SAP Harnesses Facebook Data to Boost Personalized Marketing

SAP is integrating Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool with its HANA platform to help marketers deliver more targeted advertising campaigns.

Powered by HANA, the SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence service was unveiled at the company’s TechEd conference in Berlin.

The service will enable marketers to use their own customer data with Custom Audiences to effectively target Facebook users with customized ads.

SAP hopes that the service will save money by running more cost-effective and focused campaigns that use data-driven insight to drive advertising rather than a scatter-gun approach.

SAP said the tool would enable marketers to be more effective with their campaign by assessing customers’ buying habits from data stored on HANA and mapping the information into an audience profile suitable for Facebook advertising.

According to Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president and head of corporate business development and strategic ecosystem at SAP, the partnership will enable “more targeted, true one-to-one marketing by pulling transactional content and building a predictive model of which customer segments would have the highest propensity to make a purchase. And then we can really drive Facebook campaigns.”

Combining HANA with Facebook’s targeting features will enable marketers to tailor personalized campaigns to attract likely customers.

“Let’s say a person walks into Burberry and her name is Jill Smith, and she buys a purse,” Ichhpurani says. “We can now go and pull that information from the transactional system and we can build a whole predictive model [based on Jill Smith’s Facebook profile]. We find that profile has a dozen look-alikes to Jill Smith, and we can do more intelligent targeting to that look-alike audience and sell more of that same purse.”

Described as a “closed loop” service, SAP Customer Engagement Intelligence will allow marketers to track the performance of advertising campaigns by measuring advert impressions and revenue generation against cost.

The service is indicative of SAP’s strategy to offer enhancements to HANA that bolster the platform’s features but also allow simple, efficient, data-driven business activity.

Ifan Kahn, chief technology officer for global customer operations at SAP, said during a briefing that data is becoming increasingly important to the HANA platform, but needs to be put to intelligent use rather than simply collected.

“It’s great having data and bringing that data into an environment, but you need to contextualize that information,” he said, explaining how data-related services can be industrialized to improve business operations and activity.

This article was originally published on V3.