Bright Ideas

Embracing marketing agility: ADP’s strategic leap forward with Bright

Embracing marketing agility: ADP’s strategic leap forward with Bright

The client

ADP, established in 1949 and listed on the NASDAQ, is a Fortune 500 company and a global leader in payroll services and HR solutions. With a heritage of over 75 years, ADP manages global operations across many countries and sectors. Partnering with Bright, ADP launched an ambitious initiative to instil agility within its International marketing team (known as ESI), improving responsiveness and aligning operations closely with sales and business goals.

The challenge

Facing the challenge of disparate international teams and varied operational practices, ADP’s ESI marketing function needed a realignment—not just in tools and processes but fundamentally in mindset. The goal was to transition from traditional practices to a more integrated, agile marketing approach that could unify global efforts and increase operational efficiency.

Graham Wylie, VP International Marketing said “By adopting agile practices, we can drive success, maximise our potential, and ensure our team remains innovative, efficient, and highly engaged. This transformation is vital for meeting the growing demands of our business and achieving our ambitious goals.“

Agile marketing has been a game changer for us. Whilst asking the teams to change their way of working was challenging at times, it bore fruit in the end once they understood that it’s not just about speed; it’s about being strategically aligned and responsive. The clarity and focus that Bright’s training brought have enabled us to be more adaptive and impactful.
Els Humphreys-Davies, the ESI Senior Director of Field Marketing and programme sponsor

The solution

Bright developed a bespoke agile marketing training and activation programme, tailored to the teams specific requirements and incorporating use cases that the ADP ESI marketing team would use as the pilots to activate the new ways of working and thinking.

The initiative began with an in-depth discovery phase, followed by an interactive agile marketing training programme delivered across the global marketing teams. Introducing the agile marketing principals and best practice in a way that fit the ADP ESI marketing environment, the programme focused on the role of experimentation and taking a test and learn approach, through measurement and KPIs to sustainably use agile to overcome barriers. Over 60 marketers worldwide were engaged in this transformative process.

Leadership engagement

A critical component of the solution was leadership training to help the marketing leadership team role model a growth mindset and allow the new ways of working to flourish. As well as embracing experimentation, reflecting the agile principles instilled across the function.

Activation and support

The training was hands-on, involving over 30 hours of virtual classroom instruction & interactive sessions segmented into five strategic modules. This approach ensured that the concepts taught were not only understood but also immediately implemented, fostering a learning-by- doing culture. Bright’s team, comprising B2B marketing practitioners and agile experts, provided ongoing practical support, particularly as teams transitioned into pilot phases, ensuring the new ways of working were successfully adopted and marketing effectiveness was enhanced.

The results

Agile marketing is not just a methodology; it’s a mindset that has helped propel the ADP international teams to new levels of excellence, delivering significant improvements across several key performance metrics:

Increased speed to market: Campaigns were launched faster, with a marked increase in creativity and innovation due to greater experimentation encouraged by a culture fostering curiosity and a growth mindset
Data-driven marketing: A strong emphasis on data-driven decisions and continuous improvement allowed the team to access campaign results during whilst the campaign was running and pivot activity, rather than waiting for final results.
Data-driven marketing: By prioritising data-driven decisions and continuous improvement, the marketing team gained real-time access to results, enabling them to adjust their strategies throughout the campaign.
Professional development: Marketers appreciated the investment in their skills and career development, acquiring valuable new capabilities that bolstered their professional growth
Cross-functional collaboration: Enhanced collaboration across the teams throughout campaign lifecycles aligned KPIs, shared regional learnings, and underscored the benefits of integrated marketing strategies.

Team insights

Els Humphreys-Davies, the ESI Senior Director of Field Marketing and programme sponsor, reflects on the journey: “Agile marketing has been a game changer for us. Whilst asking the teams to change their way of working was challenging at times, it bore fruit in the end once they understood that it’s not just about speed; it’s about being strategically aligned and responsive. The clarity and focus that Bright’s training brought have enabled us to be more adaptive and impactful.” Catharina Rozendaal, Marketing Growth Director for Emerging Markets, noted operational improvements: “Agile marketing allows me to reconnect with the wider marketing team faster. Using workflow tools and kanban boards means that projects & campaign information is centralised and accessible.”

Leadership perspective

Graham Wylie, VP of Marketing, whose vision was foundational to this initiative, reflected on its success: ” Agile marketing offers a method to enhance our capacity and efficiency without merely adding more staff or increasing costs. This approach allows us to continue delivering exceptional results while adapting to meet increased demands.”

Summary

Looking ahead, ADP ESI Marketing is committed to further refining agile marketing practices to continue driving operational efficiencies as well as ensuring they engage their audiences through effective marketing. The focus will be on scaling these successes to drive even greater business impact and market leadership.

ADP’s strategic partnership with Bright has redefined standards in agile marketing. By successfully integrating agile methodologies, ADP’s ESI marketing team has become more dynamic, empowered, and effective — driving both increased revenue for the business as well as operational efficiencies.

Find out more about how to inject more agility into your team with our agile marketing training

August 20, 2024 Alaina Roberts

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

Securing new pipeline and over £125k investment within 6 weeks for community platform Zapnito

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

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

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