audience back,” said Augustine.