The Sophisticated Marketer's Guide to LinkedIn
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• With plans to broadcast an 11-part web series alongside other live-streaming initiatives in the pipeline, the marketing team at Salesforcewas exploring ways to maximize organic viewership and engagement.
• “Video is a huge part of our marketing strategy,” says Marissa Kraines, Senior Director of Social & Content Marketing for Salesforce. “We find that live streaming is really a wonderful way for us to engage our audience in real time, take questions, and interact with them in a very meaningful way.”
• Salesforce identified LinkedIn as a good fit because of the company’s strong built-in audience on the platform. With nearly 2 million followers for their LinkedIn Page, plus many Showcase Pages extending to different branches of specialization, the brand’s community on LinkedIn is robust and varied.
• Late last year, Salesforce tested the LinkedIn Live feature by simulcasting their biggest annual event, as well as episodic video content leading up to it.
• For the 11-part series, Salesforce drew over 600,000 organic viewers, with a 3% engagement rate that toppled benchmarks. “What was really amazing is that for our first episode, we actually saw over 83,000 views of the episode, with no drop-off of viewership during the full event,” Marissa says. “These are numbers you don’t usually see without paid media.”
• After driving stellar engagement and viewership with the web series, Salesforce saw similar results when streaming its biggest annual conference on LinkedIn. Today, at a time where many companies are seeking ways to reach their audiences interactively and at scale without the availability of physical events, Salesforce’s success with bringing the experience online is especially noteworthy.
• “We were not only streaming the big sessions, but we were also bringing in the content that showcases the event, the excitement, the energy, the learning, and the community throughout,” Marissa shares. “The sheer number of organic viewers we got was unheard of.”
• One key to Salesforce’s high engagement and viewership rates, Marissa believes, was giving their audience something to plan around and look forward to.
• “What we found is creating a cadence of content where people knew that they could come back to on a regular date and time really helped with our viewership,” she says. “We found that we had the same people asking questions, and commenting, and sharing the content each Tuesday at 11:00 AM ... They were really excited for the main event, and we just had that huge audience once we got there.”
• As advice for other marketers who are aiming to make an impact with video, Marissa emphasizes that it’s important to dive in deeper rather than toeing the waters.
• “Have a game plan that consists of at least five pieces of content that you plan on putting out,” she suggests. “That way you can test, look at results against each other, and really see what’s working. And so after those five segments, you can create something based on those learnings that’s even more meaningful for your audience.”
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“LinkedIn is the professional network. There’s no other network that can really claim that name. We’ve seen that come to life in terms of promotion, paid media, organic media, how people connect.”
“It really came as a surprise to our leadership and executives that we could not only get this sheer amount of organic viewers, but they were thoroughly engaged, and their view time was longer than we could have expected.”
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