August 2022

Why is an agile marketing approach to briefing so important?

You’ve got the idea; now how do you make sure it’s successful? This is where effective briefing comes in. The process of briefing sets up your team for marketing success by ensuring everyone has a clear understanding of the what, why and how of the campaign or project. It starts with ideation and ends with validated results – making it an essential part of any B2B marketer’s toolkit. In this blog post, we’ll discuss why good briefing is so important and outline key steps to help you deliver winning outcomes every time.

For those looking for greater marketing agility having good discipline around briefings is key. By following a few simple steps, you can make sure your team is always aware of the big picture as well as the details. This will help them to deliver better results, faster.

So, what are the key steps to take when briefing for agile marketing success?

Set clear objectives

The first step is to set clear and measurable objectives that align with your marketing and business goals, KPIs and/or OKRs. Without these in place, it’s impossible to know if your team’s efforts are having the desired effect. Be sure to involve key stakeholders in this process so that everyone is on the same page from the outset.

Data should be driving your marketing team’s activities. By setting out baselines and KPIs for key performance indicators, you can keep your focus on the appropriate outcomes while giving your team a goal to strive for.

Identify your target audience

Next, you need to identify your target audience. This might seem like a no-brainer but it’s critical to define and prioritise your target market and the personas of decision makers and influencers. For B2B marketers’, audiences can often be narrow with a relatively small number of key accounts they want to target. Part of your briefing process is to understand these accounts and work out what their pains or barriers are, what gains they want to create and their personal and business drivers – then you are able to create a proposition that fits their requirements and use this knowledge in your marketing to test best how to engage your audience. Without this level of detail, your team will have a hard time creating targeted and effective content.

Outcomes vs outputs

When briefing your team, it’s important to focus on the desired outcomes of the project rather than outputs. In other words, what do you want to achieve and how will you measure success? For example, if you’re looking to increase brand awareness, you might measure this by tracking web traffic or social media engagement. By clearly defining the outcomes you’re looking to achieve, you’ll be able to create a more effective brief and ultimately get better results.

Sharpen your brief with experimentation and testing

In order to be most adaptable and agile in your marketing, you’ll need to agree on how you’ll take ideas forward and iterate until you find the most compelling creative approach for your campaign or asset.

The majority of agile marketers focus on a minimum viable approach so that they can rapidly test different ideas, channels, messages, or calls to action. They then use the information gathered from these tests to help make informed decisions and cut down on the overall time it takes to get their product or services out onto the market. You should aim to capture how you want to use experimentation and testing as part of your brief and even start to set some hypotheses to prove or disprove early on to support fine tuning the project or campaign outputs.

Include a call to action

Don’t forget to include a call-to-action (CTA) in your briefing. This could be anything from asking the team to create a piece of content that’s shareable on social media to designing an interactive tool that a prospect can use to calculate the cost or efficiency savings. Without a CTA, it will be hard to drive engagement, generate responses and measure the success of your marketing efforts.

Get a grip on the business case and budget

It’s crucial that B2B marketers can show ROI, so they must be mindful of their budget and how it affects their bottom line. To get the most out of their marketing campaigns, modern marketers should follow a framework that includes small, regular releases of funds to support larger investments down the road. Because money matters are often sensitive topics within companies, especially when facing an economic downturn, it’s essential for marketers to be able to demonstrate the value they bring with every penny spent.

Get sign off

Finally, it’s important to get sign off from key stakeholders. This will help to ensure that everyone is on the same page and buy-in has been achieved for the project. Once you have sign off, you can move forward with confidence, knowing that you have the support of your team and senior management.

Make sure your team is always on the same page by ensuring quality briefings. This will lead to a more agile marketing process, and your employees will thank you later when they see how much better they work and the impact of their efforts.

Download our free one-page Agile Marketing Campaigning game plan here to begin your campaigns and projects the Bright way.

Zoë Merchant Managing Director

August 24, 2022 Zoe Merchant Agile Marketing In Practice

Three ways marketing can help SaaS firms act fast and win big during the recession

Recession. Disruption. Uncertainty. It is inevitable, so what are we going to do to ride the wave?

There has never been a better time to act fast to bolster your position and win big. Especially as a technology provider.

As the recession bites, and the covid motivated pivot (and investment) into hybrid working decelerates, many SaaS companies are preparing to enter survival mode, with up to 80% of companies pausing investment in marketing and re-evaluating their spending to make cost efficiencies. Essentially it’s time to ‘batten down the hatches’ and figure out how to survive the storm and (hopefully) emerge the other side. We’re here to tell you… this is a bad idea.

When they go low…

We, as seasoned marketers know all too well, marketing is too often seen as a cost centre to a business and lacks directly attributable metrics to demonstrate revenue generation or customer retention. This makes it vulnerable and it’s easy to cut costs in the short term without truly understanding the long-term impact on both client acquisition and retention – which are both essential to maintain through a recession. Let your competitors take the easy path – cutting costs, activating survival model whilst you take the opportunity to evaluate how best to attract their customers, showing that you are a steady ship – not waivered by the storm and are a safe pair of hands they can turn to when their existing provider has stopped investing in communicating with the market and them! That’s one sure-fire way to make customers feel neglected and lost.

Businesses that demonstrate resilience and spirit will thrive beyond these tough times, showing that they’re invested in developing new products, solutions and services that add value to their customers and prospects during a downturn economy, putting them front and centre of everything they do.

Take away: The winner takes it all, if you can demonstrate your resilience

Brand vs. Lead

We understand that making changes to be more efficient is necessary in times of economic uncertainty and marketing teams will be under scrutiny to deliver more, with less budget, make efficiencies yet deliver more impact, with less resource (and morale) than during buoyant times. This often leads marketers to act erratically – focusing on tactical, short-term gains over long-term growth.

The brand is the lifeblood of technology-providing firms, running through the veins of customer success, business development, communications and most importantly, the sales funnel. If marketers divert their brand-building resources into short term & tactical lead generation in the pursuit of “more leads, and quickly”, then the pipeline will fill with lukewarm, unqualified leads, who want a quick fix, unlike those leads who have been enriched and nurtured through a meaningful and relevant brand-led experience, who understand the full value of your service.

Which lead would you rather have? One that arrives quickly and requires 1% of your service offering, driven by low price and speed of delivery, or one that spends longer in the pipeline and understands the holistic benefits of your service offerings and values your relationship as a longer-term partner?

Erratic lead generation can lead to extreme peaks and troughs in the sales cycle, creating bottlenecks and diverting valuable sales resources from focusing on leads that matter and are qualified. You also risk confusing your target audience at best or at worst eroding or damaging your brand equity and reputation. Steady and intentional always-on brand-building activity will smooth these curves enabling a free-flowing pipeline and a motivated, satisfied sales team as well as focus on prospects and clients that are strategically important to the business.

Neglecting your brand will have a significant negative effect on your long-term business. Yes, we know “If I don’t plug the short-term revenue there won’t be a long-term business”. We aren’t saying don’t do any lead generation, we are saying don’t stop your brand-building activity, it will benefit you significantly in the medium to long term. Lead generation and brand building are symbiotic; you’ll maximise the value of your lead generation activities by running brand building alongside to maintain and enhance your brand in the markets you operate and with your key vendor partners such as Microsoft.

Takeaway: Don’t skip out on brand building in favour of low-quality leads.

Time for change

Don’t keep on, keeping on. Times have changed and so should you. In periods of turbulence, your focus may need to change, and you’ll need to master adapting at pace to stay relevant to your target audience. To ensure that your brand remains valuable, agility is key to success. The Covid pandemic taught us that brands who responded quickly and acknowledged the changing needs and priorities of their customers won hearts and minds and built trust with their clients; as well as engaging their dithering competitor’s customers too. If you don’t keep in touch with your ecosystem’s priorities, maintain trust, and minimise customer frustration they will quickly become disengaged and dissatisfied.

During the height of the pandemic, businesses relied on their providers for guidance and support like never before. This period of global uncertainty enabled strong and more agile businesses to cement relationships and repeatedly demonstrate value to the customer. These relationships will stand the test of future uncertainty if those providers continue to adapt to the market changes and give the reassurance and stability clients need.

Address the elephant in the room, validate your strategies with your clients and prospects, and change when there is a signal for you to change which will create further opportunities to evolve your value propositions, product, and service offerings.

Takeaway: Re-evaluate your target personas needs and keep up with the changing landscape.

Marketing as your recession superpower

The recession is the big red R word, occupying news channels, social media feeds and board room conversations. Yes, it’s going to be tough for everyone. Especially those with licenses to sell and accounts to grow. At Bright, we see a growth mindset and agile marketing expertise as our superpowers, enabling us to reframe situations from ‘oh no’ to ‘what if’ and continually improve outputs and outcomes from marketing investment.

The recession will provide a unique opportunity for savvy B2B marketers to disrupt the landscape, knocking complacent marketers off their game and pocketing their customers and prospects while they look the other way.

Get started by investing in understanding your persona’s needs and building that into a brand-rich marketing strategy to build deep connections and loyalty which will, in turn, deliver better business leads throughout the recession and safeguard and retain your client base as you weather the storm.

Download our one-page personas and buyer journey mapping game plan to help you realign your marketing strategy with your changing customer’s needs and supercharge your marketing into and beyond the recession.

Vanessa Whiteside-Oram Senior Growth Manager

August 23, 2022 Alexandra Jefferies Agile Marketing In Practice, Marketing Effectiveness

Never give up day – The power of resilience

Never Give Up Day is all about cultivating a mindset of determination, which helps us get through difficult challenges that life throws our way. This mindset aligns closely with Bright’s values, specifically Spirit – which is defined as being energetic and resilient, using grit and determination to achieve our goals – both professional and personal.

To mark Never Give Up Day this year, we chat with our Senior Marketing Executive, Nicolai Stampfer, who has just celebrated his first year at Bright, as he shares how the mindset of resilience and determination has helped him learn and grow as a marketer.

How would you describe your first year of working at Bright?

During my first year at Bright, I was encouraged from the start to experiment with new ideas and nurture a curious mindset. It’s been a constant journey of learning and sometimes failing, but the spirited Bright mindset means that we’re not afraid of failure – but to fail fast, learn fast and don’t fail the same way twice. This mantra has been very helpful for me to grow as a marketer and become more comfortable with some of the activities that were quite daunting and foreign when I first started at Bright.

What’s the single most important thing you’ve learned in the past year

The single most important learning from my first year at Bright is to be resilient and to keep the mindset that with testing and learning, things will improve over time. When we begin new projects, the full scope of work can be quite daunting, but by working as a team, we can break down the challenges, plan the milestones and keep pace to naturally progress and solve our clients challenges.

One of Bright’s values is ‘Spirit’ – this quality is described as energetic and resilient using grit and determination to achieve goals – but always with a smile! How has living this value informed your experience of working at Bright?

This mindset has come into play when there are some days when there seems like there is so much to do, feeling overwhelmed, and you can start to question yourself about your capability to achieve what’s possible. For me, the spirit value has been amplified and lived through as a team spirit. It’s so much easier to be empowered and motivated when the team around you is living the same values and working towards the same goals.

When one of us has a bad day or one of us has an emergency outside of work, the team rallies around because we’re all in it together. This community spirit has helped me through tough times, especially last year during the Christmas period when I got COVID and couldn’t go home to my family in France. The team supported me through this time, and it was mentally very helpful, making an unfortunate situation more bearable!

How does agility in ways of working, or an agile mindset, help you to remain resilient and overcome challenges?

An agile mindset helps us to not get stuck in a rut and enables us to embrace pivoting when we need to shift pace or modify our approach. It has changed my perspective on change and allowed me to become a more versatile marketer.

What does Never Give Up Day mean to you personally?

Never Give Up Day represents my career in marketing so far. When I started out in marketing for tourism and hospitality, the pandemic struck, and I could have taken that as a sign that this career path isn’t for me. By having a resilient mindset, I explored other industries and different ways of using my skills, and that’s how I landed where I am at Bright today.

On a more personal basis, I manage ADHD and Dyslexia on a day-to-day basis. When I am under pressure, I could use this as an excuse to give up, but I don’t let this define me and I never give up every single day.

Developing a mindset of resilience and agility has never been more important than it is right now, with the necessity to react to our uncertain economic environment.

Learn more about how agility can transform your marketing team and beyond with Bright’s training and transformation training programmes.

August 18, 2022 Alexandra Jefferies Marketing Effectiveness

Recreating the art of communication in a digital world

Has technology made us lazy in how we communicate? Technological advances mean we can communicate more widely and more quickly over a variety of channels and now algorithms can monitor and predict behavioural patterns to improve understanding of a customer or prospect’s buying habits.

Sounds great, so with all of this new intelligence, why is it that so often B2B communication campaigns fail to hit the mark?

Exploring the hypothesis

Email fatigue and digital noise are often cited as two main reasons why some B2B marketing campaigns flounder. When campaigns fail to deliver, it is invariably marketing that gets the blame as the organisation is “disappointed” in performance.

In an age of hyper-targeted messaging with “persona development” and extensive analysis of the “buyer’s journey”, both driven by data and research, why is it that the message often fails to resonate?

Digital communication is not a silver bullet, but it is a tool to share messages and is essential to modern marketing. To be successful, all communications need to be customer-centric with the audience in mind, be topical, relevant and provide the audience with factual, actionable information or tell them something they may not know or have not thought about. A good example of this is when communications apply current trends or new technologies to pain points to solve specific challenges.

Content is key, yet all too frequently, it is little more than a “sales pitch” which rarely solves real-life challenges and in today’s unsettled world, often can come across as tone deaf.

People are at the heart of communications

In the B2B world, people buy from people, they work for people and with people. With this goes all the human traits, such as happy, sad, angry, stressed, rational and in today’s world – irrational behaviour, too. AI may have revolutionised the way we track behaviour, but technology cannot replicate human emotion. People are not robots.

When developing content, one size rarely fits all. Organisations with business challenges, such as change, digital transformation or cost reduction, also employ people. All too often, whilst automation will alleviate many issues around accuracy, speed, and reduced cost of manual intervention, there is very little mention of the impact on people, other than you can redeploy them to do more productive, creative and interesting work. Appealing in theory, but where is the actionable information that helps them with how that is implemented and how it should be communicated?

People need real and actionable information in communications to help them make informed decisions, manage change, and retain and attract staff – which is a massive global issue. We should also not forget to consider the “what is in it for me?” factor. This applies to all of us. We are human beings.

A final point to bear in mind is to differentiate between an organisation’s buying journey and those “humans” involved at different stages in that process. Those who initiate are not always the same people as those who research and select suppliers, those who validate proposals and those who make the final decision.

As people, they will use a variety of ways to gather information – peers, personal networks, websites, searches, analyst reports, etc. One thing is for sure, most of these “humans” will check out your website. What they want is proof that you understand their challenges, know how to solve them and can ‘walk the talk’. Importantly and often overlooked, it matters if people ‘like’ your organisation, relate to its core values and if they will enjoy working with you. In B2B marketing, customers rarely browse aimlessly, they have an objective to meet and a job to do – they are looking for something specific, so accessibility, brevity and speed are of the essence.

Taking the next steps

Keep it customer-centric: Put people at the centre of your campaigns from start to finish. Do not get side-tracked by pressure to talk only about your organisation’s offerings.

Test, learn, optimise: Validate your content with your personas with a small test pilot and refine accordingly. Taking an agile marketing approach reaps rewards as you can test and fine-tune to understand what comms and channels really drive engagement.

Ask yourself:

Would I read this?
Do I think this is boring?
What is in it for the audience and why would they care?
Is it topical, relevant and actionable?
Do you have the right data to make a difference?
What do I want the audience to do – call to action?
If the audience wants more information, can they find it easily and is it accessible?
Does your website really deliver the right experience?

Use everyday language: Think about how you personally communicate with other people. Does it pass the human test?

Remember data and research are essential in mapping out personas but if your answer to question 1 is no and to question 2 is yes, then think again.

Finally, don’t be lazy: Utilise the intelligence provided by technology to guide you and get your message out, but use your common sense to humanise.

Communication that drives behaviour

Bright is an expert in B2B communication and understands how to balance data-driven insights and human-centric messaging to communicate with the right audience at the right time, in the right place, and with the right tone. Discover how to inspire action and drive change with impactful communications – drop us a note to chat further today.

Learn more about Bright’s content and creative services, guaranteed to get your audience fired up to interact with your brand.

At Bright, we pride ourselves on being B2B marketing experts that drive results through marketing agility. We embed an iterative and data-driven approach, leading the charge to better results and the ability to adapt and change at pace.

Shine a light on your marketing campaigns with Bright.

Get in touch with us today to discuss all things agile.

B2B marketing communications

August 1, 2022 Alexandra Jefferies Marketing Effectiveness