Bright Ideas

Agile experimentation & audience development: Bright’s campaign strategy delivers impressive results for an online publishing company

Agile experimentation & audience development: Bright’s campaign strategy delivers impressive results for a publishing company

The Challenge

A global B2B digital media company specialising in publishing and information sought to enhance brand awareness and drive subscription growth for three of their brands on LinkedIn and Meta platforms. To achieve this, Bright was challenged to create and execute a successful campaign that would elevate brand recognition and bolster subscriptions.

The Solution

Bright identified thought-leadership content as a key driver for lead acquisition, along with influencer engagement within each brand’s vertical. To drive subscriptions for the three brands, Bright implemented a 16-week campaign with 23 ad campaigns, each highlighting a unique topic and presented on a gated page to drive subscriptions.

Employing agile marketing principles and a collaborative team with capability from Bright and the publishing firm. To adopt a test-and-learn approach, Bright collected valuable insights, including audience engagement with native platform gating vs. website gating and preferences for ad creative. Bright’s agile experimentation resulted in four varying creatives per campaign on average, with a focus on audience engagement and development.

The Result

Bright’s tailored and targeted approach to paid media marketing delivered a significant impact by increasing brand awareness and subscriptions for the three brands. The application of a test-and-learn methodology enabled Bright to collect valuable data insights, which informed campaign optimisation efforts. By focusing on resonating with the target audiences, Bright was able to use these insights to achieve optimal campaign results.

The paid media proof of concept campaign, generated:

1,490,724 impressions, resulting in 273 leads.
An ROI of 213% based on the commercial value of acquired subscribers
1 of the brands’ LinkedIn page saw a 1030% increase in clicks YOY
Another of the brands’ LinkedIn page experienced a 737% increase in followers YOY

It has been a pleasure to work with the team at Bright. The outputs generated and performance we’ve seen is incredible. They’ve helped share their expertise and knowledge whilst injecting audience development and agile ways of working to upskill our existing marketing team.
Director of Engagement and Operations

September 28, 2023 Alexandra Jefferies

An agile marketing approach to SaaS success for Reward Gateway

Reward Gateway, an employee engagement benefits solution provider, aimed to launch a new low-touch, scalable SaaS service for SME customers (Reward Gateway for Small Business known as RG4SB). They partnered with Bright to challenge their traditional campaign format and experiment with social media platforms, tone of voice, content, and incentives to understand how to reach and connect with their known and new audience personas.

Challenge

Reward Gateway needed to take an audience centric approach to define themes and topics that appealed to the SME market, understand where and how existing content could be adapted and explore new marketing methods that could rapidly acquire clients and secure the Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) required to demonstrate success.

The Solution

Bright worked with the RG4SB team to rapidly research and understand the audience personas and implement an experimentation-based approach to test, learn, and optimise activities and processes in short sprint cycles to capitalise on learnings. Bright focused on setting experiments and optimising across social media, inbound marketing, events, nurture flows, high-value content, LinkedIn prospecting and a limited free trial offer. This meant RG4SB could reach the new SME audience and convert them through the sales funnel at each stage of the buyer journey.

The Result

Target ARR of £400,000 and 550 customers exceeded
187 new paying business clients acquired
Individual membership increased by 3,454 (64% increase)

The limited free trial and associated campaign messaging significantly increased traffic and generated qualified leads, resulting in exceeding the target ARR. Combined with the agile marketing strategy implemented by the RG4SB and Bright which drove acquisition and reduced churn.

The approach from Bright has been a complete game-changer for us. We’ve seen growth both in audience engagement and sales. I have no doubt this is down to our new way of thinking and working.
Pippa Van Praagh, Product & Strategy Enablement Director at Reward Gateway

June 27, 2023 Sian Heaphy

It’s About Time | Positioning and re-brand for London City Airport

The only airport located in the city; London City Airport opened its doors in 1987. Because of its proximity to Canary Wharf in Royal Docks, its operations are restricted, and its growth limited. As the airport has a steep approach and short runway, no airplane larger than an Airbus A318 can use the airport, and operating hours are limited due to noise restrictions, meaning the airport is often overlooked.

There is also a perception that London City Airport is just for business travellers rather than families and holiday makers.

Bright was challenged to help increase awareness, loyalty, and revenue to compete effectively through their two most prominent marketing elements: website and advertising; working with the airport’s internal marketing department and design agency Endeavour across this campaign.

Advertising campaign

The campaign depicts nine different customer personas reflecting the airport’s target audiences, from business travellers and young city breakers, to working parents and retired travellers, alongside ideas how they can put that time saved, by choosing London City Airport, to better use. The nine adverts have launched in the U.K. and key European markets, as well as print and digital outdoor sites owned by the airport and around London, including road-side panels at Euston, Canary Wharf and Holborn.

Challenge

Raise awareness of London City Airport, increase the number of passengers, and position it as not just for business travel.

The Solution

Exploring the key benefits of London City Airport, we saw that its proximity to the city centre reduced travel times from home or work to the airport compared to competitor airports such as Gatwick and Heathrow. This allowed passengers to spend more time where they wanted to be – either at home or at their destination.

From our research and passenger persona exercises, we put together a series of user journeys and stories that we captured through informal photography. The accompanying copy, with tagline ‘it’s about time’, emphasised the concept of passengers spending their time how they wanted to, rather than on travel to the airport. The campaign ran across a range of media including out of home and print, and we then developed the creative into a series of tactical adverts promoting specific routes and destinations which ran digitally.

Customer experience is a priority for our business. To stay ahead of the game, we need to better understand customer wishes, needs and behaviours.
As the airport continues to diversify with new and exciting business and leisure routes, in addition to the core business traveller, we want to speak directly and in a very human way to new customers, who may not have considered the airport before, supported by an intuitive new website.
Cyrielle Wagenfuhr, Senior Marketing Manager at London City Airport

October 24, 2022 Alexandra Jefferies

Securing pipeline and over £125,000 in investment

The challenge

Zapnito needed to build a pipeline of investors to pursue for its seed-round funding while also raising interest and awareness of the company within the investor community. It was also key to build the CEO’s personal network for future brand-building and sales opportunities.

Method

A 6 week agile-lead demand generation campaign established across the UK, US and Europe.
Rapid, iterative approach to optimise key messages and nurture investors towards conversion.
Established audience motivations and analysed the data to curate highly engaging and targeted communications.

Results

28 qualified, opted-in leads who were actively investing
16 new meetings with prospective investors
12 new angel investment groups
£125,000 in confirmed investment after 6 weeks
320 warm contacts within the target criteria
Over 100 positive responses

£125,000

in confirmed investment within 6 weeks

July 8, 2021 Alexandra Jefferies

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.

June 3, 2020 Zoe Merchant

Lead generation campaign success!

Challenge

TECHNIA wanted to validate and launch their hybrid cloud Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tool to generate pipeline within the UK and Nordic markets as well as develop its relationship with its cloud partner Dassault Systemes.

Method

Bright proposed an agile marketing campaign, integrating LinkedIn prospecting, social advertising and email marketing activities to drive the desired outcomes. Majoring on the key challenges many manufacturing with existing cloud-based and on-premise solutions face. Bright created demand and built pipeline for TECHNIA’s services, through a Gartner industry report validating their offering.

Bright focused on reaching outside TECHNIA’s known market, to drive demand from new prospects. To move the campaign forward at pace, Bright got off to a fast start by repurposing existing TECHNIA content and visuals to bring the campaign to life.

They understand how to use agile marketing to bring together key stakeholders, create allies and get projects done at pace in a global organisation.
Ghassan Sultan, CMO

Building qualified opportunities at pace

Proved viability of hybrid cloud proposition, creating an engaged database of contacts within target accounts with strong pipeline.

At the close of campaign:

524 leads generated
70 Report downloads
17 meetings booked
1 identified opportunity

Increased brand awareness in UK and Nordics and strengthening joint partner marketing opportunities

May 11, 2020 Sian Heaphy

Creating a new proposition whilst embedding agile marketing at BMA

Challenge

The BMA were launching a new commercial proposition with an unexplored target audience and needed to validate its proposition and get to market and demonstrate results quickly.

The BMA take a traditional approach to marketing with different specialist teams responsible for key aspects of marketing execution such as comms, member acquisition, digital, design etc. They wanted to use this campaign to be different, trying new tactics and embed agile ways of working.

Method

Using our agile hub delivery model, we created a team of Bright agile experts and BMA marketing to support the delivery of a compelling value proposition and go to market campaign to deliver business objectives.

Bright worked with the BMA team in sprints to embed agile processes and ways of working to test, learn and build on key messages quickly and proactively. Bright provided on the ground and remote support to enable knowledge transfer supporting communication and cross-functional team collaboration to drive results.

Embedding agile ways of working has transformed our marketing, helping us become more efficient and creative to hit stretch targets and take a new commercial proposition to market quickly
Adrian Brooks, Strategic Change Lead at the BMA

Results

Introduced an agile marketing hub to lead the market campaign effort, starting with rapid proposition development to start to test, learn and improve the go to market approach within a few weeks.

Established commercial KPIs so it was easy to understand areas of over and under achievement to support continual improvements that drove results at pace.

Focused on transfer of agile marketing know how and cultural impact of change through collaborative working and leadership support.

Proved the hypothesis that the BMA could develop, launch and scale a commercial proposition and established strong revenue streams for the future

May 11, 2020 Sian Heaphy

Rapid launch of a new value proposition

Challenge

TECHNIA wanted to quickly define, develop and launch a Cloud based Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) application solution. The market was moving towards cloud first deployments so time was of the essence. TECHNIA needed to safeguard its existing client base, migrate them to the cloud offering and expand into new accounts globally. It needed to take an agile marketing approach to drive it forward.

Bright was engaged to run a rapid proposition development process with the objective of a minimum viable launch within four weeks. It was important to align the needs and requirements of its 12 territories and bring together multiple stakeholders for the launch to be a success.

Method

The project was broken into sprints so that it was easy to iterate and collaborate with the TECHNIA team and keep the project moving at pace. A combination of market research and perception interviews were used to benchmark the current offering and define the new proposition. Validation was undertaken at key stages to ensure messaging resonated and engaged the target audience.

Bright delivered a go to market strategy to help TECHNIA launch the proposition quickly and took a test, learn and improve approach to quickly understand performance of the launch positioning and messaging. Sales enablement was supported by toolkits including microsite and sales collaterals to support consistency across the global territories.

They understand how to use agile marketing to bring together key stakeholders, create allies and get projects done at pace in a global organisation.
Ghassan Sultan, CMO

Defined value proposition in market within 4 weeks

TECHNIA’s new cloud application was successful launched to market within four weeks, other benefits include:

Introduced agile ways of working to rapidly introduce a new proposition into market and continual improvement

Roadmap for global and local launch, bringing together multiple stakeholders to support and align to go to market strategy across key territories

Snappy, sharp and value led messaging and content to engage leads and convert them faster.

May 10, 2020 Sian Heaphy

Smashing the 1,000 attendee target

The challenge

Ghassan Sultan, CMO of TECHNIA a global Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) consultancy set out to deliver a virtual experience worth attending; his primary goal was to attract over 1,000 attendees to a virtual conference to raise brand awareness and drive sales pipeline. After a successful physical event in 2019, with significant investment in content, logistics and event space; the TECHNIA team decided to rethink the ‘roadshow’ approach to develop an experience which delivered on content and engagement whilst aligning to the brand mission for sustainability.

TECHNIA originated from a series of acquisitions – Ghassan also saw this as an opportunity to bring together the local marketing teams to drive attendance for this first truly global event. Ghassan’s vision brought together digital marketing pioneers, embedded agile marketing practices and exceeded KPIs by delivering a standout virtual experience at scale.

TECHNIA’s key objectives:

>1,000 registrations for the virtual event
Prove that the event could be commercialised by attracting sponsorship partners
Create a unique virtual experience that rivalled physical events and would be sustainable with minimum carbon footprint
Use agile marketing to bring together a cross functional global team to promote the event and unify the dispersed TECHNIA marketing teams

With the event inception in late 2019, they were ahead of the game and fully launched before global lockdown due to Covid-19.

The concept itself is simple. We wanted industry leaders across a variety of sectors to collaborate together on reimagining the future of PLM. With the focus on sustainability, promotion of the event encouraged prospects to join the conversation. Well-designed booths played host to innovative debate as some of the brightest minds in PLM shared their experiences and invaluable insight with others. It is this interactivity and engagement factor that was championed by TECHNIA and the team and highlighted the true potential of going virtual.

Method

Planning began in November 2019, curating content and working with a third party to develop a platform which could deliver on the promise of an engaging event. Having previously worked on a successful campaign, TECHNIA teamed up with Bright a leading strategic marketing consultancy specialising in agile marketing practice to create the go to market plan.

Introducing an agile marketing hub

With an ambitious target of 1,000 attendees in less than three months, Bright worked with the corporate marketing team to implement an agile marketing hub. The hub is a blended team of Bright and TECHNIA resource that was able to flex and scale based on campaign requirements and supported day to day delivery whilst embedding agile ways of working across the marketing function through on the ground change management. Bright worked with the local teams providing execution oversight and continual improvement of campaign execution using a variety of different channels to drive registrations, testing, learning and improving on results to optimise campaign performance.

The campaign focused on blending an integrated approach to target both existing and new accounts. As a digital event there was a heavy focus on digital channels, including:

Localised email campaigns across all regions, including personalised nurture and information comms to registrants
LinkedIn and Facebook advertising. Using sponsored posts to retarget key accounts and audience personas
LinkedIn Social Prospecting, targeting a global audience with direct peer to peer messaging via LinkedIn
Organic social promotion across LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook
Partner marketing. Engaging with event sponsors through regular comms and providing a marketing pack of resources to help them promote the event
Sales engagement. Engaging with the regional teams through regular comms to ensure personal and consistent promotion to target accounts, especially those already in an active sales process
Conversion rate optimisation on forms, continual testing to remove any points of friction preventing sign-up and ensure opt-in for future marketing beyond the event
Coverage in the Engineering press. PLMIF – A traditional Physical Event Becomes Digital

Cultural change

Driven by TECHNIA’s core mission to ‘Make Product Creation Sustainable’ this event had the full support of the CEO, Jonas Gejer. Creating a step change in the culture towards agile marketing methods, and the reduction of traditional events, required a collaborative culture. For a company which has grown through acquisition, they have never seen so much cross functional collaboration. Communication and working towards a joint goal have been invaluable in moving the culture forward.

Adapting to market disruption

Keeping a keen eye on market during Covid-19 TECHNIA have been able to reap the benefits of using agile ways of working to quickly flex the target industries moving away from a focus on aviation towards a focus on Life Sciences and rapid manufacturing. Adding new, relevant content and speakers to the programme on topics that would be valuable during Covid-19 and beyond and by shifting targeting, it meant TECHNIA would engage the most valuable audience for sales follow up post event.

With agile marketing, we were able to bring my vision to life, creating an interactive virtual experience bringing together the global PLM community by working as an agile hub at pace in a global organisation.
Ghassan Sultan, CMO

Virtual event success!

The live days of the event were a storming success, delivering on leads, brand awareness and user experience, including:

Created a ground-breaking, sustainable virtual event
Positioned and promoted a virtual experience to generate >1,200 high value registrations
Created an interactive and multifaceted experience blending live and on demand content, large and intimate sessions and allowing networking across the event
Increased brand awareness and solidified the brand positioning with an innovative and sustainable event
Aligned brand values with marketing activities to deliver business outcomes and support growth objectives
Created longevity through its strategy to deliver a month-long engagement within a virtual experience
Commercialised its virtual event with sponsorship and well attended booths
Brought together a team of corporate and local marketers to execute across 12 territories

The results in numbers

1789 total registrations
1188 total users on live days
3802 Sponsor booths visits
8455 document views
2210 video views

May 7, 2020 Sian Heaphy

Virtual marketing team for next-level growth

Overview

ECS Digital is a leader in automation and digital transformation. They’ve helped clients such as Walmart, RBS, and Vodafone to deliver software and services faster and at lower cost through the adoption of DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices. We were engaged by ECS Digital for our technological B2B marketing expertise and agile marketing expertise.

ECS Digital are a mid sized consultancy, based near London Bridge. Initially they had no in-house marketing resource. They realised that building credibility and increasing demand around their brand, to achieve their ambitious growth objectives, would require a marketing team with greater knowledge of the technology and B2B environment and the ability to get off to a fast start.

Agile virtual marketing at pace

Bright worked as the virtual marketing team for ECS Digital. This approach gives companies that do not want to invest in headcount nor have the time to wait to complete the recruitment and set up process for an in-house team or want to extend their existing team. Our service provides clients with their own core team supported by other Bright team resources as and when needed.

We like to really get to know our clients, so that we can add as much value as possible to their organisation, through appropriate marketing efforts. As the virtual marketing team for ECS Digital, we became engrained as a part of the team. The core team spent at least a day a week working in the ECS Digital offices. Through this (and a good number of nights out!) we became well-known faces in the ECS Digital offices, and the go-to for marketing needs.

For a business in a fast moving area, marketing is key. With Bright we get a virtual marketing team that brings the right skills at the right time time. The Bright team are part of our team, couldn’t recommend them highly enough!
Andy Cureton, Managing Director

Scaleable outsourced marketing expertise

The early months of working together focused upon lead generation and building credibility amongst senior decision makers. Clear marketing objectives were put in place aligned to the business targets and growth ambitions. The foundations of the ECS Digital marketing managed service are built upon using agile marketing to test, learn and build on success. Blending content creation, social media, email marketing, PPC, website optimisation, with the addition of quarterly campaigns to achieve specific goals.

Website and blog visits hit an all-time high; social portfolio following tripled; and the ECS Digital contact base grew exponentially with top-level business contacts setting the scene for further campaigning and nurture to build pipeline. Since this early engagement Bright has supported ECS Digital set up and transition its marketing function in-house transferring the agile ways of working which have allowed it to adapt and evolve as the business grows.

Senior audience engagement success
Campaign whitepaper downloads by CIOs and CTOs

July 9, 2019 Sian Heaphy