Many businesses promote a fixed mindset amongst their employees without really knowing they do so. This usually leads to a reluctance to change, a need for direction, rather than finding solutions independently, focusing on the negatives when something doesn’t work out as planned which impacts innovation. This way of thinking can be detrimental to not only your employees, but your marketing efforts as well.
In a recession, it’s critical your teams work with a growth mindset where employees continuously look for ways to improve, become critical thinkers, problem solvers with an eagerness to learn, adapt and continually question processes and ways of working to generate the best results.
How do you make the shift?
A fixed mindset is intrinsically linked with the company culture. The way to encourage the shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset lies within promoting accountability with your employees through self-reflection and open constructive feedback, encouraging acknowledgement of areas for improvement.
This also means encouraging employees to step out of their comfort zone and embrace challenges and the possibility of failure. That means from a resource perspective giving employees time and budget to test and experiment and adapt their activity. Individuals and leaders need to place value on the process and journey, not just the destination.
Empowering your employees through a new way of thinking is not only extremely valuable to your business, but to your clients as well. Helping your business to overcome obstacles, improve marketing effectiveness and generate better customer experiences through a better understanding of your customers resulting in a closer alignment of activity to business objectives, improved results and brand perception.
Teams that have a growth mindset push boundaries, are more creative and are willing to try new things – failing forward. This puts them immediately ahead of their competitors.” Zoe Merchant, Managing Director, Bright
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.
The modern marketer has a myriad of tools and data that they can use to measure their efforts. A challenge that we see many times is a lack of clarity on what success metrics they should be measuring. Establishing what metrics matter and defining your key performance indicators (KPIs) will ensure your activity and business goals are aligned to achieve the right outcomes.
When setting your KPIs avoid ambiguity and vanity metrics, vanity metrics are metrics that make you look good to others but do not help you understand your own performance in a way that informs future strategies. For example, instead of ‘more website visits’ instead, focus on ‘5% growth in website visits with a 13% form conversion rate from your key personas’. This will give your teams a clear goal to work towards and an understanding of the data they need to collect to report against these KPIs. Ensure there’s a clear cascade down from your annual goals and KPIs, to your key initiatives, programmes, and projects.
Here’s a checklist to ensure your KPIs meet the mark:
Does your KPI align with your business goals?
Have you removed any vanity metrics?
Does your KPI tie back into what you want to achieve?
Are you able to measure your KPI?
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 times of business hardship, the marketing budget is often cut. This becomes more likely when a recession hits and businesses look to further cut costs. Smarter businesses continue investing in marketing and R&D at the same level (or sometimes higher) to help sustain business growth and success in the long term, whilst looking for operational efficiencies that can be gained through introducing new ways of working, optimising systems and tools and focusing on data-driven marketing.
When budgets are reduced, there is often increased pressure on the marketing team to demonstrate the value of their efforts. Marketers can combat this by clearly demonstrating the impact and contribution of their efforts. Moving towards more agile ways of working and becoming more data-driven in your marketing approach is key. Not only does this allow you to report on performance more accurately, but also delve into insights that inform your strategy and provide evidence to support where to prioritise your limited resources.
Not only can data provide insight into the effectiveness of current activity, but it also aids informed decision-making to drive improvement. Working within an experimentation framework, and using the data generated to provide valuable insight early into what is and isn’t working, helping you make an informed decision on whether to pivot or persevere quickly.
Data-driven marketing increases ROI, with campaigns that leverage data-driven personalisation reporting 5-8x ROI for their campaign spend.
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, prospects behaviour and selection processes may be different. What has worked well previously may not be as effective within the current climate. Taking an agile approach to your marketing will help your teams adapt to market change more easily and quickly. A key aspect of this is experimentation.
For many marketers, when they think of experimentation they think of A/B testing, and this is one mechanism for continually improving your activity. But experimentation goes beyond this. For example, look at trialling ads across different social platforms to determine which site generates a higher number of quality leads, or look at trialling different pieces of content to see what resonates with your audience.
True experimentation starts with defining hypotheses and developing a framework and series of tests that can prove or disprove these. Understanding how these changes are impacting reach, engagement and conversion and providing insights to inform your activity and how your marketing needs to adapt accordingly.
Start by establishing an experimentation framework so that you have defined your hypothesis to prove or disprove and have set out the data points you will measure (KPI, timeframe, segment etc) to assess impact. When you are experimenting don’t throw everything up in the ai, you already know or have some understanding of what tactics, channels and topics are working with your audience. Think about what risk you are willing to take – put 60- 70% of your efforts into activity and tactics you understand and tinker with the tone of voice, images or headlines, 20% of your effort into testing brand-new tactics, adjacent audiences or more radical changes to messaging or images; finally think about putting 10% of your effort into high-risk tests such as bold new messaging or calls to action. Take the time to explore your learnings – bring the team together at the end of the sprint or experiment cycle to run a retrospective and extract all the learnings you can to drive optimisations and support the next wave of experiment setting.
Experimentation can provide data and more confidence in the decision-making process, particularly when looking to invest more in a challenge or approach that is generating results but don’t be afraid to divest if something isn’t working. Make sure you give ample time for your activity to run and generate meaningful data to inform strategic decisions on the allocation of budget. To get the most from experimentation leadership needs to foster curiosity and enable a growth mindset within the marketing team and wider business.
Advertisers who run 15 experiments per year reap proven positive impact over the long-term seeing 30% higher ad performance in the same year.
Agile marketers swear by experimentation to help them fail faster and it is an important tool in their arsenal to rapidly validate assumptions, test ideas, tactics, channels, messaging and even propositions to optimise marketing performance and deliver ROI for their businesses.
“Embedding experimentation into our marketing approach has helped us take a data-driven approach and allows for continual improvement to optimise and drive better outcomes from our campaigns and activities.” Dan Meek, CEO, LIW
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.
Customer and content go hand in hand, a recent report by Netline found that overall B2B content consumption increased more than 9% in 2022, with c-level consumption rising by 15.8% YOY. The stats are compelling, in part driven by the pandemic and a lack of in-person events and networking driving the need for research and learning through other means. Research from FocusVision suggests that as many as 13 pieces of content are now required before a prospect is ready to engage.
The pandemic has also cemented the link between content consumption and intent, providing valuable insights into where your prospects are within their buying cycle and how likely they are to be considering or close to a purchase decision.
This poses a few challenges for marketers in a recession – the type of content to invest in and how much?
Type of content
To tackle the types of content to invest in you need to shake down your personas, get to grips with relevant industry trends and what you’re hearing from your customers are all essential insights when looking at what topics are of most value to your audiences. Identifying evergreen topics for content will give you longevity and you can blend topical reactionary content alongside them.
Overall eBook registration volume grew by 15.5%, accounting for 43.3% of all downloads in 2021. Short-form video had the highest ROI in 2021 of any social media marketing strategy as 30% of social media marketers plan to invest in it more than any other trend in 2022. Video exponentially outperforms other content for engagement and consumption but remember to understand its role in the buyer journey and invest in the right type of content.
Level of investment
Content creation isn’t easy, many businesses often find creating content a challenge, however establishing a content theme is an efficient way to meet your audience’s needs, without substantially increasing the workload of your team, and an even better way to do this is by leveraging content you already have.
Decide on a content theme, establish an informative piece of content on a specific topic or theme that can be broken into many derivate assets, such as whitepapers, eBooks and guides. You likely already have this within your arsenal and will be simpler and faster to shatter into multiple assets.
This reuse, repurpose and recycle approach is an efficient and process-driven way to cover all your content bases, ensuring you’re providing content that resonates with your audience through different topicality, messaging and format at each stage of the buyer journey.
“In the ever-changing world of search engine optimization and content generation, AI can give marketers the edge they need” – Todd Van Hoosear, Principal Ground Control Communications and Lecturer, Boston University College of Communications
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.
Being a customer-centric business in a recession should not be understated. Customer centricity, with a strong focus on audience development principles (building and nurturing a community of loyal supporters and customers around your brand), is a winning strategy. Building trust with your client and prospect community will help you identify and test new ways to market your products and services.
What does that actually mean in practice?
During a recession, it’s time to revisit the importance of customers within your marketing model. Marketers typically use the funnel approach, focused on attracting new leads at the top and working down to converting into customers at the bottom, which inevitably puts customers low down on the list.
In contrast, the flywheel approach puts customers at the centre, surrounded by proactive client service, marketing and sales support. Creating a holistic view of your clients by creating a cross-functional approach to your sales, marketing and client support really helps create a frictionless and positive client experience. This means all the teams working across your client touchpoints need to learn to work together to break down silos and make sure the client is always put first.
The flywheel model shifts teams from an inward focus (we want to tell prospects and customers what we want to) to a customer-centric focus (we want to listen to prospects and customers and deliver remarkable experiences), enhancing a prospect’s journey even after they’ve matured into a customer.
Customer centricity flywheel
This model helps businesses take advantage of how customers purchase today – through their network, third-party review sites and other peer networks (e.g., social media).
Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable compared to companies that are not.
Putting the customer at the heart of your marketing is a key principle of agile marketing and encourages teams to think and prioritise marketing efforts to maximise where and how you add value to your customers. Becoming more customer-centric pays off – keeping a loyal customer is cheaper than net new, and a net new customer that feels valued can become a brand advocate and embark on a continued partnership in the long term.
“Changing our approach to be more customer-centric our client satisfaction rates increased by 10%, which then resulted in a 5% increase in yearly spend.” – Agile Marketing Manifesto
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.
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.
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.
