In a B2B marketing environment, finding the balance between entertaining, shareable content and end results can be difficult. At Workfront, we find it works well to take a lead from current events and popular culture to combine these elements. With Workfront being relatively new to the UK marketing audience, we wanted to run an event to introduce who we are, but knew that it would need to stand out from the crowd for an audience who are invited to potentially hundreds of events per year. To achieve this we looked to create a zombie run. We thought this would make an entertaining and fun event, yet one which still focussed on important brand messaging – that poor communication, collaboration and visibility has slowed the productivity of in house creative teams to a “dead-legged shuffle”.
The key to success in creating genuinely entertaining marketing is being brave, taking risks, but keeping it relevant. The B2B audience doesn’t have the time for, or interest in, frivolous events. It’s critical for any marketer to understand their audience in order to stand out from the hum drum of other offerings being pitched to them. This is especially important in our case - marketing to marketers. Looking at new trends that would appeal to the more creative type, we decided to piggyback off the recent successes we had seen with immersive theatre experiences. If you can combine something entertaining with something that is going to enable attendees to do their job better, then you have the winning formula – this is something we tried to encapsulate with the zombie run.
We created an event of two halves. The first half was described by one of the delegates as like ‘ the crystal maze with zombies’ where attendees took part in a series of tasks relating to their everyday work challenges. The second half, once attendees made it through to the ‘safe zone’ was a more traditional conference (with the odd stray zombie thrown in for fun) where industry leaders discussed and debated some of the biggest work challenges that they see every day. Keeping it light-hearted but useful was key to our success, and meant they learnt something by attending.