Salesforce’s Blazing Trails Podcast.

Driving Thought Leadership and Deeper Customer Relationships.

The Challenge

Salesforce sought to solidify their thought leadership and build deeper relationships with customers in podcasting and video. We developed Blazing Trails, a weekly show featuring executives, thought-leaders, and customers in conversation. The goals were to:

• Inspire customers and highlight Salesforce's vision around AI, the future of work, product innovation and community.

• Connect target customers to the brand through participation in the podcast.

• Engage a global C-level audience interested in insights from business leaders.

The Strategy

A content audit revealed that audiences were interested in learning how Salesforce does things and that hearing from customers and experts was critical to building trust. Combining these insights, we developed “a platform for Salesforce voices” pairing thought leaders with luminaries and key customers. From there we developed the show format optimized for multi-channel distribution:

• 20 minute episodes published weekly

• Newsworthy themes like AI, future of work, ESG, etc.

• Pair Salesforce executives and external guests like CEOs, authors and visionaries

• A content calendar aligned with product rollouts and events.

• Consistent multichannel promotion across paid and owned channels

• Repurpose video into secondary assets like social clips, blogs and Social

• ABM strategy to engage top prospects

The Execution

With over 150 episodes produced Blazing Trails captured new audiences across podcast platforms and is a top performer on Salesforce’s YouTube channel. podcast executed flawlessly on content production and promotion tactics such as:

• Editorial strategy included guest outreach, booking and interview prep.

• Professional multi-camera video shoots optimized for streaming platforms

• Post-production editing and show packaging with strong branding

• Episode launch via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube and other platforms

• Social media content and campaigns to highlight episode themes and guest quotes

• Embedding episodes in Salesforce blogs and event promotion pages

The Results

Blazing Trails has become Salesforce's flagship thought leadership content program driving impressive growth:

• Three million lifetime views and downloads

• 100k monthly podcast subscribers

• #1 business podcast on Apple Podcasts (peak ranking)

• 50% of listens 30+ days post-launch