Stemming from its recent acquisition of Buddy Media and its subsidiary Brighter Option based in London, Salesforce.com, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) has upped the ante with a new product designed in the vein of its other cloud based products. The new social ad campaign app will be known as Social.com. Vice President of Product Marketing Gordon Evans said that even though Salesforce has already run nearly 500,000 social campaigns, “There’s still a problem — companies are sitting on this incredible customer data in their CRM systems, but they’re not really connected [to their ad campaigns] in a very efficient manner.” He added that companies also lack the ability to take “full advantage of all the information that’s shared on public social networks.”
Salesforce.com, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) will look to launch a solution to the problem laid out above with a three-pronged attack from its Marketing Cloud: social media listening (its acquisition of Radian6), publishing content (Buddy Media) and branding (Social.com). They are touting the new service as an application that agencies, brands, developers, advertisers, and retailers will all be able to utilize in one self-service marketing app.
According to BIA/Kelsey, $5.5 billion will be spent on social advertising this year with that number expected to double by 2017 if not sooner.
“Within the next few years, the CMO is going to spend more money on technology than the CIO,” says Michael Lazerow, who was Buddy Media’s co-founder and CEO.
Salesforce.com, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) is claiming that Social.com will be the first product available that combines CRM and social media marketing and suggests that it will allow customers access to 500 million sources and then turn around to buy and deliver ads in the moment.
In a product demonstration today, Salesforce.com, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) showed that if the customer has the necessary materials together (copy, images, video, etc.), a social ad campaign could be initiated in about ten minutes’ time. From there the user will simply need to decide where the campaign will be delivered, budget bidding options, and finally entering audience targeting metrics.
“The idea is that we’re trying to bring agencies a lot closer with brands to make these campaigns easy and efficient,” explained Gordon Evans, vice president of product marketing for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud unit, today during the company’s demonstration in San Francisco.
