The situation

Digitate was founded in 2015 by Tata Consultancy Services to create next-generation technology solutions. Their flagship product, ignio™, leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to help IT teams intelligently automate and manage their IT infrastructure. It enables smarter, faster decision making, and helps enterprises predict and prevent issues.

Like many young companies facing larger, well established competitors, Digitate is working to gain name recognition and earn consideration in long-cycle IT purchases. One of the strategies the company uses to achieve that goal is content marketing.

The challenges

The Digitate marketing team knew the value of researchbased content, having created a B2B white paper based on a short survey sponsored by an industry publisher. Shortly before the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, however, the team saw an opportunity for content marketing with a far more provocative and promotable premise.

The team wanted to learn if IT professionals would walk out of Star Wars: The Last Jedi to take care of an IT outage, and at the same time survey their attitudes toward the use of AI as a network management tool. A great idea – but both time and resources were short

The solution

Digitate conducted their survey using Samplify, an agile DIY research platform that provides 24/7 access to Dynata’s full first-party panel. Samplify offers easy-to-use survey authoring tools, and allows researchers to set sample and survey parameters. The Digitate team cited four principal benefits:

1. Sample Specificity: Thanks to the size of the panel, and hundreds of pre-tagged identifiers for panelists, Digitate was able to survey only IT professionals – and segment responses between managers and individual contributors.
2. Ease of Use: Even with little formal research experience, Digitate’s marketers found the authoring tools simple to use, and had no issues fielding the survey or tracking responses.
3. Cost-effectiveness: With limited resources, Digitate needed a budgetfriendly solution.
4. Speed: From a standing start a month before the premier of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Digitate team was able to conduct the survey and create the content before the film opened.

The results

Digitate created a high-impact eBook based on more than 500 completed Samplify surveys (get it here). The eBook was distributed by the company’s PR agency, sent directly to clients and prospects by the company’s sales team, and offered on its website. Its key findings:

• More than 60% of IT workers would delay their response to an IT outage until they had finished watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi!
• Individual contributors were more likely to keep watching the movie compared to managers.
• Managers, in turn, were twice as likely to delegate the work of dealing with a network outage.

Digitate also learned that 60% of IT managers are receptive to the idea of relying on AI to manage their IT environment–central to their ignio solution. These findings have helped the company focus its marketing and sales efforts.