SAP

In the rapidly changing world of marketing, it's hard to keep up with the latest trends. What's more important to a brand: generating business or increasing awareness? How do you integrate social media? What about interactive ads?

SAP's CMO Jonathan Becher recently took the time to share his thoughts with us on the future of marketing — including what customer engagement really means, what companies do wrong with social media, and whether or not banner ads are dead. As a bonus, the longtime Duke fan tells us which team he picks to win it all in the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

Interview conducted by Business Insider's Patricia Chui. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Business Insider: What are the main issues marketers face today that they didn't face 10 or 20 years ago? 

Jonathan Becher: I'd characterize it in three prongs. The first is converting vast amounts of available data to provide deep insight into the effectiveness of marketing, and that's where you throw in the "big data" buzzword. The second is having to re-streamline your approach to marketing, particularly across multiple channels. The third is rethinking the customer experience, particularly along the lines of engagement — talking with, as opposed to talking to.

The heart of marketing used to be brand and what we stand for. There was a belief you could control the brand, which of course you can't really, but everyone thought you could. And now we're moving away from "how do you control the conversation" to "how do you orchestrate the conversation," based on those three trends.

BI: By "customer engagement," do you mean social media, or are you talking about other forms of engagement: content, how you align your brand with that content, and where you do it?

JB: It's all of that put together. Everyone loves to talk about social media. But counting how many tweets or blog posts or "likes" on Facebook you have is not engagement. That's still the same thing as counting the number of billboards. Some people call those vanity metrics. If you really want to have engagement, you can interact as well and as often on a call center as you can on social media. You have to think from the customer in, rather than your product and service out. 

One thing I challenged my team to think about was, what would it mean to have 50 percent of the content on our flagship web site, SAP.com, come from third parties, not from us? We're not there yet, and I'm not sure we know exactly how to get there yet, but that's the point of a grand challenge. Leveraging external content this way means the site can no longer be thought of as static – it needs to be a dynamic conversation. And since it is a conversation with customers starting outside of SAP, it’s more credible than us talking about ourselves to customers. We then become more focused on content curation. In fact, I think curation is the bigger part of engagement, rather than just doing social.

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