Agile marketing transformation programme

Challenge

Softwire are a well established and innovative software engineering firm. With ambitious growth plans the leadership team wanted to understand how marketing could contribute best to supporting their business goals.

Softwire are traditional in their structure, with a business development sales team and dedicated marketing team focused on events, online and communication outreach. The leadership team wanted to understand the maturity of the marketing function and how they could best invest to create a marketing team that could adapt and move at pace to meet market change and scale as the business grew. They wanted to create a consistent approach to lead generation, try new tactics and use agile ways of working to get better results, help the in-house gain new experience and develop a culture of curiosity and continual improvement.

Method

Bright ran a marketing diagnostic to assess and understanding Softwire’s marketing performance, results and capabilities. Working in conjunction with the in-house team to gather data, understand current marketing effectiveness and dig into the operational and martech barriers they faced. Whilst understanding the state of Softwire’s key markets, the competitive landscape and exploring perception of the Softwire brand through perception interviews with key contacts in clients, prospect accounts and channel partners.

Bright ran a number of workshops with senior stakeholders internally at Softwire to further understand key stakeholder experience of working with the marketing team, strengths and weaknesses and what marketing support would be best deployed to support business goals in future.

The diagnostic findings were synthesised and pulled into a strategic marketing plan, a roadmap for executing the plan along with recommendations for quick wins, medium and long term projects to transform the way marketing worked and the anticipated benefits to Softwire.

This was quickly translated into a marketing transformation programme with work streams that focused on transforming lead generation campaigning, data and targeting, content strategy, martech and lead management over a 4-6 month period.

Working with Bright to move towards an agile marketing model made total sense for Softwire. We benefit from being more adaptable, confident in our data driven decision making and have the ability to quickly improve areas of underperformance whilst the team remain focused on the activities that deliver against our business goals.
Andy Smart, Director

Transformation at pace

Rapidly evaluated and understood areas of strength and weakness within the Softwire marketing operation. Created a strategic approach and plan for rapidly transforming the marketing team by establishing KPI, fostered curiosity and embedding new ways of working.

Embarked on a 4 month transformation programme to work alongside the in-house team to transfer skills through learning whilst doing, embed agile ways of thinking and working whilst optimising the use of tools to improve marketing effectiveness, elevate the Softwire brand and build sales pipeline.

Broke down internal silos and created a cross functional agile marketing hub model bringing together the right people and skills to drive campaign success. Demonstrated results and drove continual improvement through data, insight, clear reporting and risk and issue management.

Data driven approach so that marketing contribution is clearly understood and how agile ways of working help them adapt and pivot to market change at pace, especially important post Covid. Regular updates to the leadership team helped them understand how best to invest and champion the new marketing approach.

Creative communications to build rapport

Fluxx is an innovation company, creating new products and services to drive growth for some of the UK’s largest companies, such as John Lewis, Lloyds Bank and More Than insurance. Fluxx offer a unique blend of creativity and practical intelligence to help brands to develop original ideas and deliver digital products and services that are both innovative and highly lucrative.

Marketing performance improvement

Fluxx was exhibiting real potential and already held an impressive client list, but, operating in an increasingly competitive industry, was keen to build on its market share. Its team was eager to establish a systematic marketing approach that would help them to be consistent in their promotional activities and support business growth.

Fluxx’s priority was to educate its target markets on the value of innovation and the role that Fluxx plays as a catalyst and strategic creative partner. Focused on communicating its point of view through thought leadership, case studies and analysis. For this it needed to establish regular and effective contact to build lasting relationships with clients, prospects and key influencers in this space.

Bright helped Fluxx get a targeted and effective marketing program up and running, fast. We kicked off the programme with a perception audit to identify and shape the messaging that resonates among customers, prospects and employees. Working alongside Fluxx’s internal team we used this to shape and support regular content production to augment the existing marketing efforts.

The road to success

The UX and fresh content was developed for the Fluxx website and promoted across multiple social channels. Bright also established a monthly e-newsletter ‘What the Fluxx’ that publicised the latest content and nurtured an increasingly engaged network. Fluxx events were (and still are) legendary, bringing together industry business leaders through unique themes and positioning to create lively debate.

Alongside this we worked to clean up the Fluxx target database by extracting data from the company’s existing system. Analysing the information to create a list of target accounts and contact information, which was cleansed, segmented, and shared with the Fluxx team. It was clear a CRM was necessary for proper management of their data, Bright supported finding the right CRM and establish best practice usage of martech tools and reporting.