Salesforce.com Used Inbound Marketing To Increase The Web Traffic By 80% YoY

About Salesforce.com:

Salesforce.com is a cloud computing company which deals in CRM products. Established  in  1999 by former Oracle Executives, company is ranked for the most innovative company in USA by Forbes magazine and also ranked at number 7 by fortune magazines among 100 best  companies to work for. Company deals in highly specialized services which includes “Chatter, Sales cloud, Service cloud, Radian6, Data.com, app exchange and data.com.”[spacer]

Business Objectives Of Salesforce.com:

With the use of inbound marketing strategy, company was looking after to increase their web traffic and leads in UK, so to achieve them they set following business objectives for themselves:

• Become search initiated, because as per data 78% of internet users conduct product research online.
• Being social powered by increasing their social network.
• Being buyer controlled, and let buyer choose when and where to engage the brand.

Strategies / Approaches Adopted By Salesforce.com:

Salesforce.com marketing strategy revolves around being able to generate leads and generate traffic for website. Company did  this by effectively promoting them through different channels. Company knew scope for online marketing is changing at a rapid pace, where online presence is much needed to grab the market. So they adopted the following strategies:

1. Company’s belief was on 90/10 content ratio, it means what ever your content is, 90% of the content will talk about customer and rest 10% will talk about your product. Thus, they implemented “content rich Microsite”, which was having following features:

• Original content – Company created content which was most resource intensive, it include things like e-books,  infographics, articles and slideshares.
• Curated content – These were the round style posts, where topics like social selling were used.
• Collaborative content – Here company used and gathered best leaders and collaborated their thoughts into topics.
• Legacy content – Company was using such contents, which were made for re purpose and can be used many times. It means if  the content has video presentation, it can be used to make article also.

2. Company also run a pilot project named “Get Found”, which was used to get found by the people who were looking for the kind       of solutions, which company provides.

Results Achieved By Salesforce.com:

In the very short period of just one month, company saw results in gaining. Just after the implementation of new inbound marketing strategy company saw the following results:

• In the month of January, the web traffic was increased by 80% when it was compared with the last year January’s performance.
• With the help of social media marketing, social media traffic increased by 2500%.
• Now the total number of signups for the news letter was more than 6500.
• Over 10,000 e-books were downloaded, which generated 10,000 leads.

Learnings:

With this case study of Salesforce.com following are the learnings which were found:

• Creating customer centric contents always generates interests of the viewers, which not only hold your existing viewer but brings new one also.
• In today’s competitive market you website needs to be search initiated, else you are out of the race.
• Projects like “Get found” are really helpful for every organization, because it will let you know what your customers are looking for, so you can provide them services accordingly.