About Salesforce.com:
Salesforce.com Inc. is a globally recognized cloud based computing company which has its headquarters located in San Francisco, California. Although best known for its customer relationship management (CRM) product, Salesforce has also stretched itself into the “social venture arena” through acquisitions. It is currently ranked as one of the most innovative company in America by the prestigious Forbes magazine, as well as numbered 7 in Fortune magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work for in the year 2014.[spacer]
Business Objectives Of Salesforce.com:
The entire Salesforce.com Foundation is based on a very straightforward idea:
- Influence salesforce.com’s people,
- Usage of latest and effective Technology and resources to build a collective knowledge
- Enable appropriate action to improve needy communities all over the world.
They call this integrated benevolent approach of theirs as the 1:1:1 model. Since the founding of salesforce, they have given over about $65+ million in grants, provided product donations for over 22,000 nonprofits and 620,000+ hours of essential community service.
Strategy / Approaches Adopted By Salesforce.com:
The following five items were important in terms of making the launch of the site a success.
1. Content Types
For launch they chose four different categories which would help them generate rich content:
- Created: They created the original and rich content required for their site from the scratch. They have also includes essentials like ebooks, articles, infographics and slidshares etc,
- Curated: These are summary style brief posts. They chose a topics which included social exchange and pointing to the best resources from the web regarding this topic.
- Collaborative: They choose some of the best thought leaders on the topics related and reached out them to see if they could contribute some valuable content based on their experience.
- Legacy: One of the simplest ways that companies can quickly scale their content for inbound marketing is to repurpose content they already have into different types of assets.
2. Product Messaging
This sort of content for the site is not exactly product centric. The best practice for this type of content is to follow the usual 80/20 rule – 80% non product and 20% product, for launch they followed the 90/10 rule. Product references were also used where they made sense only on a limited basis.
3. Promotion of the site
For the promotion of their site they have adopted a effective promotion plan. They have shared their best content on social networking sites like facebook, twitter etc. They allowed guest blogging on their site. They have launched the email and newsletter in order to keep in touch with their users who have signed up with them. Several other techniques were used for their promotion online.
4. Outbound Marketing
They have supported their inbound marketing with some of the great outbound tactics. They ran some sponsored tweets for their rich and premium content (eg: eBooks). They saw some really huge CTR numbers by doing this. They have also ran some advertising on LinkedIn targeted at their core personas developed over time.
5. Experts in the Field
Reaching out to the thought leaders in your respective market is a very great way to produce some highly valuable content for the site. They had found some great experts involved in the initial content, who shared their expert advice and experience with their audience and were also kind enough to share salesforce content.
Results Achieved By Salesforce.com:
The project was launched officially on January 3rd, 2012 and they have seen some great results.
- Traffic for January was up 80%
- Traffic from the social sites increased by 2500 %
- They had over 6500 people signed up to the salesforce newsletter
- Their eBook has been downloaded for over 10,000 times
Learnings:
They have used several inbound techniques and increased their web traffic. Content needs to have a their target audience and there is no better way to do it than identifying who you want to reach. They surely managed to get some experts in the field onboard, and this had a huge impact.
The strategy portion is wonderfully written. Very good. I’m sharing it with my students.
Good job Nikhita, Case study is very well presented.
Thanks Indrajit and Rahul for your appreciation.
Nicely written case study Nikita. Again a good example of effective integration of inbound marketing techniques. Pointer 1 is quite interesting, quality content creation , timely curation, collaboration with the experts are indeed right strategies for other brands to adopt.