About Salesforce:
- Salesforce is a cloud computing company headquartered in San Francisco, California.
- The company was founded in the year 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez as a company specializing in software as a service(SaaS)
- In June 2004, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol CRM, raising US$110 million.
- Salesforce company is Best known for its on-demand CRM solutions and its prime focus is on Cloud computing.
- They also Pioneer in developing enterprise platforms through Force.com “ Platform as a Service” (PAAS) API for extending services provided by Salesforce.
- In July 2012 Salesforce applied to trademark the term “ Social enterprise” in the US, EU and Jamaica where the term was in widespread use to describe businesses with a primarily social purpose. This was successfully challenged by a campaign called #notinourname which was launched by Social Enterprise UK resulting in Salesforce.com withdrawing its trademark application and agreeing not to use the term in their future marketing.
- They are Pioneer in developing enterprise platforms through the AppExchange directory of on-demand applications.
- Though its revenue comes from a customer relationship management product, Salesforce also tries capitalizing on commercial social networking applications through acquisition. As of 2015, it is one of the most highly valued American cloud computing companies with a market capitalization of $50 billion.
Business Objectives of Salesforce:
The core business objective of Salesforce is to increase traffic and get more leads in the UK.
- Salesforce saw a high potential and huge business opportunity in the United Kingdom market segment.
- They aspired to tap this market and extend their services.
- Salesforce wanted to create more awareness about its services and increase their sales
- Salesforce wanted to increase their revenue in the United Kingdom region and they had an objective of growing/increasing traffic and getting more leads in this market.
Also, check – Salesforce Export Data
Strategy Adopted by Salesforce:
- Salesforce decided to implement the digital marketing strategy to achieve its objective of tapping the United Kingdom market and increasing their sales and revenue
- They wanted to leverage more expertise in the content and hit the sweet spot in the B2B purchase journey
Salesforce conducted a market research and they found the following facts:
- Based on their research Salesforce got the fact that about 78% of Internet users conduct product research online
- Another relevant fact they found was about 24% of adults have posted comments or reviews online about the things they buy (Pew Internet & American Life Project, May 2010)
- These facts are clear and help on deciding the behaviour of the buyers
- It was also found in the research that People can now choose where and when to engage with your brand , plus what content they would like to consume
Theme and Topic
- Salesforce developed a microsite full of rich and relevant content
- This microsite was targeted at a set of persons who were identified and segmented from the market based on the research findings
- Salesforce created a theme for their microsite – “ The social-powered business via social research” was the theme given to this microsite
- Salesforce was fully focused on their objective
- The microsite was focused on different topics like – Sales, customer service, collaboration, and marketing
Content Generation & Measuring Success
The next task for the salesforce was hot to generate the content
- Salesforce used the collaboration tool Chatter to collaborate with a team consisting of 56 members in the team
- Role of this 56 members team was to generate the required content to achieve the desired objective
- They first identified the topics for the content and then identified different thought leaders for the particular topic and consulted with them on their expertise and thoughts
- They also identified metrics to measure the outcome of this strategy
Launch & Promoting the microsite
- They launched the microsite in 12 weeks with 32 pieces of contents in the microsite covered
- They promoted the microsite via various channels like Facebook, Twitter, Guest Blogger, emails, PR
- They also adopted outbound marketing strategy via Sponsored tweets, Linkedin banner adds / Google display network
- Overall they covered 32 different topics for their microsite
Results Achieved by Salesforce: 
- Salesforce achieved incredible results and achieved their desired objective with higher success ratio
- They achieved 80% more traffic on their website
- Their social referral traffic was increased by 2500% and this was an outstanding result
- Salesforce got 6500 new signups with the help of their microsite
- Salesforce had received an amazing 10000 new leads
Learnings:
- With the help of Digital marketing an enterprise could achieve their objective of increasing their sales to a great extent
- How social media can play a vital role in the growth of an enterprise
- Business revenue can be increased with adopting the right kind of digital marketing strategy
- Digital marketing helps to create awareness in the market
- With the help of Digital marketing any particular identified segment can be taped for business opportunities
- Digital marketing implementation is the key to success for an business enterprise
- Digital marketing has a wide reach and can be utilized for the benefit of business enterprise to achieve the desired objectives
Image Credits: Salesforce
Excellent article and the results are astounding! When I read that 78% of Internet users conduct product research online I am not the least bit surprised. Can you offer any breakdowns on this such as how much of that product research is done on social media vs. search engine, etc. Also, does this 78% apply to consumers only or does this number include business as well? All of this would be valuable in devising a digital marketing strategy and determining where to focus whether it’s social media or search engines and also to know what differences exist between B2B and B2C techniques.