Agile Marketing In Practice

Marketing agility enablement wheel

How do you enable marketing agility in your organisation?

In this piece we dive into what makes up marketing agility and whilst it’s important to understand the key characteristics that make up marketing agility, making it happen in your organisation is a different matter.

Changing how your teams work is hard, and at times thankless. It’s no surprise that businesses often underestimate the amount of support and investment needed to drive change effectively. And if you’re nodding along to this then the following model may help you understand what you’re missing or need to focus more on to enable marketing agility to happen within your team or marketing organisation.

The framework for enabling marketing agility

The framework for enabling marketing agility has been created to help support marketing teams thrive and survive in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, and complex environment.

Shaped by classic models such as McKinsey 7s and modern marketing models by XYZ and our experiences enabling marketing agility with medium to large enterprise across tech, engineering, and professional services.

The framework

Shared vision & business goals

Organisational purpose is clear, compelling and guides decision making with the North Star embodied across the organisation and people sense and seize opportunities.

To put it simply, you need to make sure the shared vision is truly embedded, understood and lived across the organisation and that your vision guides all decision making.

Those means ensuring each business is clear on what these goals mean to them in their market, function or team and that performance management is aligned with these goals.

Agile Leadership

Agile leaders believe we all have the potential to deliver on a shared purpose. They develop individuals as leaders at all levels, showing direction and enabling action, acting in a selfless and supportive way to deliver against business objectives and customer and client satisfaction.

They advocate for being agile rather than just doing agile and do this by harnessing:

Learning and continuous improvement
Team engagement and accountability
Agile culture and growth mindset
Collaboration and empowerment

Culture and mindset

An agile culture provides an organisation with a set of core values, behaviours and practices that drives the businesses’ ability to succeed.

To truly drive an agile culture means promoting, encouraging, and rewarding the values, behaviours and practices that enable your teams to act with autonomy, apply a growth mindset and demonstrate a strong commitment to experimentation, learning, reflecting, and adapting.

Collaboration and empowerment

As leaders, you need to ensure that people have an appropriate level of autonomy to carry out their work, and that there are opportunities for teams to work together, collaborate, share learnings, and align themselves towards the common goal / strategic vision.

Continuous learning and improvement

Critical to marketing agility is that teams are constantly evolving and learning to deliver the best possible outcomes; through data driven build test learn loops to validate new ideas, optimise activity if appropriate or discontinue activities or initiatives if they are not aligned or helping the business reach its strategic goal.

Team engagement & accountability

Engagement and accountability are important. Your teams have to be bought into your vision if they are going to give you their best. Your employees need to have a deep sense of fulfilment, feel safe to push back and hold themselves and their colleagues accountable.

In addition, they need to be clear on their goals, with rewards aligned to this as well as clear lines of career development and progression to keep them engaged and retained.

Agile governance

Governance supports how businesses set and achieves its goals, how risk is managed and how it improves performance and is supported by structures and processes, skills and capability, tools, and data.

It can be defined as the structures and processes for decision-making and accountability.

Critical to agile governance is transparency of process and performance and doing so consistently across the marketing organisation. Supported by:

Structures and processes
Skills and capabilities
Tools and data

Skills and capabilities

Driving agility means ensuring your teams have the right skills and capabilities to utilise new ways of working, channels or disciplines. That means matching the needs of the market and making sure you’re making skills and resource available in the right place at the right level. Providing opportunities for your teams to upskill, test and experiment to understand what works well and what doesn’t for your market context.

… become a data-driven marketer?

Structures and processes

As highlighted in agile governance this is focused on the structures and process for decision making and clear accountability. In the context of agile marketing things to think about here are regular planning, reviews, and retrospectives, KPI tracking that is visible to all and clear repeatable processes within your teams, and across your teams (depending on the structure of your marketing organisation).

Tools and data

Last but not least, agility can’t happen without the right data to support data-driven decision making. Centralised dashboards and insight that supports deep understanding of customers and audiences in real time, enabling transparency in reporting and performance and quick changes and flexing of resources as appropriate to increase the effectiveness of activity. But we aren’t just talking about data on what you’re doing, but also how you’re doing it. Using tools which allow you to have ‘work in progress limits’ and prioritise work will lead more things getting across the line – focus on the things which are delivering business results.

How agile is your marketing team?

Discover how agile your marketing organisation is with our agility calculator tool and determine whether you are surviving or thriving.

Learn more

February 17, 2023 Sian Heaphy Agile Marketing In Practice, Agile Training and Transformation

Marketing ideas to make you think

Bringing together the latest trends, tools and news at your fingertips

We’ve given the newsletter a shake-up, bringing you the ‘need to know’ stories for successful marketing, bitesize insights from the Bright team and the latest in market trends. In short, everything you should be embracing to better equip you for a smashing 2023. Looking to deliver Smarter Marketing this year? Look no further…

Embracing a growth mindset whilst being data-driven |
Marketing Metrics

Data-driven insights are your key to continuous improvement and optimisation. They are fundamental to agile ways of working, giving you the data you need to iterate and optimise your marketing activity and better support your business goals. But how do you apply a growth mindset to your data capturing to drive better business results?

A growth mindset is all about the attitude with which you approach obstacles, how you process failure, and how you adapt as a result. Applying this logic when reviewing marketing activity can mean you approach failures as lessons learned.

With a growth mindset, you’ll be able to see what didn’t work well as an opportunity to try something new, doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t. This is particularly useful now when marketers must focus on costs whilst still driving the same results. Marketers are having to do more with less and drive efficiencies whilst still delivering value to the business

If you’re interested in finding how to cultivate a growth mindset within your marketing team, attend our free online event on Friday 3rd February.
Sian Heaphy, Account Director

With the rise of the AI Chatbot, is first always best? |
Tech, tools & trends to pay attention to

It seems like ChatGPT is the talk of the town on LinkedIn, news reports and among marketers! It’s no wonder – with all its exciting new possibilities, it can be hard to know where exactly to start. As competing tech options appear, we ask, is first always best, or are there advantages of learning from your competition?

DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google, has announced its plans to launch a ChatGPT competitor. ChatGPT made headlines last year as the interactive chatbot that can fulfill several tasks for its user, from typing out a human-like text response for someone to coming up with an entire dissertation on any given subject.

Demis Hashibis, CEO, DeepMind, has said their chatbot, Sparrow, will be much safer and have features which the star rival is currently missing.

Set for private beta release this year, Sparrow will be more “conservative and constrained” than ChatGPT but with close links to Google, could this make it the search giant’s answer for ChatGPT?

Google isn’t putting all its eggs into one basket as they have also developed another AI-powered chatbot with DeepMind, MedPaLMa, for the medical community, which could generate safe and helpful answers using datasets covering professional medical exams, research, and consumer queries.

Why is this useful to you? As AI-powered technology makes its introduction to marketing activity, it’s important to remember that we are still in the early stages of AI advancement. Throughout the year we’ll likely be introduced to many more AI innovations, but all need relevant testing and experimentation to see if they work for you and your business. If you’re working agile, this will enable you to experiment to find the right tool for you and your team to help with marketing efficiency. What’s your AI strategy?

– Lydia Kirby, Client Services Director

6 steps to leading successful organisation change | Leading Change

Change enablement focuses on providing employees with essential information and support, alongside tools, processes, and strategies to help them adapt and transition to change within their organisation – it’s often a last-minute consideration! Without following these six simple steps, you’re likely to face organisational barriers to effectively implementing any Marketing Transformation.

Set realistic expectations – Leaders can easily over-promise the benefits of the proposed change, and when those benefits aren’t achieved, trust is broken. Once employees lose trust, it’s hard to regain it.

Address concerns early – The chance of success greatly improves if employee concerns are proactively addressed. This usually surfaces through three main areas; information concerns (what and the why), personal concerns (how will it impact me) and implementation concerns (how will we do it).

Be approachable – Create an environment of psychological safety where your team feel safe putting themselves on the line, such as asking a question, seeking feedback, reporting a mistake, or proposing a new idea.

Over-communicate always – When leaders withhold information, they are showing a lack of trust and lack in confidence in the change by wanting to control what people know, when they know, and how they know it. In the absence of information, people will make up their version of the truth.

You don’t know what you don’t know – Admitting you don’t know something can be one of the most powerful trust-building behaviours you can use. It shows humility and honesty to admit you don’t have all the answers.

Invite everyone on the journey – People take ownership of the plans they create and implement. Successful change efforts are those that are done ‘with’ people, not ‘to’ people.

– Danny Whitebread, Senior Communications Manager

What you need to know about the latest Google Analytics update

This year will bring the biggest changes and opportunities to the Google ecosystem in years. One of the biggest changes that impact marketers will be Google Analytics 4 replacing Universal Analytics (GA3) in July 2023.

Some of the advantages of GA4 for marketers include:

Cross-device and cross-platform tracking: GA4 allows marketers to track user interactions across devices and platforms, giving a more complete view of customer behaviour across the buyer journey. With 90% of leads doing research online before they even speak to you – this information is key to your ongoing marketing strategy
Improved integration with Google Ads: this allows marketers to better understand the impact of their advertising efforts, and often huge budgets, on website traffic and conversions.
Enhanced machine learning capabilities: GA4 includes a range of machine learning-powered features, such as predictive analytics and automatic anomaly detection, which can help marketers make more informed decisions about what marketing is working to drive business results.

Empower your data-driven decision-making and be ready for the switch later this year!

With 90% of leads doing research online before they even speak to you – this information is key to your ongoing marketing strategy

– Sophia Howard, Digital Marketing Manager

Resources to support your agile marketing journey |
Agile marketing in practice

“Bright supported ADP’s international division ably through its agile marketing transformation and continues to be a wonderful agile resource to our marketing staff across various regions. I look forward to continuing our fruitful relationship as we continue our agile journey.”
Els Humphreys-Davies, Senior Director of Marketing Programs

As world-leading in agile marketing, the team at Bright are equipped to guide you through its agile marketing journey, however far into that journey you are. From agile novice to agile aficionado.

Is your marketing traditional, fully agile, or somewhere in between? With a clear view of what makes your marketing tick, we’ll offer valuable insight into applying or optimising agile marketing within your teams and across your business. Try our Marketing Agility Calculator to discover where you fall on the agile marketing scale.

If you’re more advanced, then you may find our marketing transformation service useful like our client ADP.

Check out our free agile marketing resources.

As unprecedented becomes the new normal, ensuring your marketing activity is effective, and engaging and your processes are efficient means you’ll be able to drive better results for your business with fewer resources and be more adaptable to changing markets.

As always, the Bright team is primed and ready to help you reach your goals faster, why not book a short introductory call with one of our directors and see how we can drive the growth your business wants to see in 2023?

The Bright Team

January 31, 2023 Alexandra Jefferies Agile Marketing In Practice

When was the last time you challenged your market knowledge?

The pace of marketing can be relentless. Jumping from one project to another can be challenging, with little time to look up and around at how the industry is evolving. The risk is you miss an opportunity to get ahead of the competition or jump on a new piece of tech without understanding the how or why.

It’s easy to stick to what you know, and it’s no doubt the fundamentals of marketing don’t change – create value for your customer and drive business growth. But as we enter another period of economic difficulty, in a rapidly changing business, it’s arguably more important than ever to look to new and emerging ways of working, technologies and practices.

The market has changed

You’ve likely heard the names. The recent influx of AI developments has impacted so many facets of marketing – for copywriting like ChatGPT; creative designers have DALL-E; audience targeting with AdRoll… there’s a lot to take in.

And that’s just AI. What about newer social platforms like TikTok and Mastodon – how could they help you reach your audience? And these are just some currently in-vogue; precedent suggests there will be newer, trendier channels just around the corner. And then there is the challenge of gathering the right data to inform your marketing with cookieless tracking and Google’s next-gen analytics with GA4 (more on this soon!).

Marketers don’t need to go all-in on everything new, but they do need to be aware of how these tools could be game-changers for their customer target audience.

Shift your team focus, things you can do today

Here’s a few things you can do today that can help shift you towards where you want to be:

Retrospectives: The start of the year is a great time to look back, but it’s something you and your team should be doing consistently. Schedule a retro with your marketing teams to look at what worked, what didn’t, and what the learnings are. Retros are judgment-free opportunities to help improve for the next iteration. We love the Sailboat retro for Marketing teams, Mural has a great example to get you going. I ran a session with our client TECHNIA at the end of last year, and the positive feedback from the team was brilliant – as were the new ideas for 2023 marketing.

Host lunch & learn sessions: Taking time to learn from others knowledge sharing can be quick and fun. It can also serve as an opportunity to connect as a team beyond your project work – there’s a lot of positives. Find a subject you’re interested in – or haven’t ever heard of – and book it into your diaries. This could simply be playing a YouTube how to video, asking a team member to share their knowledge or bring in an outsider to share… show the team you’re invested in their development and generate new ideas for your marketing challenges – win-win!

External POV: Sometimes, all you need is an outside perspective. Bring in someone from outside your project – from an external organisation, or even a team member working on a different project – to facilitate a brainstorm or retro. When you have your head down, getting work done, sometimes you need to shut the laptop (metaphorically if you’re remote!) – to introduce a new point of view. There are huge benefits to bringing in an external view to facilitate and challenge the thinking of your team – set out a problem statement and start creating solutions.

Has this got you thinking? Great! Challenge your marketing team and bring in Bright to jumpstart 2023.

Tips on staying up to date

So how do you create an environment that allows your team to stay up to date and also test the new and innovative approaches to marketing?

Increasing your awareness of the wider marketing world doesn’t need to be a big lift. Here are some actions that, over time, will help increase your awareness of developing marketing trends:

Sign-up to email marketing newsletters – it may sound obvious but signing up for marketing agency and industry newsletters can be a great way to stay in the know about new marketing techniques. They’re generally free, and you don’t have to interact if you don’t want to. Create a ‘must read’ list of your team

Follow marketing influencers on social media channels – by adding some additional industry figures to your social channels, you’ll be able to keep abreast of what those in the public eye are endorsing, and whether it is a good fit for your marketing.

Set alerts – using a tool like Google Alerts, set updates for broad terms like “digital marketing” or be more specific and search for something like “copywriting AI tools”. You don’t have to check your alerts every day but setting aside time to review any news is a handy way to ensure you don’t miss out on anything.

Look at your competition – what channels are your direct competitors using? Are there learnings or changes you can make from this? Perhaps they are seeing good engagement in an area you haven’t even considered – could be worth some experimentation.

Attend industry events – whether in-person or online, it’s good to occasionally attend marketing events; they’re a great way to see other organisation’s marketing tools and strategies, and you could also happen upon something invaluable that you didn’t even realise you were looking for.

As an agile marketing consultancy, we are well placed to offer impartial advice on your current ways of working and marketing agility and implement plans to give your marketing team a structure that allows you to take advantage of new marketing techniques and tools.

January 23, 2023 Lydia Kirby Agile Marketing In Practice, Agile Training and Transformation

Agile marketing leadership: game plans

Our game plans are designed for those who want to build resilience and deliver game-changing marketing at pace. One page is all you need to increase ROI and transform your ways of working. Designed as an overview of the 30 minute bootcamp sessions, the topics cover everything from sprint leadership to building emotional connections in B2B.

The perfect tool if you want to optimise your marketing and inject agility without watching a full webinar.

Agile marketing campaigning

Download your checklist of critical success factors for you to reference and tick off when you’re putting together your agile marketing campaigning.

Vanity metrics

Identify your metrics from your KPIs. Your one page checklist to make sure you’re optimising your use of data to improve marketing performance.

Sprint leadership

Learn how to run a sprint from planning through to retro, and see a clear breakdown of the sprint, metrics you should focus on and expert tips.

Transformative communications

Discover our five top tips on how to drive cultural change in your organisation through communications.

Building an emotional connection in B2B

See the top five ways you can evoke emotion and forge a strong connection with your buyers.

Unsticking your pipeline

From TOFU to BOFU, find out what content will move your leads down your sales funnel and increase your pipeline velocity.

Personas and Buyer Journey Mapping

Everything you need to know to develop, transform or simply begin your personas and buyer journey maps.

Targeting Financial Services

There’s four key steps to targeting Financial Services effectively. Find out what they are in this one-page game plan.

To ABM or Not To ABM

Here’s your guide to kickstarting a successful ABM strategy from selecting accounts to refining propositions.

But is it compelling? Creating value propositions that convert

Learn how to create value propositions that help you convert your prospects into leads.

The rise of social selling and how to stand out

Stand out in what has become an increasingly saturated digital landscape with social selling.

Harness the power of community based marketing

Here’s your recipe for CBM – the ingredients you need to run a successful community.

Show me the money!

Quantify the value of your plans to secure senior buy in through crafting a compelling business case.

January 16, 2023 Alexandra Jefferies Agile Marketing In Practice

Three things you need to know about Web3 for B2B Marketing

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.

Metaverse virtual car configurator with Mercedes

Metaverse virtual shoe configurator using Nike

Images: www.metavrse.com

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.

September 13, 2022 Alexandra Jefferies Agile Marketing In Practice

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

Deep dive into agile marketing for FinTech

Bright injects agility into cutting-edge FinTech’s digital transformation journey

In 2020, Bright’s client, a leading financial industry operating system, set out on a digital transformation journey to pivot their focus from brand marketing to demand gen. Requiring an agile approach, we helped transform their marketing strategy and achieve their business objectives. Vice President and Global Head of Marketing of the FinTech client, Mitra Roknabadi, joins our Client Delivery Director, Lydia Kirby, to be interviewed by John Cass and share their experience of putting agile marketing into action…

1. Move fast, break nothing

In a digital world time is of the essence – Mitra highlights the importance to “move fast but don’t rush”. The qualities of an agile marketing approach align perfectly with the FinTech client’s company motto: ‘move fast, break nothing’. By beginning to work in a series of iterations, we developed a safe foundation to learn more about their digital audience through listening, testing, and optimising. Bright empowered the FinTech client team to “work at pace and learn, iterate, shift and deliver quickly.”

2. Experts, assemble!

There’s more to agile marketing than the methodology. Mitra recalls how her experience with Bright helped her to see “the full extent of what agile means”. As the campaign developed, both Mitra and Lydia as agile aficionados adapted the team’s approach and toolkit to suit the FinTech client’s needs. Demonstrating the ability to onboard and offboard expertise where needed was paramount to the FinTech client, enabling them to identify how and where they wanted to grow as a business.

3. Planning, doing, and reviewing

Keen to shirk the assumption an agile marketing approach is an impulsive one, Lydia emphasises the “planning, doing, and reviewing” that goes into a project. Bright often work in three-week Sprints to allow ample “time for learning, understanding the subject and iteration”. Project management and instant messaging platforms are key tools to unite siloed teams and enable them to collaborate and respond at pace. It’s the way in which we respond that sets agile marketers apart; having an open mind that something may work better than predicted. The review process of continuous self-reflection allows for iteration, optimisation and ultimately, the best of results.

Lydia described her experience with the FinTech client as a “dream, not because they’re simply new to agile marketing”… but because “their scale-up mentality embraced the agile methodology”. Mitra is also confident the campaign experience “will influence what we do as a company” going forward.

As Bright continues to work with innovative FinTech companies, we look forward to delivering fresh, iterative, and data-driven agile marketing approaches, leading the charge to better results, faster time to market, sustainable growth, and the ability to adapt and change at pace.

April 29, 2022 Lydia Kirby Agile Marketing In Practice

Earth Day 2022: Agility in climate action planning and why we’ll fail without it

Net-Zero targets are rightfully ambitious, but they’re doomed to fail if strategies aren’t agile. Our agile guide to help #InvestInOurPlanet

Last year, the UK Government released plans on how it will deliver its Net Zero emissions targets by 2050 including a 78% reduction from 1990 to 2035. Whilst their strategy is ‘ambitious and comprehensive’ if their plans aren’t agile, measured and take an iterative approach, they’re doomed to fail.

This year’s Earth Day, falling on 22 April annually, is themed around nature in the race to net zero with the hashtag #InvestInOurPlanet. At Bright, we believe the best way for governments to plan for climate change is to use an agile approach.

13 going on 35

2035 seems miles away from where we are now, 13 years is a long time in project planning terms, however targets and goals as ambitious as climate action ones, demand special attention. Cities across the globe are setting targets and measuring for the years ahead, however, without monitoring, how are they going to track progress?

Agile methodology manages projects by breaking it up into several phases or sprints. Involving continuous collaboration with stakeholders and constant learning and improvement at every stage. Once the project begins, teams’ cycle through a process of planning, executing, and evaluating thus teams have a natural mechanism for responding to change quickly. Do you see where we’re going with this yet?

Seize the data

Climate targets need to be data driven; however, the data needs to be monitored and used correctly. Agile emphasises the freedom to be daring in concept and tactics whilst also highlighting the importance of data driven insights. The most important aspect of an agile approach is to turn your data into actionable insights.

Try, Fail, Try something different, Succeed

Collecting climate data is all well and good, but if that data suggests or even shows that transition targets have been missed by a large margin then more measures will need to be implemented behind this goal. Equally, if target measures seem to be particularly effective, more ambitious targets could be set to reach goals faster.

This kind of flexibility is important as climate strategies need to be adaptable based on actual results and external shifts that are not yet known. Agile ways of working promote this type of flexibility and retrospective outlook which allows for prioritisation on demand – providing teams with the knowledge of what is most important to work on next.

Some cities around the world are already adapting their climate strategies to make them more agile. Mannheim in Germany, for example will digitise its new ‘Climate Action Plan 2030’ to track measurable data close to real-time via a digital twin. Meaning the city can be more flexible in adjusting milestones to reach targets faster and more efficiently.

Limit risks without risking your limits

Agile methodology is based on the concepts of flexibility, transparency, quality, and continuous improvement. Visibility in project management plays a key role in ensuring targets are achievable and that teams have the resources necessary to attain them. It’s easy for governments to set ambitious targets that make headlines and line manifestos, but if the delivery is deficient due to lack of transparency, the strategies will fail.

The Committee on Climate Change – a group of experts that advise the UK government – called the governments net zero strategy “ambitious and comprehensive” but says the UK government needs to “strengthen delivery” and agree tougher policies. With increased visibility, predicting risks, and coming up with effective mitigation plans become simpler. When working within an agile framework, there are countless ways to identify and predict risks faster meaning it’s easier to plan to ensure that the project runs smoothly, targets are met, and goals are achieved.

So, there you have it, our challenge to #InvestInOurPlanet. While there may be plenty of obstacles in climate change planning, the benefits of agile ways of working, both to governments as well as the planet, are abundant. As the planet continues to evolve and change, strategies on climate change planning need to be agile enough to evolve with it.

If you would like to introduce agile marketing into your project planning, please contact us about our Agile Marketing training or marketing support.

April 21, 2022 Alexandra Jefferies Agile Marketing In Practice

Agile: Marketing at the speed of FinTech

The buzz surrounding FinTech companies keeps growing louder as these cutting-edge businesses introduce innovative ideas to disrupt the financial services industry.

From P2P lending and digital currency to online payments, internet insurance, and self-serve brokerages, FinTech solutions can offer customers more efficiency, convenience, and security than traditional solutions.

Business Insider expects the FinTech industry to grow with a CAGR of 20 percent over the next few years.

Despite growth, FinTech companies face steep challenges

Financial institutions and customers appear eager to embrace new tools. Still, even the best new financial technology must gain visibility in a crowded, shifting marketplace.

Very often, FinTech enterprises need to introduce their brands and ideas to a marketplace that barely understands the problem that needs solving. At the same time as innovators offer new solutions, they also face rapid shifts in their business environments because of changing regulations, competitors, and customer expectations.

FinTech companies don’t just need to produce innovative solutions to help customers. They must also employ their own creative, responsive, and adept marketing processes to remain ahead of a rapidly changing business environment. This demands an approach to marketing strategy and project management that uses agile methodologies.

Why agile marketing perfectly suits FinTech companies

Successful FinTech companies use rapid, data-driven methodologies to develop and test their ideas to offer the best products and services in this dynamic business environment. Startups and established tech companies must remain agile to cope with rapid and often unexpected changes. Many technical companies rely on Agile development tools to swiftly gather information, test ideas, validate theories, and optimise processes.

Thus, Agile marketing tactics fit the culture and business model of FinTech companies precisely the same way that Agile development tactics do. Developers working within an Agile framework will recognise the core principles of Agile marketing, such as rapid sprints, using an iterative process to develop and test, relying on data-driven ideas and techniques, and a holistic, interdisciplinary approach.

Highlights of why Agile marketing flawlessly suits FinTech companies include:

Responsive to the economic and market context: In the complex and rapidly evolving FinTech market, agile marketing can pivot quickly and relies on data, not assumptions. The interdisciplinary nature of this marketing framework also offers better insights into the broader economic and competitive context.
Complementary to FinTech company culture: Typical FinTech businesses tend to be agile, and very often, use Agile development tools. Employees readily understand and adapt to this adaptable, sprint-based, diversity-inclusive, and engaging style. An agile marketing team already speaks the language of every other team member, including marketing leaders and business decision makers.
Able to scale: Agile marketing’s focus on automation and efficiency helps clients scale as businesses evolve and grow. Agile marketing tactics don’t just scale quickly. They also encourage business growth, making scaling more possible, finding new ways to reach potential customers.
Suitable for the unique demands of FinTech: FinTech businesses constantly upgrade and improve products with new or improved features. Agile marketing can keep up with this level of dynamism. Besides offering insights about the best way to communicate changes to customers, these marketing approaches can help developers learn what to change or leave alone.

As B2B FinTech grows to catch up and keep pace B2C FinTech, B2B FinTech companies will need to reach B2B Companies. This needs an approach to B2B marketing that continuously improves their digital marketing and that guides modern B2B buyers towards a purchase decision

Agile Marketing: FinTech can’t wait

Santander provides a great case study of how even established financial services firms can implement agile marketing approaches. Santander shortened campaign cycles into ‘sprints’ and used daily ‘huddles’ to dynamically adjust priorities based on performance. This allowed Santander to create more adaptable campaigns that make better use of budget. Besides taking inspiration from best practice in Silicon Valley, Santander’s agile marketing approach has aligned the marketing part of their business with IT development methodologies.

Fintech companies cannot afford to wait for weeks to adjust or broadcast their marketing messages. They need tangible results fast, together with the capacity to learn from experience. Zaptino – working with Bright – used data-driven audience insight and a rapid, iterative approach to optimise key messages. In just six weeks, they were able nurture investors towards conversion that delivered over £125,000 in investment, as well as building a pipeline of longer-term opportunities.

Agile marketing relies on continuous streams of data analytics, automated processes, rapid tests, frequent evaluations, and a series of iterations. Here at Bright, we’re excited about the future of FinTech and understand the challenges our clients face. Our unique marketing methodology and technical capabilities help FinTech companies enjoy rapid growth and profits because they employ the same agile tactics that our clients use to produce new solutions.

Discover more about the intersection between agile marketing and FinTech as Bright’s client delivery director, Lydia Kirby, will be appearing as a guest panellist at this years Fintech B2B Marketing Conference on the 27th of April. Lydia will be sharing her FinTech industry insights and agile marketing expertise on the topic of ‘Winning B2B data-driven marketing strategy is the next new normal’.

April 12, 2022 Lydia Kirby Agile Marketing In Practice