Marketing and visual storytelling have been synonymous from the days of full page ads in newspapers and magazines, to full color billboards and television. In the digital and mobile world, there has never been a channel at scale to rival TV in its ability to powerfully engage consumers with the beauty of the visual image.

That is until Instagram launched in late 2010. Almost overnight, it attracted a large audience eager to use their ever improving smartphone cameras to share what they captured in a channel solely dedicated to visual storytelling. Instagram’s clever filters added to the experience, and passionate communities were born around different interests like fashion, food and travel.

It wasn’t long before innovative marketers recognized this global adoption and brands began setting up a presence on Instagram to take advantage of engagement levels that today include 70 million daily photo uploads and 2.5 billion likes per day. Global brands like L’Oreal, McDonald’s, KLM and Chobani were among the early adopters, utilizing Instagram to engage with customers, convert fans into brand advocates and find new customers.

When Instagram initially launched its advertising offering in 2013, its user community was 150 million strong. By June 2015, that community had grown to over 300 million globally. According to a recent report from eMarketer, Instagram is expected to represent over 10% of Facebook’s global revenues by 2017, including 28% of all US mobile revenues.

Today, we are excited to announce that Salesforce is offering a whole new set of tools for marketers to engage with customers on Instagram across our suite of Marketing Cloud products; Social.com for managing advertising campaigns at scale, Active Audiences to unlock and sync CRM data in Salesforce to optimize advertising and Social Studio for publishing, engagement, customer service, and analytics.

Already we are seeing great success with our customers who sync their CRM data and email lists with digital advertising. Here are a few examples:

• Amusement park operator Cedar Fair saw 3X ROI by marketing season passes to last year's day-pass holders, and to lookalikes of last year's day-pass holders.

• An online retailer reached 77% more of its email list by adding efficient Facebook advertising. The company saw a 17:1 ROI on ads that reached email openers, and immediately implemented coordinated email and Facebook advertising as an always-on tactic.

• An apparel retailer earned a 10:1 ROI (return on ad spend) by reaching customers who had recently signed up for email in a store, and inviting them to shop online.

• Apartments.com saw a 35% increase in engagement rates and 30% lower cost to drive traffic to its promotion using Active Audiences to reach subscribers and lookalikes.

"L'Oreal as the world leader in beauty, uses visual channels to communicate with our consumers, with the objective of promoting education around our beauty products. Our ambition of delivering beauty for all, requires a tailored approach in our messaging. Social.com enables us to be hyper-targeted in our social media buying, and serve the right message to the right audience. This is particularly relevant for retargeting on Instagram, as the platform is 100% visual.” —Marco Ruschioni, CRM Director, L'Oreal

With the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Instagram integration, marketers can:

• Advertise: Buy and manage Instagram advertising with Social.com. Now, advertisers have a single platform for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. Most of the ad targeting available for Facebook is also available on Instagram, including Active Audiences. Active Audiences unlocks your CRM data in Salesforce to securely and powerfully reach your customers, target lookalikes, and optimize advertising within the customer journey. Using Active Audiences, Marketing Cloud customers can now sync audience segments to Instagram for targeted advertising.
  

• Publish: Marketers want to understand the effectiveness of their Instagram campaigns in driving reach and effectiveness. They also want to use their most compelling Instagram content in other digital campaigns. Social Studio helps marketers publish great content to Instagram, track campaign performance, and share the most successful Instagram images with multiple teams and across social networks.
  

• Engage: Marketers can earn a more relevant voice in the Instagram community by participating in conversations happening on their profiles. With Social Studio, community management teams can review discussions, automatically route and prioritize critical responses and collaborate as a team.
  

• Service: The world’s leading brands are resolving customer service issues via social media, alongside email, mobile, live chat and other care channels. With the combined power of the Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud, brands will be able to resolve customer service issues on Instagram in a timely manner and deliver a great experience.
  

• Analyze: Our powerful social listening and analysis capabilities, born out of Radian6 and now part of Social Studio, empower marketers to analyze conversations on Instagram, understand community feedback, sentiment, and trends, and optimize their Instagram strategy accordingly. Marketers can also put Instagram publishing, engagement and analysis in their pocket with the Social Studio mobile app.

As Instagram says so eloquently; images are a universal language. Salesforce is now excited to offer marketers the opportunity to extend their reach to customers on one of the most engaging channels in mobile, and coordinate those efforts with every other channel in the customer journey.

At Salesforce, we have a history of leadership and innovation in digital advertising and social marketing. We are a partner to all of the major social networks, including Facebook where we are a Facebook Marketing Partner across Ad Technology, Content Marketing, Community Management, and Audience Onboarding. Additionally, Salesforce is a launch partner of Twitter’s Ads API program, Pinterest’s MarTech Developer Alpha, and LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates program.

Learn more about Salesforce Marketing Cloud: request a demo or read the latest Salesforce Marketing Cloud Advertising Benchmark report, highlighting pricing and industry trends with aggregate data compiled from the campaigns of global brands.