In a recession, your marketing needs to work smarter, not harder. Use your marketing campaigns to not only sell to new clients but to expand within your existing customer base, focus on retention as much as (if not more!) than acquiring net new clients. This means getting closer than ever to your clients and using what you learn to sharpen your targeting. Identifying those market(s) or industries that you already have a proven track record within and leveraging your existing customers as advocates to demonstrate value.
To start your analysis, go back to basics and make sure you really understand what your client’s interests are, their pain points, where they spend their time and which social media channels, they’re most present on. Identifying where to connect with your target audience and remap the buyer journey and how you can help them are critical first steps. Don’t be afraid to ask your clients. Talk to your key client stakeholders, and pick their brains – after all, they choose to work with you, so take the time to explore what gave your product or services the edge.
Not only will you learn a huge amount, but clients appreciate you taking the time to listen to them, so you’ll not only strengthen your go-to-market approach but also build deeper relationships and trust. A bonus will be that you are quickly able to identify opportunities for expansion within your existing clients and new go-to-market propositions to test, this will keep you ahead of the competition.
“There is only one winning strategy. It is to carefully define the target market and direct a superior offering to that target market.” – Philip Kotler
The next step is to improve your targeting and define the firmographics and demographics that your target audience share. We know buyer journeys for complex B2B products and services can be long, and procurement is led by multiple decision-makers and influencers. Do you really know your audience? Company size, location, industry? Who are the decision-makers and influencers – their typical age, gender, qualifications, profession, position in the buying process and where they find relevant information. During this process, you’re likely to identify smaller sub-segments, and when revisiting your existing audience(s), you may find that buying habits have changed, for example, one specific job title is now more involved in the buying process.
With your target audience sharpened following the process above, it’s key to reclassify your target audience by their roles within their buying process.
Reviewing and updating the decision-making unit as well as revisiting the buyer journey regularly allows you to distinguish the following roles and how you need to adapt your marketing to target them more effectively:
Users: A person that uses your product or service
Initiators: People within the organisation who first see the need for the product or service
Influencers: People who have an influence on buying or using the product or service
Buyers: People who will purchase the product
Gatekeepers: Someone who is between your organisation and the decision maker within the organisation you’re trying to partner with
Decision-makers: An individual who has final authority over the purchasing decision
Solidifying the decision maker unit (DMU), you can now apply this to your marketing funnel, identifying where each person within the DMU sits within their buying journey and look to push them through with more appropriate content & engagement tactics.
Download the Book of Hacks
Download Bright’s book of insanely valuable agile marketing hacks that will give you the know-how and confidence to supercharge your marketing and ride out the economic downturn.
Discover how to focus on what matters, how to get the best results from your budget, tools and people, how to demonstrate value from lean marketing tactics and how to meet your marketing goals with agile ways of working.
During a recession, consumers and businesses alike are navigating troubled waters, so as a business it’s key that you remain consistent. There will be tough decisions to make. Whilst there will be many businesses, including yours and your competitors, reducing marketing activity, budgets will get cut and headcount reductions will happen – stay focused on maintaining and sharpening your brand creating relevant propositions and let your audience know that you’re there.
Consistently articulate the value of working with you during a downturn through clear messaging and positioning. Take every opportunity to sharpen your messaging, making it positive and relevant to your clients pain points to increase visibility, improve brand awareness and address client needs through your products or services where your competitors fall short.
Amazon sales grew by 28% in 2009 during the ‘great recession’. The tech company continued to innovate with new products during the slumping economy, notably with new Kindle products which helped to grow market share.
Keeping your marketing consistent, positive, and relevant is important to gain traction with new audiences and reassure your loyal clients. Feedback is a gift! If you’re not regularly seeking client feedback either formally via NPS or customer satisfaction monitoring or informally via your sales and client success teams you need to do this today. You cannot underestimate what you can glean from your clients to help you understand where you can help them further and identify opportunities to reframe your products or services to meet market needs and exploit a niche to drive future growth.
Download the Book of Hacks
Download Bright’s book of insanely valuable agile marketing hacks that will give you the know-how and confidence to supercharge your marketing and ride out the economic downturn.
Discover how to focus on what matters, how to get the best results from your budget, tools and people, how to demonstrate value from lean marketing tactics and how to meet your marketing goals with agile ways of working.
Whether you like it or not, you can’t deny the hype that surrounds Web3, which includes the Metaverse, Cryptocurrency and Blockchain. But how do we as B2B marketers cut through that noise and identify the opportunities for us?
Here at Bright, we’re always looking future forward, scanning the horizon for what’s next and staying ahead of the curve – which is why we’re going to digest the top three things you need to know about Web3 for B2B marketing.
Understanding Web3
History of the internet
To understand what Web3 entails, we must first look back to the beginning with Web1, or ‘Web 1.0’. It was the first iteration of what became the World Wide Web, headed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. His idea was to create open, decentralised protocols that allowed information sharing from anywhere on Earth. Web 1.0 lasted between 1990 and 2004, and featured static websites owned by companies, with little interaction between users, leading to it being known as the read-only web.
Fast forward to Web 2.0, from 2004 to the present, where the web has evolved to be read-write, increasing audience participation and engagement. This means that instead of companies providing content to users, they began to provide platforms to share user-generated content and engage in user-to-user interactions, propelled by the explosion of social networking fuelled by sites like Facebook or Twitter.
As more people join the online community, a handful of companies, such as Meta and Google, began to control a disproportionate amount of the traffic and value generated on the web. Web 2.0 also birthed the advertising-driven revenue model, meaning that while users could create content, they couldn’t own it or benefit efficiently from its monetisation. Leading us to Web3 – the next stage of the internet.
The impact of Web3 on marketing
With exciting new developments in technology and how much we rely on the internet, it can often feel overwhelming, trying to navigate the line between what’s relevant and ‘the next big thing’ and what will pass as a short phase. You can already see big brands, such as Unilever, who have utilised Augmented Reality (AR) experiences to showcase a virtual career fair using their ‘Pot Noodle’ brand, replacing its live event, which was cancelled due to Covid-19. On another side of Web3, you can see how brands like Nike or Mercedes have utilised virtual configurators to visualise products with their customisations.
This will have a profound impact on the buyer’s decision-making process, in the near future, moving towards a more personalised and visual hands-on experience, which has become imperative for both B2B and B2C marketing within the past few years.
Data-driven Marketing
One of the benefits of a blockchain, which is a decentralised, public digital ledger that is used to record transactions across desktops, is that there is complete transparency within it. You can see how much crypto a wallet address has and where transactions have been taking place. With some sophisticated analytic research, you could get a relatively clear insight into what your audience is spending crypto on online, and target that accordingly.
So, how can B2B marketers can harness Web3
Cryptocurrency and loyalty
One of the burning questions surrounding those interested in Web3, is how it can be utilised commercially. Cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum are popular in the B2C market, however, the applications around coin or NFTs as a loyalty mechanism may be more applicable to B2B – firms can establish their own ‘coin’ which can reward loyal clients and employees. This coin could be used in more diverse ways than a loyalty scheme, for example as reinvestment in future projects or joint ventures with clients.
Metaverse and virtual worlds in B2B
An area of value to B2B marketers is the utilisation of virtual experiences to showcase a product or service offering. It can be done in a way as simple as going into Meta’s ‘Horizon Worlds’ platform and designing a virtual store or using Unity’s ‘Unreal Engine’ to create a gamified experience.
How about utilising Web3 within your workplace? You could create a virtual office space to bring team collaboration into the modern age, ditching the typical ‘zoom’ meetings that gained popularity during the pandemic, or even hold a virtual event in the Metaverse.
Forward thinking firms such as Sony are working with pioneering virtual experience firms like, V-gather to create an immersive shopping experience.
Generating leads through the Metaverse
It doesn’t stop there; Web3 can be utilised to create virtual-only services for B2B, such as ads. Advertisement within the Metaverse is something we believe will explode in the coming years, as brands learn more about what possibilities lie ahead, and embark on early adoption so they don’t get left behind. It’s important to note that advertising in the Metaverse is not yet as sophisticated or programmatic as it is in the Web2 landscape.
With innovative updates and features created in the Metaverse, it’s easier for B2B marketers to find leads. The Metaverse is an avenue for B2B marketers to reduce traditional methods of lead prospecting. You can support an end–to–end engagement and commence the marketing process from lead prospecting to customer acquisition and rewards. It’s possible to interact with prospects like never before.
NFTs and gated content as a community tool
One of the hottest trends of 2021 was the hype surrounding NFTs (non-fungible tokens) which are collectable digital assets that link ownership to unique physical or digital items, such as art, property, music, or videos, and are considered modern-day collectables. NFTs could be utilised in a B2B environment by rewarding clients with your native token for using your services, like a loyalty programme; providing real tokens that they can exchange on cryptocurrency exchanges. You could produce an NFT to give to your target audience to access gated content, such as a Discord server, support channels, videos, articles, webinars, and so on, creating a stronger sense of community.
Get started by taking an agile approach
Knowledge sharing is going to be powerful; we’re keen to hear about what you think of Web3, and how you think they can be effectively utilised within the B2B marketing environment, we’ll be sharing our learnings as we venture further with clients.
Bright’s founder and Managing Director, Zoë Merchant, commented:
“With Web3, we’re getting ready for the biggest evolution yet in Customer Experience. B2B marketers need to take an agile approach to testing, learning and building on success to understand how they can harness the power of Web3 to take advantage of immersive and virtual worlds and make good use of the data they can gather to get closer to their customers and prospects.”
One thing is for sure, by taking an agile marketing approach B2B marketers can start small and set hypothesis to test ideas and learn from the data they garner to build on success. A great place to start is to understand your client’s perception and areas they would find beneficial and start to build out immersive customer experiences as well as innovative promotional strategies harnessing Web3.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How many times have you, or someone in your team, spent hours crafting a piece of content? Agonising over the right phrases to use, making sure the content looks visually appealing, that the format is seemingly easy to consume, only to find that when it goes live, it doesn’t get the ‘big bang’ results you originally anticipated?
We’ve all been there, trying to uncover why it isn’t landing, maybe a shorter headline will help? Maybe a different graphic on the front cover? Is it cutting through the noise? Unfortunately, there is not just one right answer, it could be a whole host of reasons.
It may sound simple, but the way to create truly compelling content is by understanding your target audience, through this understanding you’re able to create something that is truly of value to them.
Where do you start when writing compelling content?
Something that is often overlooked when it comes to creating compelling content is relevancy. To get the traction you were looking for, your content should be timely and speak directly to your target audience and their pain points, regardless of if you’re creating a compelling case study or short social media content.
Understanding your target audience through developing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Persona(s), you can collate unique characteristics which can help uncover average revenue, number of employees, number of customers, budget, industry, geography, and purchase process but it should include other information such as pain points around their role and industry, but also personal fears, aspirations and needs.
Once compiled, you can then tailor your content to specifically address these points – without this level of information, you can end up speaking about a subject matter that has very little relevancy or is of little interest. For instance, if your ICP includes HR businesses with 10 people that only operate within the UK, it is probably best to steer away from trends in the US…
Have you kept your audience in mind?
Now you’ve established your ICP, it’s pivotal to consider how you’re already communicating with your prospects, and at which stage they are within the buying cycle. For instance, if you’ve only recently started to communicate with them, it’s likely that they’ll still be in the awareness phase, so creating compelling content that keeps you front of mind for them will be key.
Considering what stage they’re at within their buying cycle isn’t the only thing to keep in mind, going back to your ICP and based on the information you collected, you should also have an understanding of what makes them tick and what motivates them day to day. Knowing this information will inform which format the content should be presented – for example, you should probably steer away from creating a whitepaper for time-sensitive individuals, and instead may want to opt for more snackable pieces of content that they can get value from in short doses.
Pinpointing how they typically like to consume content will also have an impact on how you leverage this and the channels you utilise. For instance, if through your ICP development you know you’re your audience typically spends a lot of time on Facebook, then you may want to target them there.
Are aesthetics important?
So now you’ve established your ICP and done your research about what makes them tick and considered how and where they typically like to spend their time, we should now shift our attention to the content itself. How many times have you read something that was completely lacklustre and switched off after the first paragraph? Well, you’re not alone…
The human element to your content shouldn’t be understated, in B2B it’s easy to forget you’re talking to another human behind their screen, so don’t forget to show some personality, sometimes being a little controversial or incorporating a light-hearted joke can help to attract attention in the saturated B2B market and become memorable, keeping your business front of mind.
Finally, don’t forget about your content’s curb appeal, your copy may be elegantly written, and personalised to each individual business but if it visually doesn’t look great – you may see that your audience hits the exit button quicker than you’d like. Ensure that the format and layout of your content flows and is easy to follow, include relevant imagery and eye-catching visuals, and sometimes it pays to think outside of the box, it’s not just B2C that can be fun!
How do you measure your content?
Now your piece of content has gone live, how do you know if it’s compelling? At this stage, it’s important to separate feelings from the facts and resist making educated guesses.
The data and insights from your website content will help you identify if the content is compelling in the eyes of your audience. Bounce rates, dwell times, downloads, conversions, and heat maps are a great place to start… but beware of vanity metrics! For instance, if your content has a high bounce rate, this may indicate that the information within the content isn’t providing added value, or if a heat map is showing a cold spot on your eBook, it may be a sign to switch up the format of the page.
It’s important to continually test and learn, further optimising to hit the sweet spot and leveraging that data-driven insight moving forward.
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.
We explore the fusion of agile and performance marketing for B2B marketers.
What is performance marketing?
You’ve probably heard the term performance marketing used a lot recently, and you may be wondering is this a methodology? A collection of channels? Or just another buzzword that’s being used in the industry? Simply put, performance marketing is an umbrella term for online marketing and advertising programs where you pay when a specific action occurs, these typically include generating a lead, sale, click or a download.
Performance marketing directly relates to sponsored advertising, social media advertising and search engine marketing. Depending on which platform you’re using, you will pay for an action, for instance, a cost per impression (CPM), cost per click (CPC) and cost per lead (CPL).
Although performance marketing is defined as such when an action is complete, setting up a performance-driven campaign will vary depending on which platforms you use, and what actions you want your audience to make.
What are the benefits of performance marketing?
There are many benefits to performance marketing in comparison to traditional marketing. Due to the nature of performance marketing, regardless of the channel you’re operating from, it’s easy to track performance, which means that if there is any indication that the campaign isn’t performing as expected, this can be identified early on and optimised in line with the data, ultimately resulting in a low risk, high impact activity.
Another benefit of performance marketing is ROI, depending on your overall objective and only paying for a specific interaction, this means budget isn’t utilised on vanity metrics or performance indicators that isn’t related to your overall objective.
What are the fundamentals of performance marketing and how do you measure it?
Now we’ve unravelled what performance marketing is and the benefits, let’s dive into the fundamentals of performance marketing and where to start when you’re looking to launch activity and how to measure it.
Firstly, setting marketing objectives is key, without clearly defining this at the start of your campaign it can be difficult to optimise and measure. Setting your objective is a crucial first step, are you looking to increase brand awareness? If so impressions and engagement across social channels may be your overall goal, you should then look at what this means in terms of tangible key performance indicators (KPIs), what is your total audience size and what is the number of impressions you’re looking to achieve? Or perhaps this is a click through rate (CTR) above 13%.
Once you’ve set your goal, you need to establish the content you’re planning to leverage. Refer back at your personasand identify what their pain points are and how your product/service can help alleviate their current challenges. Your persona should also include information on how they typically consume information, ensure that your content is aligned to your findings.
Now you’ve established the right-fit content, it’s now time to prepare your campaign and set up activity ready for launch, this will vary depending on the platform you use. Once you’ve set up, aligned and launched your campaign, it’s now time to monitor and optimise, whether you’re embarking on a brand new activity or launching a campaign on a platform that has typically worked for you before, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, this is where performance marketing and agile marketing meet.
The collision of agile and performance marketing
Performance marketing is an umbrella term, agile marketing is a methodology that allows marketers to respond faster and adapt at pace. Using agile marketing practices within your performance campaigns can ensure that you continually drive results.
Once your performance campaigns have been set up, it’s key to revisit, realign and review throughout. Not every marketing tool or social channel will drive results for your overarching goal, it may be that your audience isn’t as present on the platform, or the content you’ve leveraged may not be as impactful on your audience as you had hoped.
Running your performance marketing campaign in sprints will allow you to test new channels, audience groups, visuals, and messaging in a constructive way. Through sprints you can plan review and optimisation sessions, splitting your campaign into shorter periods of time, to reveal results quickly, as opposed to a more rigid traditional marketing methodology. Review your overall goal and drill this down into each sprint, what engagement level do we expect to see within a 3-week period of a particular channel, or perhaps it’s a click-through rate (CTR) above 7% initially to continue running activity for the next sprint.
The agile marketing methodology will ultimately enable you to be dynamic in your performance marketing approach, uncovering patterns and insights quickly to learn and adapt fast.
Don’t be bewildered by buzzwords
Don’t get lost in the language – performance marketing is simply a method of ensuring each action taken on each channel is utilised effectively and is measurable through metrics. Don’t be bewildered by buzzwords, Bright can help decode the detail and shine a light on the latest marketing trends.
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.
How to make Account Based Marketing successful with agile marketing principles.
How many times have you tried ABM and it’s not quite worked or driven the success you wanted it to? Or even struggled to get everyone internally on the same page?
Some sales teams see ABM as a risk, narrowing your activation to a select group of accounts compared to being out there for all to see. Others see it as talking to those most likely to buy and therefore more efficient use of budget. Both are right.
ABM can be categorised in three ways:
1:1 – is your hyper-personalised, highly targeted campaign, talking to a select group of individuals.
1: Few – is slightly broader, talking to your selected accounts with some commonality. This could be vertical-specific or common pain points.
1: Many – this is your broader approach that will talk to everyone in your target audience with an overarching message.
The following steps apply to all three categories and will guide you to making your ABM campaign, a successful one.
Data
In ABM, data is king. This might sound simple but selecting the right accounts and getting the correct data surrounding them is crucial. Get this step wrong and the rest is significantly less effective.
Starting with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), building your Total Addressable Market (TAM) and then narrowing down your audience and understanding the Decision-Making Unit (DMU) composition. These are the foundations of your campaign. Take your time here and be confident that you’re targeting the best accounts that fit your brand and service offering.
What is ICP?
An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a detailed profile of your ideal customer who would benefit the most from your product or service, used to customise marketing and lead generation tactics.
What is TAM?
TAM stands for Total Addressable Market which refers to the total market demand for a product or service. It’s the most amount of revenue a business can generate by selling their product or service in a specific market. Businesses can use TAM to estimate a specific market’s potential for growth.
What is DMU?
The decision-making unit (DMU) is a collection or team of individuals who participate in a buyer decision process. Philip Kotler defines the decision-making unit or DMU as “all individuals and groups that take part in the decision-making process relating to the negotiation of products /services”.
Alignment & metrics
This is a small but crucial step. Make sure that all stakeholders agree with the campaign and its steps, for example, sales & marketing need to be aligned to ensure the successful and seamless delivery of the campaign. This might sound obvious but in the cold light of day, misalignment and internal non-engagement with campaigns will result in missed business opportunities.
At the same time, we all must agree on what success looks like for this campaign. Success for marketing and success for sales can have different success metrics, so defining KPIs is key for everyone to get the most out of every campaign.
Speaking to your audience
Now you have settled on who you want to target, and everyone is aligned internally, the next step is understanding how you’re going to talk to them. Persona research, common pain point analysis, industry trends and value proposition development are all elements, that when combined, will help to form your messaging hierarchy.
Now you need to define which elements will resonate with the targeted individuals? Why your business? What problem do you solve? Why risk change? So many questions we will need to answer to move targets into and through your pipeline.
Fearless creative
Earlier, we said that data is king, and it is, however, a campaign creative is a very close second. With the marketing world becoming increasingly competitive and the cost of acquisition going up, standing out in a saturated marketplace is business critical. Creativity – conceptual and visual – can become the difference between winning and losing the attention of ICP’s in competitive business landscapes. Take a stand with your creative – be brave, be different and most importantly, be memorable.
One of our goals in marketing is to create memorable and actionable campaigns. This translates into business when you become one of your target audiences’ top three options when considering a change. That, in itself, is a success and will translate into pipeline opportunities.
Channels & execution
“Marketing is just LinkedIn ads, right?” This was an opening line from a sales director in a recent presentation. To a degree, he’s right and to a great degree, he couldn’t be more wrong. Whilst LinkedIn is a critical channel and one that has grown significantly during the last three years, it isn’t the only viable option available to reach your ICP. Direct mail, content syndication, sales development rep outreach, display ads, email nurture sequences, and many more options may be more appropriate, or impactful to get the right results your campaign.
This is where we go back to knowing our personas. Where do they spend their time? What do they value? Where and how can you get their attention? For some it is a direct mail landing on their desk and getting physically in front of them, for some it’s a catchy subject line from an email nurture sequence. Ultimately, no one channel will be the silver bullet. It will be a combination of tactics which all build towards moving you into their top three. Oh, and yes, LinkedIn ads are usually part of most campaigns nowadays. Music to the ears of the lovely Sales Director I mentioned earlier.
Data lead optimisation
Now, this is where we make the difference. Data allows us to see what is truly working and what needs more work. Which message is getting the most attention? Which image is driving the most clicks?
The crucial part of this is to not only review the data but to act on it. Make every touchpoint work harder. At Bright, we apply a test, learn and iterate approach to every marketing activity. This agile methodology gives us regular opportunities to review, assess and adapt to make sure your campaign is as effective and efficient as possible.
ABM is a great tool in the armoury of every marketer. Whether that is 1:1, 1: few, 1: many or a combination. Getting to the right people and propelling your business into their consideration options and ideally into that magical top three.
In summary; Be methodical with your data. Seek alignment, Speak to your audience. Be brave with your creative. Be agile, test, learn, iterate and follow the data.
At Bright, we pride ourselves on being world-leading B2B marketing experts, driving results through marketing agility. We embed an iterative and data-driven approach, leading the charge to better results, faster time to market, sustainable growth, and the ability to adapt and change at pace. Everything you need to have a successful ABM campaign and much more.
Shine the light on your marketing campaigns with Bright.
