Beyond the Crisis

SAP and Oxford Economics worked together in the first half of 2020, during the early peak of the coronavirus pandemic, to survey 3,000 business executives from around the world and across ten different industries. Our data show that highly interconnected organizations are better able to work quickly and adapt to changing circumstances. Further, they are likely to prove more resilient than siloed enterprises.

The challenge for marketing was how to rise above the noise to get this thought leadership into the hands of our prospects and customers who were working remotely and whose inboxes were being inundated with virtual event invitations.

At the same time of course, we all were highly aware of the meteoric rise in popularity of all things audio. Of the U.S. population over the age of 12:
- 62% are now weekly online audio listeners,
- 33% now own a smart speaker,
- 46% listen to audiobook.

So, we asked ourselves: How can we use this audio trend to increase our total market AND increase our hit rate with senior executives? Whitepapers by nature are very difficult to read. Each sentence, chock full of pertinent information, could run four or more lines and often requires rereading. It’s a time-consuming task to make your way through even a short paper. Time busy executives were not inclined to invest, so we did the work for them by engaging a professional voice-over artist to record the papers in the form of an audiobook.

And since this had never been done before, we blazed our own trail by posting them as audiobooks on YouTube, unlisted so they wouldn’t come up in search results and with chapter indexes to allow listeners to skip around. Then we promoted them on a landing page which requires registration. We knew that registered listeners could distribute the link to others who could subsequently access them sans registration, but it was a good start.

Thus far in the campaign, 35% of registrants are from the C-Suite. A further 8% are SVP/EVP, and 42% are VP-level.