Maybe The Largest Ever Content Marketing Scheme
CRM giant Salesforce believes that there’s an audience for business content streaming à la Netflix, writes Robert O’Brien
Nobody does customer engagement quite like Salesforce, the American CRM software company established by Marc Benioff in 1999. Every September the company’s Dreamforce event would attract over 100,000 people to San Francisco for a mix of learning, networking and partying. Last year the event was totally virtual, and for 2021 in-person attendance will be limited to c.6,000 invitees, spread across venues in San Francisco, New York, London and Paris.
For the digital audience, Salesforce has planned over 100 hours of original B2B content to showcase the company’s new Salesforce+ streaming service, billed by some observers as the largest content marketing scheme ever. In tandem with Dreamforce, Salesforce is unveiling Salesforce+ with the aim of forging stronger bonds with customers through the provision of intelligent and helpful business video content that, for the moment, is ad free.
All B2B vendors will be watching the development with interest. Traditionally, marketeers have used white papers, case studies and research papers to lure prospective customers to their site. With everyone now hooked on entertainment streaming and even old-timers dipping into YouTube every week, Benioff and his colleagues believe that there’s an audience for more business video content too.
On past form, mostly it will be talking heads. Through the pandemic, Salesforce has produced c.70 episodes of a series called Leading through Change. These largely consist of one-on-one Zoom chats with company executives about how they do this and that. Salesforce claims an audience of c.700m views, though they don’t seem to be overly popular when aired on YouTube.
Other Salesforce series that will populate the Salesforce+ streaming service are:
• The Inflection Point: CEOs from leading brands share their back stories, professional influences and values that inform their leadership.
• Connections: A showcase of innovative US marketeers.
• Boss Talks: A career advice series.
• Simply Put: Explainer series that aims to make complex business problems easier to understand, on topics such as how to build an e-commerce business and how to grow digital sales.
This type of content will be present through four Salesforce+ channels. Overseeing the project is a team of around 50 writers, editors, directors and producers, with hundreds of other staffers also working on the project. “Just as brands like Disney and Netflix have done streaming services for consumers, Salesforce+ is providing an always-on business media platform that builds trusted relationships with customers and a sense of belonging for the business community,” explains chief marketing officer Sarah Franklin.
Colin Fleming, who’s in charge of Salesforce brand marketing, adds: “As a result of the pandemic, we took a good look at the media landscape, where people are consuming content, and decided the days of white papers in a business-to-business setting were no longer interesting to people.
“We’re staring at a cookie-less future, and looking at the consumer world we reflected on that for Salesforce and asked, ‘Why shouldn’t we be thinking about this too?’