Salesforce.com introduced today a new addition to its Marketing Cloud – Social.com, which allows marketers to apply their CRM and social listening data to their social ad campaigns. Creating targeted ads, marketers frequently run into the “silo issue” of being unable to connect their various customer data sources, noted Gordon Evans, VP of marketing at Salesforce.com.
“We wanted to help our clients take the information that’s living in Salesforce,” Evans told AdExchanger, “and connect that to their other customer databases to create segmented and targeted ad campaigns that they can update in a self-service solution.”
With Social.com, an ad agency can access Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool on the Social.com dashboard to create and deliver messages – such as Sponsored Stories – to various groups on its client’s behalf. If the client was Ford, for example, the marketer “might have [from the company’s Salesforce CRM system] a group of folks that filled out an online form on Ford’s page and another group that bought a Ford Focus more than five years ago,” Evans noted.
The ad agency can create content for the ad, target it according to the segmented data from Ford’s Salesforce database as well as by zipcode, turn it into a mobile ad, enter a bid amount, and upload the ad to the social network.
When asked if Social.com was designed to compete with Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences tool, which enables advertisers to target users who are similar to their current customers, Evans insisted Salesforce.com was not trying to replace the tool.
“We’ll integrate everything that Facebook allows us to integrate through its API and we’re not trying to limit it to using one or the other,” he said. “Lookalike Audiences works differently from us. We’re focused on being able to target your actual customers using the data you have.”
As for Twitter, using the capabilities Salesforce.com gained when it acquired the social monitoring platform Radian6, Social.com lets advertisers create and deliver ads in response to trending conversations on Twitter. Now that Twitter enables users to target ads based on keywords, advertisers can monitor Twitter with Social.com for relevant hashtags that would trigger targeted tweets around that hashtag.
Salesforce.com has reached out to a number of its ad agency clients to help it test Social.com. GroupM and Omnicom have managed more than 500,000 social ad campaigns and one trillion impressions with the new tool, according to Salesforce.com. The campaigns have been run by marketers in 45 countries; in March, Social.com served more than 2.5 billion impressions daily.
Social.com is priced as a percentage of the total ad spend made via the application.
