Get behind-the-scenes insights from leaders of award-winning content programs at Salesforce, AARP, HBO, and other B2C and B2B brands
In March 2020, the world changed seemingly overnight.
Salesforce responded to the new reality of business seemingly overnight, launching its Leading Through Change content initiative on March 17.
That’s not a typo. The first blog of the program launched days before California issued shelter-in-place orders and travel essentially shut down.
How did this huge company pivot so quickly – and deliver results that surpassed expectations?
Leading Through Change won Project of the Year in the 2021 Content Marketing Awards. And it's one of the reasons Jessica Bergmann, who drives content strategy at Salesforce, earned the 2021 B2B Content Marketer of the Year honor.
Here's the remarkable story of how the program came together. –Stephanie Stahl
The answer to how Salesforce launched Leading Through Change so quickly sounds simple. The company relied on a documented content strategy and trained all of its 1,300 marketers to follow it.
But that simple answer obscures the months of effort behind it. The underlying work started in July 2019, when Jessica kicked off a “content revolution” at the tech giant.
Jessica Bergmann VP of Content and Customer Marketing Salesforce
As part of that revolution, the team launched an integrated planning effort that had content strategists working with each line of business and industry team to document their content strategy for the year.
The content series that grew out of that work (360 Perspectives) paused when customers’ business challenges changed due to the pandemic.
But the revolution’s principles laid the groundwork that enabled Leading Through Change:
When COVID hit, Salesforce stopped all marketing, including the 360 Perspectives series Jessica’s team had spent months preparing.
“Companies’ needs had changed,” Jessica said. “The messages and campaigns we had planned prior to COVID were no longer relevant.”
In rethinking their marketing approach, Salesforce made three pivotal decisions:
From listening to customers (and their insights teams), the company found a need for information about how to go digital fast.
Companies needed to figure out how to keep employees working successfully remotely.
And they needed to tackle new business challenges, like deciding when to go back into the office and how to operate safely.
Out of those and other insights, Leading Through Change was born. The goals were straightforward:
Taking the series from goals to a quick launch took some doing. Everyone got involved.
“We put all the wood behind one arrow,” Jessica said, “We went through one weekly approval process.
We worked in one system. We all worked through one planning process.”
In a way, the crisis brought about the content revolution the team had been working to bring about for months. The content team had a seat at the strategy table. And the desire to co-create with customers proved helpful for the Leading Through Change initiative, just as it had for the earlier series.
“When the pandemic hit, no one had all the answers,” Jessica said. They had to ask, “How can we lead through change with our customers, experts, and partners?”
The answer was to put customers at the front of the series. “They were telling us how they were navigating the pandemic’s impact,” she said.
As Salesforce explained in its Content Marketing Awards submission: “We created content about what we knew — leading with values and customer-centricity — while tapping into the expertise of international medical experts, CEOs, and government leaders.”
Salesforce teamed up with CEOs and luminaries from various industries. Tapping into experts helped the team take on topics they hadn’t covered before, including well-being at work, upskilling, success from anywhere, and vaccine management.
For example, they published a series of articles and videos based on interviews with Dr. David Agus, such as this one about why companies should consider hiring a chief health officer.
They also created a resource center and filled it with helpful guides, including the COVID Response Playbook and How to Safely Reopen Your Business.
The content also recognized other big changes happening in 2020 and 2021 as conversations about justice, race, and inclusion were elevated in the world.
Music for Change: Hear the Next Generation Raise Their Voice for a Brighter Future helped Salesforce enter conversations around justice, race, and inclusion. The virtual event highlighted original songs from students around the world and featured celebrity judges will.i.am, Jewel, Dave Wish, and Dr. Ron C. Smith.
For example, the company hosted Music for Change: Hear the Next Generation Raise Their Voice for a Brighter Future, a live competition featuring original, digitally produced songs from students around the world. The event featured celebrity judges will.i.am, Jewel, Dave Wish, and Dr. Ron C. Smith.
Leading Through Change content focused on challenges – like how to safely reopen a business – identified by the customer insights team at Salesforce.
"This combination of interviews with experts, thinking at the forefront of change, talking about product innovation, and then bringing in a moment of entertainment and levity got customers excited,” Jessica said. “They were proud to be part of it.”
Ultimately, Leading Through Change took a multimedia, multinational approach that crossed broadcast, on-demand video, blogs, audio, online learning modules, and social media channels in over 20 countries and 15 languages.
In the first month of the series, organic prospect traffic to the site increased 47%. The live broadcast series reached more than 600 million viewers on owned and social channels, with an average of 10 million views per episode. Salesforce’s blog newsletter audience grew by over 70%.
Form completions through webinars grew 80 times, which led to nearly all of the 5% year-over-year engagement growth in the first month of Leading Through Change.
Leading Through Change helped Salesforce internally, too. It aligned to the need for new products that empowered sales teams and met that need with products like Work.com and Vaccine Cloud.
Salesforce used the project’s success to attract new attendees to Dreamforce – its biggest event of the year – which took place virtually in 2020.
Through LinkedIn engagement retargeting, the company earned more than 600,000 impressions for the 2020 Dreamforce registration page and 1,400 clicks.
It also got the notice of the business world. As Matt Derella, global vice president of Twitter, explains:
"The Leading Through Change show has been a lighthouse example of a business adapting to change to create value for their customers and advantage versus their competition.
"The quality of the content and the scale of the conversation is breathtaking. After their initial envy, other leading brands are learning from and trying to catch up to Salesforce’s innovative approach."
Leading Through Change proved transformative for content strategy and content marketing at Salesforce. And, as with any transformation, it wasn’t easy.
When you tell everyone there’s one content initiative they all need to get behind, you can expect pushback. As Jessica said, “Of course, there’s friction.”
Working in a single system helped because everyone could see what they were working toward.
What really helped, Jessica found, was to change the conversation from “No, you can’t do this,” to “No, this doesn’t align to our approach, but here’s how you can modify or consolidate this idea to be included in the series.”
Eventually, the results spoke for themselves.
And the lessons learned continue to inform their work on new content projects (including the print magazine Vantage Point, which launched this summer, and the all-new Salesforce+ streaming service).
Ultimately, the experience “was a major learning curve for a lot of the team, " Jessica said. "We were stronger afterward. It streamlined our processes and changed the way we operate and develop content across the board.”
Now, that’s leading through change. CCO
Watch the award ceremony for the 2021 B2C Content Marketer of the Year to learn about the finalists and winners, then turn the page for more details about their innovative work.
If your content is for everyone, it’s for no one.
No one would accuse AARP of ignoring that truism. The association’s massive-circulation publications offer pitch-perfect content for the over-50 crowd.
In the last few years, they've gone even deeper, creating niche publications for often-overlooked audience segments.
Sisters From AARP, which targets Black women over 40, is one shining example of this strategy. The weekly newsletter and website won the 2021 Content Marketing Award for Best Digital Publication.
Claire McIntosh Editor-in-Chief, Sisters From AARP AARP
Sisters' editor-in-chief, Claire McIntosh, established the pub's keen editorial focus and fresh, distinctive voice –and it earned her the 2021 B2C Content Marketer of the Year honor.
We asked Claire to share the Sisters From AARP story and for her thoughts on building a successful content product and team. Here's what she told us. –Kim Moutsos
“I remind Sisters From AARP’s multigenerational contributors that the organization touches every generation,” explains Claire McIntosh, editor-in-chief. “The younger you are, the more you need AARP. Sisters’ outreach and strategy takes that into account.”
When Sisters launched in 2018, the website served as a home for the articles in the weekly e-newsletter.
An April 2020 website redesign made room to showcase themed Spotify playlists featuring Black artists, as well as polls, games, online events, and other exclusive content. It also marked a more concerted push to engage readers and create community.
While the pandemic raged and social justice concerns dominated the news, the team stepped up communication on its Facebook and Instagram channels. Content choices prioritized lifestyle, informational content, and even humor to promote “a sense of belonging and contentment,” according to AARP.
And it worked – the Sisters team sees more engagement on (including enthusiastic comments, not just likes) social channels and more subscribers. They now reach an audience that numbers in the hundreds of thousands.
Before building Sisters’ web, email, and social channels, Claire and the team conducted audience research and tested concepts with its audience.
Claire established Sisters’ content categories, editorial calendar, and brand voice, which she conveys to writers as “the same conversational tone they’d use with a bestie at brunch.”
And when a writer's content doesn’t quite hit the mark, she makes the advice even more specific: “Write it as you would share it conversationally after ordering the second mimosa. We want it to be really friendly.”
Claire takes an ear-to-the-ground approach to guiding editorial decisions and her writers.
“Early on, I shared with senior vice president and editorial director of AARP Media Myrna Blyth that I saw my role as a listener-in-chief,” she explains.
She’s tuned into reader feedback, taking ideas and inspiration from reader emails. “It’s the readers who are driving what we talk about. That comes from subscriber surveys, my mailbox, what people are asking for, what they tell us they like, what they tell us they don’t like.”
Claire also listens to colleagues and contributors. “I’ll meet a writer for lunch or virtual coffee. She’ll tell me how she handled things with the school principal when her daughter was being bullied, and I’ll ask her to write about it.”
Claire works closely with Sisters’ creative director Dian Holton, who shapes its visual branding, and senior editor Leslie Quander Wooldridge, who manages its social media and produces Q&As, celebrity updates, first-person stories, and polls.
All three women are part of a team led by Shelley Emling, executive editor of specialized content, and AARP General Manager Sami Amad. That team produces Sisters and two other niche platforms: The Girlfriend (for Gen X women) and The Ethel (for women over 55).
A group of project management, marketing, design, business development, and web development colleagues supports all the newsletters, social channels, websites, events, and e-commerce offerings that arise from the project.
Claire contributes to AARP print publications, too, shaping the food content for AARP The Magazine.
All that collaboration adds up to signal-boosting power for all the specialized publications. “When you collaborate with innovators from across the enterprise,” Claire says, “you access a breadth and caliber of talent that wouldn’t be available with a dedicated team. You can punch above your weight class.”
Sisters From AARP connects with a niche that Claire describes as “unaccustomed to targeted media that celebrates and supports them at the age and stage that they — we — are at now.”
Engaging this often-overlooked audience in a way that makes a real difference in their outlook and lives brings meaning to the team’s work.
“This engagement makes a difference as the African-American community faces grave challenges linked to the pandemic, voter suppression, employment and wage discrimination, and racist violence.
"I’m equally proud of how we kindle joy and resilience by elevating fun, friendship, and fulfillment,” she says.
Sisters sends every reader a birthday greeting, which is a great prompt for the recipients to share how they think about the newsletter and what they want. In general, Claire says, “They just want more.”
Look for more of that sense of fun and friendship as Sisters rolls out some new social media initiatives that will make it “more of a party” and a new e-commerce project to support readers with stylish self-care options.
While Claire and her team work on making sure Sisters content reaches its audience in more ways and more places, the team knows its purpose.
“Above all, we’ll advance AARP’s mission to empower people to choose how they live as they age.” CCO
Ever look at an organization’s content and think, “How do they do it?” Yeah, same.
So we asked a group of admired content leaders – 2021 Content Marketer of the Year finalists – for a peek behind the curtain. (Each nominee this year worked on a winning entry in at least one category in the Content Marketing Awards.)
You’ve likely heard variations of their advice before (hence the quotation marks around “secrets” in the headline). But their input proves that the fundamentals of content marketing work.
Here’s what they told us about why their content programs resonate with audiences and keep the support of business leaders who invest in them. – Kim Moutsos
Jackie Gagne Senior Vice President, Multicultural Marketing HBO Max and HBO
Our team reflects the audiences we speak with daily, and our partners also reflect the audience. Both are very passionate about multicultural audiences and creating moments that give back to underrepresented groups.
Our focus is on Black, AAPI, LGBTQ+, and Latinx audiences. In each vertical, we have audience experts, and that was very intentional. We are the experts when it comes to these audiences.
If there’s a multicultural marketing or emerging markets team in the organization, I encourage you to work closely with them to develop your strategy. If that expertise doesn’t exist within the organization, then absolutely
find an agency partner who knows and has experience with the audiences you want to engage.
Julie Shapiro Editor-in-Chief The Well by Northwell Northwell Health
The key to The Well’s success is our data-driven approach to content creation. We know what our readers are interested in because we study them. We learn about their needs and curiosities at the different stages of life and formulate concepts for content around those findings. And we don’t do it in a stuffy, formal way.
When we started, we were “intuition-driven,” meaning the team (made up of all women/chief medical officers of the household) would brainstorm about the things that mattered to us.
We assumed we knew what people wanted because we were the target audience.
Now that we're data-driven and spend a good amount of resources studying trends to really know what our demo is searching for, I’d say we weren’t wrong, but we didn’t understand how much more people were interested in – topics we hadn’t even thought of.
My advice is to get to know your audience and give the people what they want.
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We use Bambu by Sprout Social to share content internally so that it gets shared externally. It’s been a wonderful tool for us.
We had great success in leveraging that for our sales team during the early months of the pandemic, which allowed them to keep in contact with their clients and stay relevant.
We just kept sharing content and data points through this platform internally, and they could then put it right onto their own LinkedIn. They can put it on Twitter. Now we do it two to three times a week, and it’s a constant flow.
Carl Germann Senior Marketing Manager – Brand Communications Monster
One of the main things we care about is seeing how many Workflow readers engage with the ServiceNow brand in a way that increases the chance that they will become customers (things like what percentage of Workflow readers click off to get assets on ServiceNow.com either directly or indirectly).
I think the exciting opportunity in content (at least the editorial thought leadership side) is to show how you’re contributing not just to brand awareness but ultimately to the business funnel. We’re not product marketers. But it’s important to be able to show that we’re sending people from an editorial experience to the top of the marketing funnel, where they can be captured as leads.
Richard McGill Murphy Editor-in-Chief, Workflow ServiceNow
It’s important to have some type of champion at the executive level who will enable you to have the tools you need to get these things done.
That’s it. We couldn’t have done it without the support of my boss at the time.
Julia Gaynor Senior Marketing Strategist – B2B Monster
Read 3 Strategic Pillars Behind Every Winning Content Strategy, by Jodi Harris, on the Content Marketing Institute website.
