With the goal of drawing North American business professionals to its new streaming service, Salesforce+, Salesforce created a custom content series to promote its tentpole show, The Ecopreneurs, and introduce users to its new streaming service.
Objective:
The Ecopreneurs is a tentpole show for Salesforce's innovative new streaming service, Salesforce+. Debuting three months after the launch of Salesforce+, The Ecopreneurs had two distinct business goals: generate brand awareness for Salesforce+ and promote Salesforce's newest core company value of sustainability.
Salesforce had a well-established audience on YouTube, but the company sought to drive awareness of Salesforce+ and build an audience for the service, a first-of-its-kind, business-focused direct-to-consumer streaming site. Salesforce partnered with FORTUNE Brand Studio to expand production capabilities for the series and increase the content varieties offered for each episode, while reaching a target audience of North American business professionals.
Target Audience:
Salesforce created The Ecopreneurs to resonate with business leaders and decision-makers in every role, industry, and line of business — and inspire action. College-educated adults aged 25 to 54 were specifically targeted throughout the accompanying promotional campaign.
Creative Strategy:
Sustainability and entrepreneurship are top of mind for the Salesforce audience, and The Ecopreneurs was crafted to celebrate current achievements and inspire action in future generations. A long-form, character-based storytelling approach was utilized to show how businesses are adapting to and solving some of the greatest challenges of the climate crisis. Episodes feature next-generation drones flying through 15,000-foot Andean peaks and underwater cameras transporting viewers to newly regenerated seascapes. This approach created appeal for casual viewers beyond the target audience and offered business professional content with a level of artistry not often found in the field.
The premier episode of The Ecopreneurs, "SeaTrees," was released in full on YouTube to drive awareness of the show and redirect the YouTube audience to Salesforce+. Subsequent episodes were shown exclusively on Salesforce+ to build on the success of other original programming, especially Salesforce's frequent live event streams that were popular among the target audience.
Additional content such as long-form articles, animated explainers, and founder profiles not only provided further information beyond the scope of the featured video, but also generated sticky, shareable content to encourage viewers to spread The Ecopreneurs message.
Context:
The Ecopreneurs is the flagship piece of a campaign for Salesforce's newest content offering, Salesforce+. Similar values-based marketing projects were isolated on third-party sites like YouTube. The Ecopreneurs was a year-long effort that not only communicated the company's commitment to driving change, but also demonstrated how those values were integrated into Salesforce's offerings.
Overall Campaign Execution:
To amplify The Ecopreneurs messaging and encourage audience action, Salesforce and FORTUNE Brand Studio (FBS) created a robust supporting content and promotion strategy for each episode. Through high-impact homepage takeovers on Fortune.com and newsletter promotion, as well as social and native promotion across Fortune's ecosystem, the series saw impressively high engagement.
On top of highlighting the engaging series for the Fortune and Salesforce audiences, the brand also created a branded content hub for each episode that dug into the innovations pioneered by the ecopreneurs in custom long-form articles, in-depth Q-and-As, and animated explainer videos.
For each episode, Salesforce also created a behind-the-scenes video that showcased how stories were captured in the air, on the ground, and underwater.
Mobile Execution:
The Ecopreneurs was promoted across all major social media channels using content tailored to audiences likely to use each platform. For Instagram, Reels were created to showcase the most breathtaking shots of the series. On Meta and LinkedIn, behind-the-scenes featurettes were used to demonstrate the high level of expertise that went into each episode. Social posts hit all critical benchmarks on every social site despite a company-wide promotional slowdown in response to global political events. The series also saw above average penetration on Twitter, where content was tailored to people outside of the target audience. Posts of nearly every episode accumulated more than two million impressions each for a total of eight million impressions.
The Ecopreneurs was a success as both a proof of concept for Salesforce+ and as a leader in driving brand awareness across multiple demographics. The show was a crossover success and had two of the top 10 most viewed episodes on Salesforce+. The pilot episode, "SeaTrees," garnered more than 3.3 million views during its promotional run on YouTube.
The Ecopreneurs also became a leader in total watch time and average watch time among Salesforce+ shows. Two episodes, "SeaTrees" and "Acción Andina," beat average viewer watch time benchmarks by multiple minutes. In fact, during the first month of release, "SeaTrees" averaged more than six minutes of watch time, which is greater than 50 percent of the episode.
Content created to promote episodes performed exceptionally well, generating over 57 million impressions against the goal of 16 million.
But most importantly, the series and episodes have created significant real-world impact for the people and businesses featured in each episode. SeaTrees, the environmental organization featured in the eponymous episode, saw a tenfold increase in site traffic and donations on its platform in the first three months following the premier of its appearance on The Ecopreneurs.
