One of the biggest challenges in reaching a C-suite audience is bridging the gap between inspired, interesting creative and reaching such an incredibly select few people. To meet its goal of reaching $10 billion in annual revenue by 2025, Workday had to think beyond traditional messaging and influencers. If we wanted to reach our corporate audience- and get them to pay attention- we couldn’t act like every other B2B brand. We had to break convention. And what better place to do it than the beating social media heart of corporate America--LinkedIn.

Workday helps create finance and HR rock stars, which is great for corporate execs, but not so great for actual rock stars who don’t like sharing their title with the corporate world. Workday invited Billy Idol to become the first ever rock star B2B Influencer, having him join LinkedIn and troll execs in their most comfortable corporate environment with a warning: stop calling each other rock stars. We took rock star rebellion and brought it straight to the heart of the corporate world, disrupting their online ’safe space’, and the usual corporate conversation. 

The two most important assets of just about any organization are its people and its money. Because Workday helps you manage both, our audience was the people in charge of the workforce and the software they needed: CFOs (Chief Financial Officers), CHRO (Chief Human Resource Officers), and CIOs (Chief Information officers).

Traditionally, these have been back-office functions. Boring, predictable, and hardly sexy. If the software they used wasn’t broken, they weren’t looking for something new. But over the last several years, digital transformation has fundamentally changed the nature of their jobs and the challenges they’re looking to solve.

To help Workday grow, we needed to resonate with an incredibly select target- the C-suite and occupy a more salient role in their minds.

Millions of successful corporate execs used LinkedIn as their social media business platform, sharing their successes, thought leadership, and support for their peers by calling them ‘rock stars’ of business. For the first time in LinkedIn history, a rock star became a B2B Influencer. Workday enlisted Billy Idol to disrupt the boring B2B conversation, going where no rock star has dared to go, trolling corporate types with a warning: yes, Workday might make them great at their jobs, but they still can’t call each other rockstars. The stunt used LinkedIn capabilities in a way that’s never been done before- as a creative platform instead of a networking platform and changed the definition of a ‘thought leader’.

Billy received a warm welcome after officially joining LinkedIn and his first-ever post on the platform. Workday was one of the first to market with the new LinkedIn capability of boosting organic thought leader content and Billy Idol’s first video post resulted in a 12.36% engagement rate (234% higher than the 3.69% ER benchmark). Workday gained over 20,000 new followers in the 20 days post Billy’s LinkedIn profile going live, an increase of 20.6% (vs. previous 21 days).