SAP Grows Blog Organic Sessions 1682% and 11X Blog Conversions
13X
Conversion Rate
1,682%
Growth in Organic Blog Sessions
Blog Conversions
SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software, they help companies of all sizes and in all industries run better by redefining ERP and creating networks of intelligent enterprises to provide transparency, resiliency, and sustainability across supply chains. their end-to-end suite of applications and services enables their customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and make a difference worldwide.
The Challenge: Flat traffic and leads plus a rebrand and website redesign
In late 2021 SAP were focused on customer marketing and demand generation, yet their content and SEO program was inconsistent, resulting in a stagnation in traffic and leads. They also found that visitors downloaded content assets and were interested in the information, but they weren’t requesting demos or becoming customers. The team was heavily reliant on paid marketing and outbound sales to bring in new customers, so they were intent on building an inbound marketing engine to diversify their customer acquisition portfolio. They needed a trusted partner to build the content infrastructure and scale a new content program to achieve their demand generation goals.
The Goal: Build an organic marketing machine that brings in qualified leads
Since SAP was bringing in nearly 80% of their customers through outbound sales, they wanted to turn content into a robust growth channel to generate qualified leads for their Sales team. The company wanted to kickstart the content program with a high-velocity publishing cadence while maintaining high-quality standards. That meant growing organic traffic by producing product-led content based on their key personas and targeting topics and keywords focused on product use cases. This content would support customer acquisition as they rebranded and redesigned their website. SAP was also redefining and tightening their definition of their ideal customer profile (ICPs) to expand their reach into new industries. The content would help them reach those new ICP industries.
The Solution
the SAP team needed a strategic partner to build a search-friendly content strategy, own content production, and provide regular reporting on performance. They chose MOArt as their content and SEO strategy partner based on our understanding of the procurement space and our experience working in-house at leading B2B software companies.
MOArt worked with SAP to build a content program that aligned with their business goals.
The program included five phases:
Phase 1: Align on SAP business goals and large company initiatives
Phase 2: Audit SAP existing content library to identify update opportunities
Phase 3: Research in depth to develop a full-funnel content strategy mapping to SAP’s business goals
Phase 4: Execute on the strategy with content and backlink production
Phase 5: Content optimization
Phase 1: Alignment
SAP and the MOArt team sat down for an intensive Q&A to ensure the team understood the business model, business goals, growth strategy, success metrics, guardrails, and any other relevant marketing initiatives. SAP was in the process of rebranding when they engaged MOArt. They were also in the middle of a full website redesign to support the rebrand. They wanted to maintain their existing traffic throughout the rebrand and redesign. This context was important in defining the order of operations: the SAP and MOArt teams started by making sure the rebrand and redesign were a success in terms of SEO before implementing new programs.
Phase 2: Content & SEO audit
MOArt’s content audit used a data-driven approach that combined insights from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and Ahrefs. The content audit reviewed over 100 blog posts written and published by previous content marketers. While this content had laid a strong foundation for the SAP blog, the content wasn’t aligned to the newly defined ICPs or optimized for conversions. This explained why the SAP blog was failing to bring in traffic and leads. MOArt identified posts to rewrite, update, repurpose into conversion assets or landing pages, or delete in order to help get more traffic and conversions out of the existing content library. They also conducted an SEO audit to support the rebrand, identifying all pages with links to the old domain and links to 404s that needed to be redirected or updated.
Phase 3: New content strategy
The third phase was focused on building a content strategy that matched SAP’s ICP at each stage of the buying journey, and used product-led content to capture visitors. SAP worked with the MOArt team to develop a full-funnel content roadmap which required team interviews, competitive analysis, content gap analysis, and keyword discovery. This research, paired with the content audit, uncovered new, relevant content and SEO opportunities for SAP
Phase 4: Content & backlink production
After developing the strategy, MOArt deployed their internal editorial team to implement a full-service content production process — taking opportunities from ideas to ready-to-publish content on a consistent basis. In tandem, the team built valuable backlinks with a minimum domain rating of 50 to SAP’s most relevant pages.
Phase 5: Content optimization
Once the content production process was humming along, SAP and MOArt worked together to improve the blog conversion rate. Over the course of a year, they improved the conversion rate 3X.
Results
The content audit, strategy, and production proved successful. SAP significantly grew organic blog sessions and began turning content into a growth channel for user acquisition and revenue. Since beginning our work together in February 2022, SAP has published between four and eight posts per month, about 30 of which were content updates. A look at the result of the content updates (which ensured SAP’s existing content was working for the business). Looking at all the efforts of content produced and updated, monthly organic blog sessions grew 1682%.
When breaking out updates of existing content, SAP grew monthly organic traffic to their pre-existing content 600% since March ‘22.
As of February 2022, SAP appeared in the Google search engine results page (SERPs) for only 524 keywords. By the end of February 2023, they appeared in the 6317 keywords. Of those, they appeared on the first page for 921 keywords.
Blog conversion rate improved 13X.
11X
With the increase in blog conversion rate, SAP also saw an 11X increase of monthly conversions from the blog (blog subscribers, leads, and MQLs).
SAP continues to see organic traffic grow and generate meaningful conversions for the business.
Let’s find out how we can help you turn content into a growth channel.