Marketing leaders are faced with an ongoing barrage of challenges from fast-evolving AI to the pressure of achieving better results with fewer resources, as well as getting the most from your CDP investment and needing to balance short term KPIs with long term goals. We understand that marketing leadership is a tough job right now!
In our webinar on ‘How to maximise your marketing effectiveness’, our panel of B2B marketing experts address some of these key challenges, and share insights and practical solutions to address these issues – we’ll cover people, process, data and tech.
Listen to the podcast
Download your Marketing effectiveness reframe cards
Reframe Cards enable you and your team to have a different kind of conversation, re-think strategies or tactics and highlight learnings that you can take forward to optimise and generate better outcomes.
These Reframe Cards are focused on having conversations to help improve your marketing effectiveness, and empower your team to challenge their thinking. By changing their frame of mind to continually learn and grow, you can yield real business results and make a positive impact on your businesses bottom line.
Check out our suggested reading list of articles, reports and videos to help take your marketing effectiveness to the next level
On-demand video on Maximising your marketing effectiveness
Watch to learn how to improve the impact of your marketing machine, including:
People: Improving ways of working, determining future skills and developing a growth culture
Process: Optimising your operating model to improve revenue and customer centricity.
Data: Achieving optimal RevOps and KPI setting
Tech: Maximising the value from your existing martech stack and optimising GenAI opportunities
You’ll also hear examples of how you can find hidden value within your existing marketing and how to prioritise your efforts for the biggest impact.
Our panel includes:
Emily Nicols, Group Marketing Director, Informa Markets
Sian Heaphy, Certified Agile Trainer and Director, Bright
Zoe Merchant, Managing Director, Bright
Meet the speakers
Emily Nicols
Group Marketing Director, Informa Markets
Emily Nicols is a seasoned marketing professional with a passion for driving growth and creating impactful campaigns. As Group Marketing Director at Informa Markets, Emily has successfully implemented comprehensive marketing plans that have consistently delivered measurable results.
Sian Heaphy
Accredited Agile Marketing Trainer and Director
Sian uses agile methods to encourage creativity, curiosity, and data-driven decisions in marketing. She works with teams to design experiments, gain insights, and achieve business goals. Sian promotes continuous improvement through experimentation and learning.
Zoë Merchant
Managing Director, Bright
Zoë is an agile marketing aficionado — a passionate believer in staying ahead of the competition with resilience, adaptability, and pace. After 20 years of delivering B2B marketing strategies. Using agile marketing to test, learn and build on success. Zoë leads the team in delivering results through continual and focused improvements to support clients’ business goals.
Marketing’s remit is forever expanding, requiring a blend of creativity, strategy, and effective project management. One tool that has increasingly become central to effective marketing is the Kanban board. As with any tool, the effectiveness of Kanban boards lies in how they are used and managed.
A key tool in the application of agile marketing, Kanban boards have crossed over from many other industries due to their ease of visualising workflow, managing tasks, and fostering collaboration. Marketing, with its multiple tasks and objectives, can particularly benefit from this approach.
However, a common question arises when everything in Marketing is connected: should we maintain a project-level Kanban board or a tactical one?
Project-level boards vs tactical boards
The project-level board provides a broader view of the whole project, including the diverse tasks needed to achieve a marketing campaign’s goal. It tracks the project’s progress from start to finish, showing the status of all tasks at a glance: what’s been completed, what’s in progress, and what’s yet to be started. It’s like looking at a map of a journey from a bird’s eye view.
On the other hand, a tactical board is more focused. It manages individual or interrelated tasks that make up a project. While this micro-level view can be handy in managing the intricacies of tasks, it might not show how these tasks fit into the overall project, and it can lead to losing sight of the big picture and end up increasing the siloes rather than removing them.
In marketing, where campaigns often involve interlinked activities (content creation, social media promotion, email campaigns, etc.), it becomes more advantageous to opt for a project-level board. This broad outlook ensures that all elements are interconnected and moving in harmony towards the campaign’s overall goal.
Managing your Kanban board
Regardless of the type of board you use, its efficiency boils down to proper management. Here are some tips to guide you:
Regularly update: Ensure the board is frequently updated with the status of tasks. It should be an accurate reflection of the project’s state.
Prioritise tasks: Use a system (like color-coding and tagging) to signify task importance or urgency. It helps to focus the team’s efforts on what matters most.
Limit WIP (Work-In-Progress): Kanban encourages completing tasks before taking on new ones. Set a WIP limit to prevent the team from being overwhelmed and to enhance productivity.
Feedback and improvement: Have regular reviews and retrospectives. Use feedback from these sessions to streamline processes and improve the board’s functionality.
While tactical Kanban boards can be useful for managing detailed tasks, the interconnected nature of marketing activities makes the project-level board a more effective choice.
Team benefits of Kanban boards
As previously mentioned, Kanban boards contribute to maximise project management efficiency but how do we see the benefits play out within our teams?
Accountability: Teams can prioritise tasks based on the appropriate coding system ensuring high priority tasks are not missed as well as enabling teams to have full autonomy through clear accountability and ownership of tasks.
Simplicity: Kanban boards can be replicated, changed and adapted resulting in a simple, intuitive and swift adoption practice within teams.
Remote collaboration: Whilst we are all still trying to adapt to new ways of working – especially across different verticals, industries and geographical locations – Kanban boards allow cross-functional teams to collaborate without missing key updates – wherever they are in the world!
Well managed, a Kanban board can be a game-changer, promoting transparency, increasing, improving and maximising efficiency, and ultimately, driving your marketing campaign towards success.
If you are looking to improve your ways of working to enhance your team’s agility and effectiveness, our Agile Marketing one-day training bootcamp is a good place to start.
Run by our team of accredited B2B agile marketing trainers and practitioners. Quickly empower your team to:
Work smarter – make the most of your people, budget, tools and time
Implement experimentation to drive continual improvement
Use data & insights to inform decision making
Demonstrate results and ROI at pace
Pivot or persevere – easily adapt to market forces
If you are someone who writes content for a living, you may have entered 2023 a little worried about your job following the launch of ChatGPT in late November 2022. There’s no denying that on first trying out the tool, it was impressive just how quickly it could write something that was clear, well-structured and seemingly accurate. But by the third or fourth go, you quickly realised that it all looked and sounded the same, and it was glaringly obvious when someone had copied and pasted straight out of it. Content writers everywhere breathed an audible sigh of relief. The robots haven’t replaced us just yet!
However, it’s exciting to explore how we can achieve productivity gains and access these vast knowledge banks to lift our own content, striking the balance between AI and human capabilities. Here are our guidelines on how to get the best out of content AI tools while still sounding “human”, authoritative and authentic.
Your research helper
Use ChatGPT or other content AI to help you research your topic and develop your key points for your piece, alongside your other previous research methods. It can also be used to research clients, client prospects, the state of the industry and so on. But asking the right questions is critical and you should never accept the first response you receive. So much so that some companies are now hiring “prompt engineers” with expertise in this area. You must keep refining your prompts to get higher quality responses and reach the level of depth you require.
Note that ChatGPT has limited knowledge of events after a certain date and nobody seems to be clear when that date is according to a recent article by ZDNet. You may need to stick with traditional research methods if it’s recent events you’re interested in. Take an agile approach to testing what research methods work best to produce an outline which is comprehensive and accurate.
Creating personas
Open AI has given ChatGPT a carefully chosen tone of voice which is designed to appeal to the majority and is best described as neutral and professional, i.e. a bit generic and boring. However, you can train ChatGPT to create content that reflects your organisation’s unique style, vocabulary and tone of voice.
To do this, you need to create a training dataset which consists of a range of content examples that reflect your organisation’s tone of voice. This should include blogs, social media posts, articles and client-facing emails and cover a variety of topics.
If you produce content for multiple organisations, you can create different ChatGPT personas for each organisation which reflect their individual writing style. Building on an agile approach, you could set up different personas for an organisation to help test different styles and see which achieves the most engagement.
Need for speed
Like the famous racing game series, the pressure to increase efficiency and speed impacts us all. Content AI can absolutely help you to write and produce content much faster than previously, by speeding up the phase that takes the most time — researching and planning your piece. This can allow you to focus on the tasks that require more creativity and innovation.
Be careful though, ChatGPT isn’t perfect and can sometimes generate inaccurate information. It’s only as good as the data it’s trained on and as with all things, fact-checking and a good pinch of common sense is required.
Overcoming writer’s block
Sometimes getting started is the hardest thing when it comes to writing and we all suffer from writer’s block from time-to-time. Asking content AI what it thinks about a certain subject can be enough to kick-start the creative juices. Once they start flowing again, it’s time to step away from the AI.
Run a pilot
We always recommend taking an agile approach and running a pilot to test and learn before deciding which content AI to adopt within your organisation. This provides the opportunity to demonstrate to leadership how the tool can help improve your team’s productivity without compromising on quality. As with all AI, privacy and security should be a key consideration. Leaders need to ensure guardrails are in place for their teams to be able to test and adopt AI solutions safely. This agile approach enables you to test and learn then quickly scale where value is demonstrated.
Human’s rule
ChatGPT and other content AI are still powerful tools and can speed up the content writing process, but they cannot replace human creativity, intuition and empathy. It’s essential to strike a balance between AI and human capabilities to achieve the best outcomes. Any piece of content should always reflect your organisation or client’s tone of voice to ensure it remains consistent and authentic.
Content AI can’t compete with your insider knowledge about your market and your audiences. Always remember you are the expert in your area!
Get in touchto find out how Bright can help you harness agile marketing to deliver your marketing strategy in 2024.
Download your cards to re–frame conversations and spark fresh perspectives.
The Reframe Cards are designed to bring creativity and agile thinking into your team’s communication.
By offering specific prompts, these cards encourage team members to share their thoughts, ideas, and opinions more openly, fostering a culture of transparency and collaboration.
Each Reframe Card aims to stimulate problem-solving discussions, driving the team towards actionable, goal-focused solutions.
Reframe your thinking
Ready to reframe your mindset and your conversations? Download your Reframe Cards today!
Great to use in team meetings or to kick-start internal workshops, these cards cover the following areas:
⭐️ Design thinking –Challenge conventional strategies, embrace a fresh perspective and find innovative solutions to complex problems.
⭐️ Activating agile – Unlock agile methodologies to enable adaptability, perform efficiently and drive a results-focused approach.
⭐️ Experimentation – Experiment with new ideas and strategies, encouraging a culture of continuous improvement and learning
⭐️ Growth mindset – Re-think your current practices, iterate towards exciting outcomes and deliver exceptional results through continuous learning.
⭐️ Change enablement – Say goodbye to outdated approaches and enable your team to embrace change to stay ahead of the competition.
Here are some additional resources you may find useful:
Welcome to a curated collection of thought-provoking reads and podcasts as a retrospective of 2023. Embark on a journey through the realms of AI, agile marketing, design thinking, and growth mindset with our carefully selected recommendations.
The future of search in B2B marketing – Join Kate Cox, CMO at BrightBid, in a podcast exploring how AI is set to revolutionise search engine marketing for B2B.
Activating agile marketing
Book:
Agile Marketing” by Neil Perkin – Explore adaptive marketing principles and practices, offering guidelines to redesign marketing structures fit for today’s changeable environment.
Adam Grant: ReThinking – Engage with Adam Grant’s podcast exploring innovative and transformative ideas.
Elizabeth Day: how to fail – Join Elizabeth Day in her podcast that celebrates the wisdom that comes from failure.
Dive into these resources to prepare yourself for 2024. Each recommendation is carefully chosen to enhance your understanding and inspire insightful discussions.
Where effectiveness equates to competitive advantage, the application of agile marketing has become a key framework for B2B marketing leaders focused on improving their strategic impact in 2024.
In this webinar, we have brought together leaders in agile marketing to reflect on the learnings and successes from 2023. Watch the webinar to discover how you can embrace new techniques to enhance your B2B marketing outcomes in 2024.
Our experts dive into practical strategies around the following themes:
👉 Streamline operations and decision-making through agile adoption for effective marketing. 👉 Leverage data to optimise marketing strategies and showcase their value. 👉 Elevate marketing relevance through personalised interactions with your audience. 👉 Build brand consistency to drive loyalty and increase customer lifetime value. 👉 Foster a culture of experimentation for high-impact strategies and continuous improvement.
Missed the session, watch it on demand!
Meet the speakers
Jim Ewel
Co-Founder and Author, Agile Marketing Alliance
Jim is an Agile marketing pioneer who has guided over 70 organisations in adopting Agile practices. He helped create the first Agile Marketing certification and authored ‘The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing’
Zoë Merchant
Managing Director, Bright
Zoë is an agile marketing aficionado — a passionate believer in staying ahead of the competition with resilience, adaptability, and pace. After 20 years of delivering B2B marketing strategies. Using agile marketing to test, learn and build on success. Zoë leads the team in delivering results through continual and focused improvements to support clients’ business goals.
Kirsten Dixon
Marketing Performance Director, Informa
Kirsten is an experienced Marketing Performance Director, leading the EMEA Marketing team for Informa Markets. She is responsible for driving marketing effectiveness across the company’s diverse portfolio of markets and products.
Sian Heaphy
Accredited Agile Marketing Trainer and Director
Sian uses agile methods to encourage creativity, curiosity, and data-driven decisions in marketing. She works with teams to design experiments, gain insights, and achieve business goals. Sian promotes continuous improvement through experimentation and learning.
When it comes to engaging with your audience, you could have the most exciting, innovative product or piece of content, but if it’s not accessible then it won’t deliver the results you’re looking for. The concept of accessibility in design has reshaped the way we create products, experiences, websites, apps, and digital platforms, requiring designers to be even more creative in our approach to consider and deliver for all audiences and ultimately leading to increasingly innovative and inclusive design.
Understanding accessibility in design
Good design can connect with people around the world and across different cultures to create equity and accessibility, helping to foster an inclusive and socially responsible community. Embracing accessibility isn’t just a trend, but a commitment to designing with empathy and foresight to have a positive impact on people’s lives. It’s important to not think of accessibility requirements as a restriction, but instead an ignition to creativity, to innovate past basic delivery and offer different design layers.
Accessibility in design is about creating products and services that can be easily accessed, understood, and used by people, regardless of their physical or cognitive abilities. It is a key component of inclusive design, which puts accommodating diverse users’ needs and preferences at the core of a project.
Where to start with inclusive design
When you begin to consider how you can apply inclusive design thinking to your projects, it can be overwhelming to know where to start. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are international standards that help creatives develop accessible web content. While guiding structures around design can feel limiting, these guidelines set a platform for diving deeper into the creative process and encourage an innovative approach to deliver for all, not just the majority.
These guidelines are built on four guiding principles that fit under the acronym POUR:
Infographic using inclusive design principles
Creating an accessible design involves incorporating features and considerations that enable people with disabilities to use a product, website, or environment effectively. Here are some essential elements that make the examples below more accessible:
Consistent navigation and layout
Plain language and easy-to-understand content
Contrast and colour choices
Readable fonts and typography
Digestible content in sufficient time
Promoting inclusive design
So, how can we deliver content and experiences for our audiences across different platforms that are digestible for everyone without sacrificing creativity? We put together some practical tips to help promote inclusive engagement whilst also ensuring creativity.
Test alternatives for visual content
Whether you are producing for a website or another digital product, descriptive alternative text (alt text) for images and graphics allows you to get creative with your visual design, while ensuring users with visual impairments can interpret what you’re communicating. Include descriptive text for the mood, story or artistic intent behind the image, not just the practical explanation, to enhance the experience for everyone.
Business reports and data visualisation
Clear reporting and data presentations are crucial to bringing your audience on your journey and building confidence in your strategic direction. To make these documents accessible, formatting is everything. Accessible PDFs or data tables used alongside visually engaging charts and graphs will give you extra opportunities to represent your data in an effective and creative way, whilst ensuring you’re being inclusive of a broader audience.
Experiential event design
When you think of an event experience, your first considerations are sight and sound. However, by incorporating other sensory elements such as touch, smell or taste into a tactile exhibit, you allow further opportunities for your audience to engage with your brand. You’ll find your full audience benefits from this well-rounded and memorable approach to event design.
Captioning and transcripts for multimedia
Turning on subtitles is becoming more popular across different audiences for TV shows and movies regardless of ability. If your project involves multimedia content like videos or podcasts, tools such as closed captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions help ensure you will reach a wider audience. Within inclusive design, these additions don’t just make your content more accessible for users with hearing or visual impairments, but also open opportunities for creative storytelling through synchronised captions or tailored transcripts that can capture nuances in spoken content. In the same way that a script has stage directions for actors, you can create a more valuable experience for your audience with further direction on how they can interpret the content.
Inclusive design is a journey that not only aligns with our social and ethical responsibility as creatives, but also expands the potential for innovation in design. It means designing with diversity in mind from the very beginning, rather than as an afterthought.
Whether we’re working on web projects, product packaging, or experiential events, inclusive design isn’t about compromise; it’s about expanding our horizons and reimagining the creative process. By thinking inclusively about our diverse user needs and providing alternative ways for people to engage, design can play an important role in making the world a more inclusive place. We encourage you to imagine and innovate without boundaries and explore how you can supercharge your creative design for your entire audience.
Elevate your marketing strategies and dive into the world of generative AI at our latest Smarter Marketer panel event. Whether you’re grappling with how to harness the potential of AI to drive business growth or seeking actionable tips on how to integrate AI into your marketing efforts, our event covers it all.
Our exclusive panel discussion simplifies the complexities of AI’s challenges and guides you towards pragmatic solutions that work for your organisation. Witness first-hand the positive impact generative AI is already having on marketing strategies and outputs.
Our Smarter Marketer panel event delves into:
Generative AI tools unveiled: How AI is revolutionising content creation strategies.
AI in action: Implementing AI for maximum effectiveness.
Testing and adoption incubation: Implementing and testing AI tools.
Operational excellence: Vital considerations for governance in your marketing operations.
Risk management: Identifying, assessing and mitigating risks.
Missed the session, watch it on demand!
Unlock the AI advantage – activating AI
Ready to embark on your AI journey? Our tools and use cases for marketers resource is a great place to start – download yours today.
Meet the speakers
Mark Breslin
Chief Product & Technology Officer, Informa Tech
Mark is responsible for leading the Product & Technology at Informa Tech. This team focuses on working with the leadership teams across the business to shape and create product strategies and roadmaps for new and existing products and services.
Kate Cox
CMO, Bright Bid
Kate is an experienced CMO with a focus on marketing for the digital age and is a native AI marketer in her current role at Bright Bid, an adtech company using AI and human expertise to improve the effectiveness of paid digital activity
Zoe Merchant
Zoë is an agile marketing aficionado — a passionate believer in staying ahead of the competition with resilience, adaptability, and pace. After 20 years of delivering B2B marketing strategies, Zoë founded Bright to help tech, engineering and consulting firms get the most from their marketing investment. Using agile marketing to test, learn and build on success. Zoë leads the team in delivering results through continual and focused improvements to support clients’ business goals.
Interested in reading more about the capabilities of AI in marketing?
As the days grow shorter and the nights get cozier, there’s no better time to embark on a journey into the world of AI. To kickstart your adventure, we’ve curated a list of unmissable reads and listens that will light up your path to AI enlightenment.
For the bookworms:
Rewired – The McKinsey & Company guide to outcompeting in the age of digital and AI.
The future of search in B2B marketing– Podcast with Kate Cox, CMO at BrightBid, which examines how AI will change Search Engine Marketing for B2B customers and B2B marketing.
Interested in hearing more about the capabilities of AI in marketing? Check out our panel discussion “AI in marketing: Unpacking the opportunities and challenges” for more insight, as well as helpful AI resources.
Be more curious, creative, and inject innovation. All things as marketers we’ve constantly been told to do bring to our thinking as we address the challenges of a highly competitive market. Great advice, but how do you actually do it?
We chat to Victoria Hardiment (Marketing Director, Informa Markets) and Neil Preddy (Customer Strategy & Planning Expert) and they reveal how leading marketing teams are using design thinking to inject innovative action into marketing activity.
We want to give you as marketers the power to do great work – check out our Smarter Marketer Event on design thinking; a 40 min panel discussion featuring the savviest marketers in B2B and can help you discover how you can take your marketing to the next level.
Missed the session, watch it on demand!
Access the reframe cards – design thinking edition
Get started with design thinking with our reframe cards – purposely created to help you and your teams utilise design thinking tools and frameworks to better understand your customers, improve team collaboration and optimise marketing effectiveness.
Meet the speakers
Sian Heaphy
Sian uses agile ways of working to help businesses be more creative, curious and use data to transform their marketing and deliver business outcomes.
Lydia Kirby
Lydia is passionate about showing tangible value for marketing and finding creative solutions to business problems. She loves working in partnership with clients and sharing learnings from her work with agile marketing methodology.
Victoria Hardiment
Victoria is an experienced marketer who oversees the marketing strategy and operations of Informa Markets as their marketing director. She has incorporated design thinking into her impressive career, putting the focus on the customer to inform her decisions.
Neil Preddy
Using data to solve problems, find opportunities and make better decisions, Neil is a product leader and marketer with global experience of building analytics and big data platforms for CPG companies and retailers like Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Tesco and Amazon.
Reading List
Watched the panel and interested in hearing more? Check out our extended list of design thinking in marketing resources:
Books:
The Design Thinking Playbook by Michael Lewrick and Patrick Link – This book offers a step-by-step guide to applying design thinking to solve complex problems in marketing and other areas of business.
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries – This book is a classic on how to apply the principles of lean startup methodology to create and launch successful products or services.
Value Proposition Design by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith – This book offers a practical guide to creating compelling value propositions using design thinking so they resonate with customers and drive business growth.
The Design Thinking Toolbox by Michael Lewrick, Patrick Link, Larry J. Leifer – This book offers a comprehensive set of design thinking tools and techniques for solving business problems, including marketing challenges.
Alchemy: The Magic of Original Thinking in a World of Mind-Numbing Conformity by Rory Sutherland – a recommendation from panelist Neil Preddy, discover the alchemy behind original thinking, as TED Talk superstar and Ogilvy advertising legend Rory Sutherland reveals why abandoning logic and casting aside rationality is the best way to solve any problem.
Design Thinking 101 hosted by Dawan Stanford – This podcast series features interviews with design thinking experts and practitioners, offering insights and best practices for applying design thinking in various contexts, including marketing.
Design Together hosted by Abby Guido – This podcast series focuses on how design thinking can be applied to solve complex problems in business, including marketing challenges.
