MarketingSherpa Blog

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

At MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014, we added a new feature, the Media Center, where MarketingSherpa Reporter Allison Banko was able get behind-the-scenes interviews with presenters, attendees and event vendors.

This B2B Lead Roundtable Blog post features a segment with Christine Nurnberger, Vice President Marketing, SunGard Availability Services, speaking on how the B2B IT disaster recovery company was able to take advantage of the pop culture zombie trend to create an effective multichannel marketing effort.

Christine said, “I’m so passionate [about B2B marketing]. I always love the opportunity to share what’s worked for us, and to hear what’s worked for other people. When you bring folks together like this in a group where people are really learning from their peers, you can take a lot of powerful stuff away from it.”

In this video clip, she goes on to describe SunGard’s business model — disaster recovery business continuity — and how her team realized that not only are zombies very hot in popular culture, the idea of a zombie apocalypse played directly into SunGard’s core marketing messaging of a business being able to survive a disaster or catastrophic event.

Most companies probably agree that a horde of the undead roaming the streets would be pretty catastrophic for businesses, so the team knew that the zombie tie-in was likely to resonate with the target audience as well as bring a bit of levity to the fairly serious business topic of disaster recovery.

“[We thought] it’d be really interesting to tie something that’s so relevant in pop culture to our business value proposition,” Christine explained. “What better way to test your continuity plans than to see if they could survive a zombie apocalypse.”

She added that the key takeaway from her presentation was the importance of measuring campaign KPIs and performance to better understand the campaign’s target audience.

One interesting takeaway for SunGard from this effort was CFOs had a much higher email open rate and website download rate when they received an email sent between 7 a.m. and 9a.m. on a Sunday morning.

Additionally, watch a brief excerpt below of Christine’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014 presentation titled, “Above the Noise: How an IT company leveraged unique creative and an integrated approach to ‘wake up the dead’ and connect with its audience,” where she discussed how the team was able to fit the zombie theme into the campaign messaging

You can also view 14 other valuable sessions from the Email Summit 2014 stage for more transferable insights from marketers just like you.

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About David Kirkpatrick

David is a reporter for MarketingSherpa and has over twenty years of experience in business journalism, marketing and corporate communications. His published work includes newspaper, magazine and online journalism; website content; full-length ghosted nonfiction; marketing content; and short fiction. He served as producer for the business research horizontal at the original Office.com, regularly reporting on the world of marketing; covered a beat for D/FW TechBiz, a member of the American City Business Journals family; and he provided daily reporting for multiple LocalBusiness.com cities. David’s other media and corporate clients include: USA Today, Oxford Intelligence, GMAC, AOL, Business Development Outlook and C-Level Media, among many others.

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Categories: Lead Generation Tags: B2B LeadBlog