Newsbyte: SAP Announces Marketing Gap Analysis Tool That Sets the Foundation for Customer Engagement Success

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Jan 26, 2015, 07:00 ET

WALLDORF, Germany, Jan. 26, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Today's customers have higher expectations for organizations than ever before. They engage with brands across multiple channels throughout their customer journey and demand personalized treatment, making marketers critically dependent on sophisticated technology as a result. Unfortunately, acquiring the best solutions for their organizational needs is not a simple task. If brands make the wrong choices and implement technology that does not meet their business needs, they miss critical opportunities to connect with target customers to drive growth and advocacy. To address this need, SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) collaborated with Raab Associates, Inc. to create the marketing gap analysis tool, a free online interactive tool that provides marketers with personalized recommendations on focus areas of investment for their organization.

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The interactive tool asks a series of questions about the organization's profile, marketing programs, current systems and processes. The platform then evaluates that information to provide an analysis of the organization's current marketing technology foundation. It also provides directional recommendations on strategies to improve their marketing systems. Recommendations provided by the marketing gap analysis tool include: strategies to consider in general architecture, such as integrated suite, shared customer data platform or application-based; industry-specific issues, such as regulatory concerns; and identification of gaps in specific marketing systems.

"Like any good consultant, we start by asking marketers what kind of programs they want and what their current systems look like," said David Raab, principal, Raab Associates, Inc. "Based on that, rules within the tool can determine the system capabilities required to run each program, aggregate these into a consolidated set of requirements and compare the requirements with existing capabilities for a gap analysis. The process provides an educated starting point for internal discussion on strategic changes that should be made and how to implement them."

SAP solutions for customer engagement and commerce extend beyond the scope of traditional, control-based and salesforce-oriented customer relationship management (CRM) applications to provide capabilities that enable marketing, commerce, sales and service to support deeper, end-to-end customer engagement.

To learn more about the marketing gap analysis Tool, visit www.marketingtechgap.com, or watch David Raab's recent webinar, "Building a Solid Marketing Technology Foundation."

For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

Media Contacts:
Janice Tsoules, SAP, +1 (650) 223-4817, [email protected], EST
Britt Gottlieb, PAN Communications, +1 (617) 502-4334, [email protected], EST

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SOURCE SAP SE