2021 Bronze Best Performance Marketing Activity

Agency: Jellyfish

Client: Salesforce

Campaign Name: Salesforce Developers YouTube Trust Campaign

Campaign Overview

Salesforce Developer Relations needed to deepen connections and become a trusted resource, serving expert content when users sought solutions to overcome coding challenge

Strategy

Salesforce needs developers to build on its platform, creating scalable, flexible and efficient solutions for organisations.

It also knew their opinions were critical to the C-suite for making purchasing decisions. Become a trusted resource, providing developers with inspirational content to ensure they stayed up to speed with three releases per year - enabling them to extend and develop the platform for Salesforce customers - was imperative.

Surveys showed developers were visiting YouTube to watch video content uploaded by others in the community for education and inspiration. Salesforce also learned its developers enjoyed watching an expert demonstrate a new feature before trying it for themselves.

It refreshed the existing Salesforce Developer YouTube page to be more developer-focussed, implementing detailed descriptions and organising content into actionable playlists. In-house experts were asked to create purpose-built short-form video content that demonstrated fast fixes to tricky solutions, including SEO keywords developers were already using.

Salesforce commissioned a new brand visual identity, and ran a YouTube paid media campaign to attract in- and out-of-ecosystem developers to this new content. It also executed an email campaign to invigorate the database and create a buzz among the community

Creativity

The series featured short-form video content purpose-built for the channel. Paid ads showcased a dramatic visual brand identity and featured keywords that developers were using.

The YouTube was updated:

• applying new visual brand identity

• restructuring existing video content to walk developers through a build process

• defining metadata to enhance and complement search

• standardising video descriptions for ease of finding content

• including links to useful content hosted on Salesforce properties

The team combined organic social media posts shared on Salesforce Developer channels with YouTube paid media ads to attract developers to the new content.

Each Quick Take video used a title slide with the new brand identity, which became the visual for the YouTube paid ad via the thumbnail image.

SEO analysis was conducted to identify developer-appropriate keywords which were included in the ad copy and video descriptions. An email campaign featured the new brand identity to build trust within the developer community.

Results

The campaign to build fresh content for developers met their needs and was the most successful paid media campaign ever run by Salesforce:

• 160% over target on impressions

• 167% over target on views

• $0.014 Cost Per View, against earlier benchmark of $0.02

• 3.22% Click-Through-Rate on emails, an increase of 1.1% on the previous year

The work acquired 37,000+ new subscribers to the channel during its run. This showed a commitment on the part of the developer audience, that they liked the content and would continue to engage with it after the campaign had concluded.

Post-campaign, relationships with developers has fundamentally improved, with increased engagement from the audience as they like, comment and share content, which demonstrates trust.

Salesforce experts monitor comments and feedback posted on their videos and build new content in response.

They’re also more widely followed on social media, and frequently asked to present at developer group meet-ups.

The Team

Salesforce - Christie Fidura, Director, Developer Marketing - Marissa Lowe, Senior Corporate Marketing Analyst - Heather Storm, Senior Manager, Developer Marketing - Valerie Um, Marketing Coordinator, Developer Marketing - Amber Molina, Senior Manager Marketing Operations, Trailhead