Malin Liden, Vice President, Global Field Marketing, SAP
11 March 2020
I experienced a historic moment last week, I could be among the last SAP employees to travel, at least for the month of March. Joining many others in acting responsibly to prevent spreading of the Corona virus, SAP is pausing business travel, shifting communication from meeting in person to digital and virtual conversations. But when these guidelines hit our inboxes, I had just arrived in Barcelona along with 30 of our best and brightest digital marketers for our yearly SAP Digital Tribe community summit. We immediately knew we were the right people in the right place at the right time for a reason. We had to make it count!
In the spirit of never wasting a crisis, we chose to look at this as an opportunity to help accelerate what needs to happen anyway: Shifting more of the marketing mix to digital and virtual engagement. In a situation of such urgency, with mass cancellations of physical events, it’s tempting to just replicate what we would do at a traditional event and offer it online, broadcasted or on demand. But it isn’t the same. It is much easier to be distracted in a virtual environment, and there is an important element missing: The people! What about dinners, concerts, entertainment, random chats with colleagues and customers you bump into on the show floor? Instead of trying to replace something that will never be the same, we must create something better, but different! We have to turn the disadvantages of physical events into an opportunity for virtual experiences.
Here are my top 5 reasons to be excited about a shift from physical to digital:
1. The obvious one first: You don’t have to travel around the world and you can sleep in your own bed. That’s already pretty good!
2. Technology leaves a lot less to random encounters than walking around the show floor. Instead of wasting time talking to someone you are too polite to leave, you can be matched with the right person for the right conversation in a more targeted way. And you can have more of those discussions, because you don´t need to physically move.
3. Let’s be honest, some presentations at conferences can feel lengthy. A virtual environment requires better content, shorter segments and more engaging delivery. If you still don’t like a session, it’s easier to leave and move on to another one.
4. Conferences can be overwhelming! Instead of doing everything in 3 days, feeling like your head is exploding even though you still did not manage to do everything you wanted, a virtual journey allows you to consume the content in chunks, mixing live broadcasting with on demand content and online meetings to go deeper when and where it makes sense for you.
5. No need to queue, and I’m not talking about the food or the restrooms. The coolest showcases and the most fun experiences are popular, so customers wait and some even miss out. In a virtual environment, we can bring those showcases to the attendees desks, using virtual reality or holograms it can feel very, very real. Cool give-aways for registrations like a merge cube that lets you hold virtual 3D objects for entirely new ways to interact with the digital world can enhance the experience of a virtual event, providing a cool give-away you don’t need to enter a lottery on the show floor to grab.
I agree with my colleague Timo Elliott, who recently tweeted that he thinks the current disruption will lead to a more balanced hybrid approach with smaller, more focused local in person events between larger broadcasted events and virtual experiences. I hope he is right. Both because we need to dramatically reduce travel for environmental reasons, but also because it saves enormous amounts of time and money, while providing better result.
Marketing teams can lead this digital transformation by creating always on education and experience journeys, highly personalized, insight driven paths where we find, engage and guide our audiences based on what they do and what they tell us, not based on what we want to say and when we have organized an event to say it. I spent the precious face time with my Digital Tribe last week discussing how to design these digital journeys, and I could not think of better partners to tackle a challenge with. The group of people in the Digital Tribe could not be more different when it comes to age, background, personality and experience, but we all share one common interest: To shape the future of Digital Marketing at SAP. The moment we came together in Barcelona this week we immediately knew: There is no better time for it than now, and we stand united to lead the way!
If you’re interested in finding out more about the SAP Digital Tribe community, please read this blog or contact me. I would also love to hear your thoughts and ideas about the future of physical and virtual events. Are they to be or not to be? Or is that not even the question? Let’s discuss and learn together!