Jada Balster, marketing director at Workfront, speaks to Maxine-Laurie Marshall about the company’s rebrand and how she incorporated zombies into a tech event
You’re in a dark room with a group of peers you met this morning and you only have minutes to escape from a zombie attack. What do you do? No, you don’t switch off the TV because I’m not talking about the latest reality telly offering from BBC3. This was the situation Workfront put its prospects in at an event last year. Jada Balster, marketing director at the work management software company, thought up ‘The workplace zombie invasion’ to inject creativity into the company’s events.
Instead of sitting prospects in a room and talking at them all day, Balster exaggerated and personified (or zombiefied) the challenges faced in an everyday working environment. Challenges, such as a change in deadline and having to complete a job differently due to unforeseen circumstances, were in this case put across by having a room full of zombies wake up from their nap and cut your escape time in half.
This enabled Workfront to really get prospects engaged and enjoy the event, while still allowing them to talk about their product and the issues around work management software, as when event attendees had reached the ‘safe zone’ the event took on a more traditional conference format.
When asked why she opted for this unique way to run a tech event, Balster said she puts herself in her prospect’s shoes and thinks about what she would find appealing and how to cut through all the noise in the market. Balster’s team try to latch on to cultural trends and interests, not just trends in B2B marketing. She says: “Immersive theatre, specifically in London, is huge at the moment. So we ran an event focused around it.”
The workplace zombie invasion was the first event of its kind Workfront ran, and thanks to the reaction and results the company saw it as a big win. Balster says: “We’ve had a number of renewals and uplifts from people who have attended the event with hundreds of thousands of dollars of new business closed with lots of other opportunities still bubbling away.”
Launching a new brand
Balster plans to run a similar event in 2015, albeit with a new theme. This year all marketing for Workfront is going to have to work much harder as the company is less than three months into launching its rebrand. Formerly AtTask, the company felt the word ‘task’ didn’t match its position as an enterprise company. Working with two naming agencies, and even launching a competition for staff to make suggestions, Workfront was selected. Communicating the rebrand internally was really important for Balster. She made sure staff knew what the new brand would be a month before it was launched externally, and has worked to make sure everyone internally adopts the new brand. Balster says: “Like a swear jar, there is a pot in the office where anyone who says the ‘A word (AtTask)’ must put in a pound.”
While Balster was fortunate to already have c-suite buy-in to the rebrand, she says: “Marketing still had to push for budget by convincing the executive team that ‘you can’t just change your name and expect the world to know.’” She continues: “We weren’t spending any money on brand awareness until this year, so it’s a big change for the company. We had to explain why we needed to spend more.”
Prior to the rebrand Balster conducted a brand equity study with customers and prospects and found 28 per cent recognised the brand. While this is a number Balster was happy with considering there had been no financial investment in brand marketing, this figure will be zero in the wake of the new brand launch. It’s her aim to bring it back up to 28 per cent in less than a year when she redoes the brand equity study. The plan is then to grow this number over the next five years. Seeing no value in prospects recognising the logo but not understanding the company behind it, Balster wants to avoid just plastering the new logo everywhere and says: “We are keen to be thought leaders and I feel it’s really important to educate people. Face-to-face events are working really well for us. Smaller events such as roundtables are great at generating good quality leads. They may not generate large numbers, but as a marketer I want to be confident I’m handing over leads that are likely to convert.”
Working with sales
This is something Balster can be confident doing most of the time. Marketing is responsible for 90 per cent of the business that comes in to the company, so the focus on demand generation and passing across quality leads is high. Explaining how this happens, she says: “We’ve got an interesting set up over here, we have our business development team report through to marketing, they do all the lead qualification then pass those qualified leads on. What that means is we don’t have that clash of ‘marketing are giving poor quality leads and sales aren’t following up’. I know all marketing leads are getting followed up in a timely manner and sales know the leads they are getting are quality leads because they have been highly qualified by this team. It makes for such a nice, harmonious sales and marketing relationship. One thing I pride myself on is having that strong sales and marketing relationship because that’s what success looks like.”
Balster has a great combination of having a passion for injecting creativity and emotion in B2B marketing as well as being results driven. It’s her aim to make sure Workfront stands out from the crowd while still delivering on her targets. If more B2B marketers shared her desire to think outside the box and have some fun with their marketing, there would be absolutely no doubt that B2B can stand up to its consumer counterparts.
Balster’s top tips
1. When developing your relationship with sales, communication is everything. When you get feedback, positive or negative, try to take it on board without being defensive and avoid confrontational discussions. Having mutual respect, open lines of communication and talking regularly about what’s working and what’s not is key.
2. Don’t be scared to try something new. In order to stand out, it’s important to be different to break through all the noise in the market.
3. Get emotional. B2B is changing. When I started in the industry, marketing was heavily focused on features and benefits. Things have progressed so much over the last 10 years and there is a real opportunity for us to leverage strategies of B2C marketers now. We need to remember that our prospects and customers are consumers first and put some focus on humanising B2B and to talking to them about the emotional benefits of purchasing.
