Moving the Needle
in India’s Mid-Market
Salesforce shifts brand perception
with a localised and personalised
brand campaign on LinkedIn
Industry: Software Development No. of Employees: 10,001+ Headquarters: San Francisco, California, USA
India is a key international market for Salesforce. While being the only social platform in the mix.
already firmly established as a global leader in its
Fully utilising LinkedIn’s unique capabilities, Salesforce
category, Salesforce invested in a made-for-India brand
adopted an integrated marketing approach that
campaign that was not only tailored for the market but
cleverly combined a paid media play with an organic
also personalised for its target segment: mid-market
engagement and employee advocacy programme.
companies.
The brand successfully drove social conversations
With the objective of changing brand perception and
among its target audience and dominated Share of
increasing brand familiarity among mid-market decision
Feed during the campaign duration. This awareness
makers and influencers, Salesforce launched a multi-
and engagement contributed to the campaign’s overall
channel brand campaign in the last quarter of 2023.
success in shaping positive brand perception among
The eight-week advertising blitz ran across print, display, mid-market decision makers in India.
online video, and out-of-home channels, with LinkedIn
THE RESULTS
On LinkedIn, Salesforce combined paid media Salesforce’s internal brand measure results
campaigns with an organic engagement and show that the multi-channel campaign was
employee advocacy programme to achieve: successful in shifting key brand perceptions:
growth in Share of Feed vs key
170% competitors % during the campaign Unaided brand
+16pt awareness
audience reached, driving 200k+ ”Salesforce is a company that
2.3M quality visitors to website
+10pt understands Indian businesses”
”Salesforce facilitates growth for
engaged #IndiaGrowsWithSalesforce +8pt companies like mine”
1.4K posts by employees in India
THE CHALLENGE
To deepen penetration into India’s burgeoning mid-
“It’s essential that we present Salesforce as a
market segment, Salesforce recognised that its global
local player in the local market. We sought to
brand campaigns — successful as they were — would not
deepen trust that we not only understand and
be able to address the specific needs of these customers. can support mid-market companies in India,
Instead, Salesforce conceptualised a highly localised and but also, that we are committed to partnering
personalised campaign to demonstrate how the brand with them as they grow and scale.”
understands Indian mid-market businesses, facilitates their
Kritika Srinivasan
growth, and helps them build stronger customer
Senior Manager, Customer
relationships. Advocacy & Brand, Salesforce
THE SOLUTION
As part of the multi-channel brand campaign, Salesforce Salesforce’s paid media campaign eventually reached
activated on LinkedIn to drive engagement on the social 2.3 million members, penetrated 50% of its target
front using a powerful combination of organic and paid industry personas, and earned over 200,000 clicks to
marketing. site. It has reinforced LinkedIn’s standing as Salesforce’s
most efficient platform for driving quality website
Paid Media Campaign
visitors based on highest time spent on site. The brand
With just eight weeks to maximise impact, Salesforce also achieved 99% positive/neutral sentiment from the
worked closely with the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions team programme on LinkedIn.
to continuously test, learn and optimise performance.
This included staying agile and leveraging LinkedIn’s
objective-based advertising to optimise paid efforts
towards the campaign’s reach and engagement goals.
• Deepening localisation
In addition to ad creatives that featured Indian
imagery and local mid-market customers, Salesforce
introduced a Thought Leader Ad fronted by Salesforce
India’s Chairperson & CEO Arundhati Bhattacharya.
Featuring a local leader and voice strengthened
resonance and drove clickthrough rates 2x higher than
platform benchmarks.
• Strengthening personalisation
Through A/B testing, Salesforce discovered that
engagement rate doubled when it added the line
“Indian retail companies like yours are growing with
Salesforce” to its ad copy, compared to ads that did
not carry that line. This suggests that personalisation
drives performance.
Organic Engagement & Employee Advocacy
Salesforce’s paid media campaign was supported by a
strong organic engagement and employee advocacy
programme. This integrated approach makes full use of
the strength of LinkedIn networks and leverages
Salesforce’s massive local workforce to extend the reach
of its brand campaign.
In a synchronised move, local employees were invited to
be brand ambassadors and campaign amplifiers by
posting campaign related content on LinkedIn. They
could either insert themselves into the ad creatives via a
Virtual Reality tool or take a selfie with out-of-home
billboards. The latter had the added benefit of
amplifying the reach of the campaign’s out-of-home
ads, which were only installed in selected cities.
A total of 1,400 employee posts with the hashtag
#IndiaGrowsWithSalesforce added more than 40,000
engagements to the campaign while boosting
employee engagement and encouraging a stronger
sense of pride and connection to the brand.
THE FUTURE
Having successfully moved the needle on brand
perception among India’s mid-market companies,
Salesforce has since relaunched the campaign with a
focus on expanding featured customer stories and
industries. Understanding that brand-building, especially
in international markets, is a long-term play, Salesforce
continues to invest strongly in growing with India.
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