Companies embracing the “social revolution” are growing up to 48% faster than their rivals by employing cloud-based marketing strategies, according to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
The CEO revealed the statistic speaking at his company’s keynote address at its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco yesterday where he also revealed a host of updates to its Salesforce’s suite of services such as the Chatter and Database.com platforms.
With over 85,000 attendees registered for the event, Benioff’s message to marketers was that all businesses are now social and that 21st century brands can embrace cloud-based technologies to personalise their marketing communications.
“The cloud is coming…this social revolution that is going on right now is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before,” he said.
During the address, Benioff also presented data demonstrating how Salesforce customers including AON, Coca-Cola and Google, are growing up to 48% faster than their rivals by using cloud-based, data-led marketing.
“That’s why it’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to our business,” added Benioff, explaining that organisations must be more social internally.
Speaking during the same session, Hilarie Koplow-McAdams, Salesforce, president of SMB unit, revealed that on average its customers see a 27% increase in sales. By using services such as social listening tools, businesses can link data from the social web to their own internal data in order to target potentially new customers, added Koplow-McAdams.
“It’s the power of social data generating social selling,” explained Koplow-McAdams.
Among a host of product launches was the Salesforce Touch product to make the service available to marketers across a host of mobile devices, see video below.
Video:
Salesforce.com
Also demonstrated at the event was Salesforce’s Chatter service that contains a dashboard that lets brands see customer concerns across a number of channels.
They can then see the various ways to communicate with the customer and then respond via the appropriate channel, Twitter or FaceTime or even phone, and whether or not they have to ‘escalate’ the customer service case.
Citing Gartner research, Salesforce CEO Benioff explained how the trend towards social meant that that by 2017 CMOs will spend more on technology than CIOs, citing technology such as its Marketing Cloud product, which is now fully integrated with Buddy Media’s social media software suite.
Such developments mean that marketers using Salesforce products can extract social data from the cloud-based service, segment the audiences they want to target and then generate ads tailored on the specifically for these potential customers.
Also present at the event where a host of Salesforce customers who were on hand to explain how they used the service.
Coca Cola CIO Ed Steinike was on hand to explain how social and cloud-based marketing techniques were key to the company’s goal of doubling in size between 2010 and 2020.
“You have to embrace the cloud if you want to double the size of your company in under ten years,” said Steinike.
“Mobile for us is the most important medium of the next decade as it plays a role across our business on just about any platform you can imagine,” he added.
