Crafting connections: the art of AI in creating meaningful relationships with your target audiences 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool in shaping marketing and event experiences. We spoke with Colin Fleming, EVP of Global Brand Marketing at Salesforce, about the data-driven strategies and innovations that have propelled the business software giant to the forefront of marketing and technology. In this interview, Colin speaks from his 10 years of experience in marketing and explores how businesses can emulate Salesforce and leverage AI to connect with customers and audiences, nurturing relationships built on trust, purpose, and customer-centricity. 

Watch the full video interview on the Virtually Live! On-demand hub! 

Can AI help us reduce friction in the consumer experience? 

The ability of artificial intelligence to help us reduce friction in the consumer experience is an unbelievable opportunity. It’s going to help us market to humans instead of attribution models. And it’s going to help us rethink the role of content and the role of B2B marketing along the way. AI will give us the space needed to focus on delivering the run rate of the business and making sure we’re delivering the pipeline. We’ll have the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and reinvent the role of marketing as it relates to content, creative, and many other aspects.  

How do you maintain ease of discovery and education with AI? 

Salesforce was founded 25 years ago on the premise that it should be as easy to use as it is to buy a book on Amazon. And so we’ve tried to carry that value into what is now a large organization with a very complex buying personality and environment. We tried to make sure that simplicity and reduction of friction remain part of that experience. 

Using AI to perform simple tasks like generating a summary for attendees who happened to miss a session at an event. Little extras like that are amazing in the value that they bring to our attendees, but they also reduce friction. B2B marketers have kept themselves hidden behind large forms and big friction. Let’s throw that out the window. A consumer will spend a limited amount of time educating themselves about your technology, your differentiation, your community, and about your customer success. Let’s not waste half of that time having them fill out forms. Let’s spend that time educating them, making it easy to get content, and providing some value for them. Do that well enough, and you can be pretty confident that they’ll come back with the right purchasing behavior. 

Can you share a little “behind the scenes” of the Matthew McConaughey AI campaign? 

The campaign is called “Ask more of AI.” Over the last year, we’ve seen a true revolution in the realm of artificial intelligence. And the possibilities are endless. 

Artificial intelligence is all about asking questions or prompts to these large language models. But the most important question is, are we asking the right questions? Of course, we’re experimenting with the possibilities of the technology. It’s a kind of gold rush mentality when you see people interacting with it. It’s almost without regard for trust, data privacy, security, and the integrity of the data along the way. And so we started asking ourselves, how can we shine a light on that?  

As a large company, we felt we needed to take a bit of responsibility. So, Matthew, the team, and I got together to ask those important questions. And so the campaign is simply about asking the important questions of who’s in charge, where my data goes, and what happens when I input my customer data in this information. And of course, in true Salesforce fashion, we brought a little personality and spirit to it.  

I think it’s really important that while we’re shining a light on the values orientation with artificial intelligence, we’re embracing it at the same time. It’s a very, very important part of our business. In fact, Salesforce has been at the forefront of artificial intelligence in the enterprise for ten years. So you don’t have to trade off innovation and values. They can coincide, and I think that’s important as we go forward. 

What’s your philosophy on marketing and top-of-mind awareness? 

80% of B2B purchasing decisions are made from being just top of mind. I think for too long we’ve focused exclusively on bottom-of-the-funnel marketing behavior and lost sight of what’s important. You know, when you make a purchase in a B2B environment, you’re looking after the same things that you do when you buy a new pair of shoes. Or in a consumer environment, do I trust the brand? Does the product meet my needs? Is the brand trustworthy? Will they honor customer service? Will they support me along the way? Are they going to continue to innovate on it? Those things are true in both B2B and B2C environments. 

And given that we should be thinking more about marketing as a B2C environment, we have to think about bringing emotion top of mind. If you’re not top of mind when the customer need arises, you’re not going to get purchased no matter how brilliant your bottom-of-the-funnel marketing is.  

My philosophy has been to increase the situational awareness of Salesforce. So when you think about business technology or business software, Salesforce is the first company that comes to mind. And I think we do that through a myriad of ways. Of course, we have world-class products, and a world-class sales team. But we also lead with our values. As we talked about in the campaign before, I think it’s really important to show the kind of company we are and what we value. Our values are trust, customer success, innovation, equality, and sustainability. Those values permeate our advertising and our content. 

What’s the role of brand communities, for you? 

Developing community is everything when it comes to technology. Word of mouth is a huge part of marketing in any kind of organization. At Salesforce, through products like the Idea Exchange, we source ideas from our community to understand in which direction to take our engineering horsepower and resources. 

Our values have also been driven by interactions with the community. The last Dreamforce event’s Keynote was completely shaped by our community where we’ve gone out and done focus groups to shape it. 

A two-way communication with our community earns trust along the way. It helps with word of mouth, but it also inspires them to invest more with us. The Salesforce community is now 18 million strong. Amazing to see these incredible statistics of people who have bet their careers on Salesforce. We’ve heard incredible stories of people who have gone from early administrators to now CIOs of large organizations by investing in Salesforce, and learning how to implement it successfully. Two-way communication is important.  

How do you measure success in the age of AI? 

As a data-led company, Salesforce incorporates AI into measuring the success and impact of marketing campaigns and virtual events. What AI has allowed us to do is look at the broad ecosystem of touchpoints with our customers and bring in more and more data. And being able to look at data at scale. It’s validated a lot of our brand marketing initiatives and more of the B2C content we created before. While an event like Dreamforce might not look amazing on a 90-day traditional last-click attribution model, when you look at the emotion it brings, the buying behavior, and the personality over a longer period, it’s been amazing to see. 

It’s just a great example of how many experiences you can bring in, and how many different uses that we can think off for AI. At this time, the world is rightfully focused on generative AI. It’s a breakthrough innovation and we’re testing and experimenting a lot there. But AI can potentially do so much more. For too long B2B marketing has operated in this dinosaur legacy attribution model world where the last click represents the whole the value of a campaign. And that’s where we’re chasing down-the-funnel marketing behavior. I think we’re about to witness a new way of thinking about marketing success. And a lot of that’s going to be driven by AI.  

But the most exciting for me is that nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen with generative AI or what the next advancements are going to be. Just in the last year, we’ve seen incredible breakthroughs. And the more we can learn from it, the more that we embrace it, and stand at the cutting edge of its possibilities, the better off we’re going to be. As long as we’re asking the right questions. 

To watch the video recording of the session with Colin Fleming sign up for free on the Virtually Live! on-demand page. Virtually Live! is Kaltura’s yearly virtual event for marketers by marketers. The 2023 edition focused on AI in marketing and contains dozens of sessions by high-profile marketing professionals and experts sharing their experiences, tips, and best practices for leveraging AI in marketing automation, content generation, and elevating virtual event experiences for your audiences. Register today on the Virtually Live! page and enjoy free access to hours’ worth of content for you and your colleagues.