Welcome to the first pandemic of the modern age. Does your organization have a plan for keeping the devices held by thousands of your front-line workers clean and COVID-free? How about healthcare workers who are treating COVID-19 patients – are their devices clean? Are you keeping your employees six feet apart? What about limiting sales of rubbing alcohol so those who need it most have access? And drive-thru testing facilities…how can you be sure the right patients are getting the right diagnoses as soon as possible before they infect anyone else?
Zebra Technologies’ solutions are centered around providing answers to these questions, but as the reach and impact of the virus progressed, we knew we needed to provide even more resources to best protect and equip these front-line workers using our devices in hospitals, warehouses, stores, routes and more. Our customers needed to navigate contact tracing, product disinfection, diagnostic testing lab setup, drive-thru testing facilities and surges in peak capacity.
We are committed to helping our customers, their employees and end-users do their jobs better, faster and safer. As we managed through the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic together, we also realized how important it was to take time to show our appreciation for the people rescuing patients, fulfilling orders, bagging groceries, and delivering supplies. Their work was more important than ever. We shared our gratitude for these front-line heroes through a resourceful campaign called "Empowering Heroes."
The campaign ran officially from mid-April through the end of May, although some components went live before the formal launch in the spirit of disseminating critical information to those who needed it quickly.
We launched our very first campaign asset in the form of a blog post detailing how to disinfect mobile devices used by front-line workers. This post went live on March 9th – more than a week before the first U.S. state had issued a stay-at-home order for nonessential workers, a sign that not many had fully understood the monumental impact the pandemic would have on everyday life. Soon after the English version of the blog post went live, it went viral so we quickly translated it into nearly a dozen other languages, and it quickly became our most visited blog post ever. Subsequently, many of our industry peers published how-to sanitation guides of their own.
In the period between the publishing of the device disinfection blog post and the official launch in mid-April, the marketing team at Zebra was hard at work crafting an entire multiplatform campaign designed to communicate resources detailing how to leverage our products and solutions to support the pandemic response. We included vertical-specific application briefs and infographics, banner advertisements, social media posts, press releases, blog posts and a 2-minute video expressing our gratitude. We also created a digital disinfectant tool to allow customers to easily find, select and learn how to sanitize their products. All these resources were available on our Empowering Heroes landing page, which was personalized using account-based marketing software to ensure applicable information was even more readily available.
For our channel partners who are critical to Zebra’s business and responsible for driving more than 80% of our sales globally, the campaign included ample resources for partners to communicate with their own customers. On Partner Gateway, our intranet for members of Zebra® PartnerConnect, we provided all the aforementioned resources plus ready-to-go emails, web copy and photography. Understanding that our partners were feeling the burden of the pandemic themselves, we also included a free Zebra coloring book and a collection of education, fitness and crafting videos for anyone with kids at home.
Finally, our campaign included internal resources for Zebra employees – both those who continued to work from a Zebra facility and those who were newly remote, many with increased responsibilities at home like child and elder care. For our employees who were unable to work from home, we collected and shared messages of support and gratitude from remote employees. For all employees, we offered a weeklong series on our intranet featuring summer camp-themed content for parents and guardians to keep children engaged, entertained and educated.
By the end of May, our fastest developed campaign of all time had effectively reached our existing and prospective customers, partners and end users. Here are key metrics to showcase our campaign success:
