Salesforce drove awareness of its new streaming platform by drawing audiences to episodes of its marquee show on YouTube.
Objective:
Connections is the tentpole show for all Salesforce+ original programming. It communicates brand values and priorities, drives brand awareness beyond target demographics, and establishes a relationship between viewers and company president and CMO Sarah Franklin.
Salesforce's strategic objective was to build brand awareness and position Salesforce + as the streaming service for business leaders.
Connections is a show that turned a challenge into an opportunity. During the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, marketing leadership needed to find new channels for customer engagement. An enormous amount of research and production resources were put into gathering safely, allowing Connections to lead the way for marketing production during an evolving public health crisis. And by presenting new and engaging feature content during a time when most outlets still relied on live Zoom calls and webinars, Connections was able to entertain and inform audiences in a much-needed way.
The show started as a test case for Salesforce's original business content and established benchmarks for audience numbers, watch time, and click-through rates. Now, Connections acts as a leader for Salesforce+ viewership and a key driver in audience engagement.
The key performance areas that Salesforce measured against were number of views, the average percentage viewed, and new subscribers to the Salesforce YouTube channel.
Target Audience:
Connections' target audience is college-educated business leaders aged 25 to 54. Specifically, Connections — and all Salesforce+ programming — aims to connect with people who have decision-making powers at companies of all sizes in all English-speaking regions.
Creative Strategy:
The creative strategy for Connections was simple: identify a diverse range of business leaders across every industry and then discuss their life journeys and marketing perspectives.
Salesforce's research showed that audiences love to hear how leaders overcame adversity or found inspiration, regardless of their specific job function. With this in mind, Connections guests are selected to range from surfing instructors to tech CMOs, and even include Olympic snowboard champion Shaun White. Each conversation is lighthearted and approachable to encourage audiences to use Connections as a break from their day or as a source of inspiration for the week.
Connections initially launched on YouTube to reach the broadest audience possible. Two months after Connections went live, Salesforce+ was launched. Now, Connections functions as a bridge between YouTube and Salesforce+ and each episode encourages audiences to discover all of Salesforce's other content offerings.
Salesforce's premier marketing event is also named "Connections" and is used to reach audiences who may not stay up to date on business streaming services. Overall, Connections has led the way in building both an audience for Salesforce+ and new brand awareness for Salesforce.
Context:
2021 was the first year of Salesforce's Connections campaign. Connections, and Salesforce+ as a whole, are net new content offerings for Salesforce. Connections is the companies' first foray into feature-length business content. The series has generated exponentially more interest than previous YouTube efforts and driven a wide range of audiences to Salesforce+.
Overall Campaign Execution:
Approximately 35 to 45 percent of promotion went to mobile across the campaign. Salesforce optimized each campaign throughout to ensure it was delivering as efficiently as possible: When the content was performing better on a certain device, the campaign leaned more into that. With these adjustments, the campaign ended up allocating around 39 percent of its resources to mobile.
Connections has exceeded all internal benchmarks for video performance. To date, the series has racked up over 18 million views and one million hours of watch time on YouTube. On Salesforce+, Connections is in the top three for each of the service's most important metrics: views, hours of watch time, and average watch time. As a leader on both YouTube and Salesforce+, Connections has become a tentpole show for all of Salesforce's other original programming.
Connections has proven that demand exists for fun and inspirational marketing content among a broad and diverse audience. Based on Connections' success, Salesforce has launched a dozen other series with more to come in the near future.
