Bright Ideas

100 days to implement Agile Marketing foundations within Informa PLC’s Pharma Marketing division

100 days to implement Agile Marketing foundations within Informa PLC’s Pharma Marketing division

In a rapidly evolving landscape where innovation meets customer expectations head-on, Informa Pharma and Bright embarked on a groundbreaking journey of agility and adaptability. Informa is a globally recognised leader in events and digital services, a member of the FTSE 100 which operates in over 30 countries, with more than 11,000 employees.

The challenge

Informa Plc is a globally recognised leader in events and digital services, a member of the FTSE 100, which operates in over 30 countries, with more than 11,000 employees. One of Informa’s subsidiaries, Informa Markets, has a dynamic pharma marketing team. They were tasked with targeting the pharmaceutical sector with the challenges of a growing number of customer touchpoints and increasing customer expectations.

Their solution? A shift towards agile marketing practices to foster flexibility and responsiveness.

We’re witnessing a shift in how our audiences interact with us not just joining our events but an increasing shift towards a long term, always-on relationship based on knowledge and access to critical insights. To thrive in this environment, we must be agile and adaptive, placing the customer at the centre of our strategy.
Victoria Hardiment, Pharma Marketing Director

The first phase

The first phase of the marketing transformation journey started by enabling the marketing leadership team with an awareness of agile marketing principles and best practices. This inspired Victoria Hardiment, Pharma Marketing Director, to delve further into how agile marketing could help the Pharma marketing team evolve their ways of working, secure better prioritisation, and use data to deliver greater business value ultimately.

The journey has been challenging but rewarding. We’ve successfully launched three pilot hubs and gained buy-in from all levels of seniority. The Scrumban method has facilitated our work tremendously, allowing us to launch our main event CPHI Europe registration earlier than ever.
Lizzie Knight, Agile Marketing Lead, Informa Pharma

Informa hired Lizzie Knight as an Agile Marketing Lead to pilot their agile transformation. Lizzie worked with Bright to launch a 100-day plan to lay the foundation for agile marketing adoption. The plan defined clear objectives and empowered the agile marketing hub teams with alignment to business goals.

Bright plays a crucial role in this transformative journey as an active practitioner, providing strategic support, training, coaching, and advisory services to the agile marketing lead. With deep expertise in agile marketing, they are reshaping the team’s marketing operations, resulting in effective outreach, increased engagement, and significant efficiency gains.

The results

With the roadmap defined and Bright enabling the change, the journey towards greater marketing agility to support the business with its ambitious growth plans is well and truly underway. The Pharma marketing team’s early experiences demonstrate the transformative power of agile marketing when well implemented. As the journey unfolds, agile marketing will continue to empower how they evolve and adapt in an ever-changing business landscape.

Early launch of major event registration: Leveraging agile marketing methodologies to drive efficient execution and timely delivery
Alignment around personas and segmentation: Refining marketing efforts by gaining deeper customer insights, improving both customer experience and journey
Advanced tracking and reporting: Increased visibility of marketing activities and their impact on the business allowing the teams to take a test and learn approach to drive continual improvement
Greater team alignment: Enhancing internal collaborations for a more seamless and efficient workflow

This is just the beginning of our journey into the world of agile marketing. We’re taking an ‘agile’ approach to our rollout; testing, learning, and iterating as we go. We’re excited to continue on this path, reap the benefits and share our experiences as we transform.
Victoria Hardiment, Pharma Marketing Director

Learn how Bright can help your organisation accelerate your marketing transformation.

November 2, 2023 Alaina Roberts

Agile experimentation achieves 1030% increased engagement, 273 leads and 213% ROI

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

Exceeding ARR £400k targets with agile marketing approach for SaaS business

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

Transforming underperformance by embedding an agile marketing model

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

Accelerating GTM plans with agile marketing ways of working

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

205 C-suite leaders downloading whitepaper thanks to outsourced marketing support from Bright

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

Agile marketing from scratch

Flo Group (formerly MavenWire) delivers transportation consulting services and solutions to large global firms. They aim to improve logistics and support the evolution of the supply chain across a wide range of industries – from retail to manufacturing.

MavenWire had the credentials and the experience as a market leader, but struggled to communicate effectively to its target audiences, who were difficult-to-reach senior decision makers.

Bright were engaged to create an agile marketing strategy for MavenWire to transition its brand to Flo, create a new identity, build reputation in the EMEA region and differentiate itself in the market to better engage the right prospects, build strong alliance relationships and attracting new talent.

Creating a brand identity and brand voice

Bright formed an agile marketing hub including subject matter experts, data and reporting specialists, project sponsor and Flo’s existing marketing resources to develop a strategic roadmap and use an iterative agile marketing approach for activity execution – focusing on the website and the core collaterals to support business development.

Initially, Bright created a joint brand identity to showcase MavenWire and Flo’s expertise, elevating it to a market leadership position in preparation for the transition to Flo Group. Starting with creating a website built upon clear, consistent messaging and a clean look. The website was validated with key audiences, so that only the successful elements were retained whilst reworking areas of underperformance.

New content and messaging drove search engine traffic, supported by a social media campaign and other marketing activities, resulting in increased time spent on the website and greater social following from key audiences.

A consistent brand voice was woven through the off line collateral to support the business development process via sales toolkits and to use at events. Up-to-date case studies gave the brand visible credentials to approach the right decision makers and provide evidence of success.

Once the foundation marketing was underway, a demand generation strategy was developed based on campaigns to build pipeline for key go-to market propositions.

Bright created a marketing foundation for Flo Group by implementing a strong brand identity and driving multichannel demand campaigns, that delivered results that supported our business goals.
Barry Hayes, CEO

Driving further demand

The campaigns were designed to deliver fast results and used agile marketing to quickly execute, gather feedback, validate and restructure the propositions in order to best exploit market demand and maximise response. Bright also proactively used this approach with Flo’s alliance partners such as Descartes, Oracle, FourKites and Flexis to quickly develop and execute joint campaigns to drive further demand.

Bright added value to Flo’s annual conference presence by bringing consistency to communication outreach prior to, at and post events. This was combined with identifying, following up and nurturing new opportunities with key prospects.

After feedback and research, Bright recommended creating a stronger event and market presence through adding video content to explain complex ideas in an accessible format, create higher impact and drive engagement.

July 9, 2019 Sian Heaphy No comments

Integrated agile marketing drives success

IMGROUP now part of Hitachi Vantara, was a multiple award-winning data insight and information management consultancy that helped clients improve business performance, achieve competitive advantage and reduce cost through the effective use of data.

The IMGROUP leadership was looking for a marketing partner that could help reinvigorate their marketing programmes, inject new ways of working and help them to take ownership of early stage pipeline. Bright was chosen to work with them to create an agile approach to campaigning using thought leadership to drive engagement and establishing KPI that aligned to the company’s business objectives.

Injecting agile ways of working

Bright conducted a marketing diagnostic that identified key areas for improvement across people and culture, ways of working and martech. The marketing leadership and Bright then restructured the in-house team to ensure it was results-focused and better integrated with the sales team.

Bright worked with the in-house team to create and execute an agile marketing approach and plan focused on lead generation and brand communications. Built on strong content and integrated across all channels including events, PR, UX, digital and social media marketing.

Bright has the expertise, credibility and gravitas needed to help us instigate change and get support from the senior leadership team. The result was sharper, more targeted and effective marketing that built the brand presence as well as generating leads.
Rav Atwal, Marketing Director

Agile marketing transformation

Bright brought a mix of strategic thinking with a pragmatic, results-based, agile approach. The team delivered both critical short-term benefits and the longer-term strategic approach needed to build a successful programme that met the needs of the business, the results included:

800% increase in qualified leads
High quality content used across multiple channels
Brand building resulting in acquisition by Hitachi
Greater alignment between sales and marketing
Transformed the marketing function and injected agile ways of working
Improved internal perception of the in-house marketing team

July 9, 2019 Sian Heaphy

Perception as a spring board for repositioning

Founded in 2005, Mint Digital helps companies create and grow standout digital products and services. As the digital landscape has changed, Mint Digital has adapted and evolved to meet its demands. International expansion and the launch of new services meant the company had diversified and the senior team were keen to find out how this had impacted perception of them in the market.

Key to the project was that Mint Digital ended up with refreshed compelling, credible and up-to-date positioning messaging, that would give them a strong platform to drive the business forward.

The team at Bright were great to work with and very professional. The diagnostic was insightful, and the final workshop rounded everything off, helping us to shape our core messages.
Noam Sohachevsky, Director

Digging deeper into perception

Bright conducted a perception audit using an agile marketing approach to get maximum value and insight quickly. The perception audit focused on interviews with key customers, prospects and influencers. Using a customised series of questions that iterated and evolved with each piece of feedback. The questionnaire explored perceptions around the brand including strengths, perceived weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Once the responses had been collected and collated, they formed the basis of a positioning and messaging session facilitated by Bright. The session used the key areas of strength and opportunity as the basis for a messaging architecture to take them forward in future.

Customer centric messaging

The perception audit, messaging workshop and the architecture created from its findings, enabled Mint Digital to align its messages to its audiences’ needs creating a customer centric approach and provided the following business benefits:

Insight into what its target audience really thought
Identified new market entrant opportunities
Valuable and actionable feedback to sharpen its delivery
Compelling, credible and up to date messaging
Repositioning strategy

July 9, 2019 Sian Heaphy No comments