2021

The agile trinity: How three pillars drive Marketing effectiveness in B2B

Ever wondered how to explain your complex B2B marketing role to someone outside the industry? Simple explanations often hold the most power. Here at Bright, we champion agile marketing, where clarity, data and pace are paramount. So, how can we break down B2B marketing into a concept even an eight-year-old child could grasp?

Here’s our take: We connect businesses with the people who matter – those who can buy from them, join their team, or support their purpose.

The three pillars of high-impact B2B marketing…
or we might even call them the three gears of B2B marketing with their symbiotic relationship@

Building a thriving B2B organisation requires a solid marketing foundation. This foundation rests on three crucial pillars that work in perfect harmony:

Pillar 1: Demand Generation: The art of attracting the right audience

This is the cornerstone of traditional marketing – attracting potential customers with an interest and ultimately need for your products or services. However, it’s about more than just lead generation. Effective demand generation involves nurturing a long-term pipeline of qualified prospects.

Funnel marketing is a traditional marketing approach that visualises the customer journey as a funnel, with a broad audience at the top and a smaller set of qualified leads at the bottom. The goal of funnel marketing is to move as many prospects as possible through the funnel stages until they become customers.

However, flywheel marketing is a more recent concept that emphasises the importance of customer retention and satisfaction. The flywheel model depicts the customer journey as a continuous cycle, with happy customers referring new business and propelling the flywheel forward. It is a more customer-centric approach.

When considering the entire customer lifecycle, another relatively recent concept which can help to maximise marketing effectiveness is RevOps or revenue operations. This is the practice of aligning the revenue generating teams around a common set of goals & KPI which can include sales, marketing, and customer service teams to improve the customer experience and drive revenue growth. RevOps teams take a collaborative approach using data and insights to align, identify and remove obstacles in the customer journey.

Agile marketing allows your marketing team to adapt and respond to change, which is constant – by leveraging a test and learn approach, you can adopt new tools & tech, collaborate better and course correct to maintain alignment to company goals. By using experimentation, you avoid placing big bets and investing budget inactivity that doesn’t work. Instead you can iteratively develop and scale campaigns and activity that builds on what drives results.

By constantly adapting your approach, you can maximise marketing effectiveness and ensure a steady flow of high-quality leads.

Pillar 2: Brand building & positioning: Shaping your reputation for success

Your brand is your reputation. It defines how people perceive your company, products, and core values. Effective brand building establishes a strong market position, fostering trust and loyalty. While measuring the direct impact of brand marketing can be challenging in B2B, it’s an essential investment that fuels long-term success. In B2B you can use long term metrics such as customer lifetime value (CLV) or Lifetime Value (LTV) to demonstrate brand value & contribution. Firms targeting high value, long customer relationships need a strong and credible brand in order to maintain that value and extend the lifecycle of customers.

A key focus for every brand is having a thorough understanding of your brand value proposition. Developing a clear position that describes what is valuable about your brand, products and/or services to your audience and why they should choose you over your competition. This is something Bright have a lot of experience in, working with tech companies, engineering and professional services firms to help build the foundation of their brand narrative, value proposition and portfolio strategy in the market. It forms an umbrella for all your brand communications, as well as supporting and enhancing your demand and talent marketing generation activities.

Pillar 3: Talent acquisition & retention: Finding and keeping the best people

In today’s highly competitive job market, attracting and retaining top talent is a top priority. Marketing plays a vital role in your employer & employee value proposition (EVP) showcasing your company culture and attracting skilled individuals who resonate with your values. Remember, this pillar works hand-in-hand with your overall brand and demand generation – a strong employer brand attracts not only customers but also talented individuals.

Internal communication also plays an important part of retaining your employees, especially when undergoing any significant change such as implementing a new technology, striving for rapid growth, pursuing a new strategic direction or undertaking a business restructure. With 70% of change initiatives failing and reasons for employee resistance to change including mistrust in the organisation (41%) , followed by lack of awareness around the reason for change (39%) and fear of the unknown (38%)*, the value of a change communications strategy cannot be underestimated if you want to retain your most valued staff.

Taking an agile approach to talent marketing and internal comms is critical to meet the changing needs of the organisation as well as adapt to the talent market. Establishing the right ways of working and enabling opportunities to challenge how you’ve always done things, allows room to improve the effectiveness of your talent marketing and take your outcomes to the next level.

Why all three pillars of marketing matter

These three pillars are intricately linked and symbiotic. Focusing solely on demand generation might bring in new business in the short term, but neglecting brand building can hinder your long-term ability to drive sales. And, without a robust employer brand and agile internal comms, attracting and retaining talent becomes difficult affecting customer experience and potentially damaging your customer loyalty.

The Bright mantra: Demand, Brand, Talent, Growth

At Bright, we believe that all three pillars must work in unison for a marketing strategy to be truly effective. By prioritising each element and ensuring they seamlessly align, you’ll be well on your way to achieving sustainable growth.

Ready to unlock marketing effectiveness for your B2B organisation through agile strategies? Let Bright be your guide! Contact us today!

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November 15, 2021 Zoe Merchant Marketing Strategy 42 comments

Four things B2B marketers need to focus on now

2021 has been a bumpy year so far, starting out in the firm grip of the pandemic and rapidly evolving into a more positive outlook for most firms as society and economies started to unlock and learn to live with Covid day-to-day.

Bright has been flexing our agile marketing muscles this year with a focus on experimentation, testing, rapidly learning, and building on success for clients to remain lean whilst taking advantage of every opportunity a fast-moving and unpredictable market allows. We’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of B2B marketing as we’ve strived to embed new ways of working to bring greater marketing agility across our tech & consulting-focused clients. So, what have we learned – here are the top four things marketing teams need to pay attention to now:

Data trumps opinion

As agile marketeers, we rely on data to fuel our learnings and inform where we invest more time and effort next to improve marketing output and impact. Closed feedback loops are critical for marketers to evaluate and assess the performance of an activity. This means marketers have become savvier at setting KPIs and metrics to measure and evaluate success. There is still room for gut instinct and experience, but it must be backed up with insight.

Dealing with data has meant marketers need to develop skills around data analysis and synthesising data from disparate sources quickly to pull out the key learnings and make decisions around where and how to drive improvements.

What if you have no data to start with? Then marketers must be creative and tap into their networks to find look-alike data or industry benchmarks to put an initial stake in the ground and learn from there.

Farsightedness

The pandemic truncated markets and forced budget reduction and freezes[i], and the resulting uncertainty has made everyone much more near-term in their focus. Marketers need to make sure they balance short term tactical activity with meeting longer-term strategic goals and know the difference between the two.

Although all marketers have, without a doubt, become more resilient, agile marketers have found it easier to prioritise and pivot to match the disruption in the market. Agile marketing doesn’t mean there isn’t a plan, its focus is on using short sprints to move towards long-term goals. Learning to set and balance near-term KPI and metrics with the long-term strategic goals and priorities is a critical skill for marketers to develop.

Agile marketing relies on adopting a test, learn and build closed-loop model – these cycles of experimentation are often short, and sprint-based. Agile marketers benefit just as much from some second order thinking skills[ii] to make sure their experiments are robust beyond just the initial intent and factor in longer-term impact beyond the sprint they are in.

Patience is a virtue

Marketers are spending an increasing amount of time justifying their budget investments. However, it must be considered that any marketing process takes time, especially in complex high-value B2B tech sales cycles. Marketers need to be honest and open about the time it takes to build momentum, especially around brand activities. A recent LinkedIn study found that digital marketers often measure ROI too quickly. While the average length of a B2B sales cycle is six months, only 4% of marketers measure ROI over 6 months or longer^[iii].

Agile marketing helps marketers to work in a more sustainable, and ultimately leaner, way. Enabling you to show ROI early by optimising successful activity via the test, learn, and build cycle, discarding or changing things that underperform quickly. Metrics in agile marketing cover both sprint-based outcomes to show short-term performance impact combined with longer-term (campaign or project) KPIs for ROI which aligns with the business goals. Agile marketers were more confident that they were able to demonstrate ROI than those taking a more traditional approach[iv].

Breaking down internal silos

A major challenge faced by marketing teams is that they lack permission to be curious and experiment. Hence, marketing teams are still struggling to form cross-functional teams to become more agile and breaking down internal silos. This often leads to a painful lack of customer centricity reflected in poorly constructed value propositions and campaigns.

The great tech marketing teams are focused on new ways of working as a cross functional team – what they can learn, where they can improve, and how it aligns to their business goals.

[i] Bright 2021 B2B marketing trends report – #1 area of challenge for marketers is doing more with less (page 6)

[ii] https://www.techtello.com/second-order-thinking/

[iii] https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/success/insights-and-research/marketing-ROI

[iv] Bright 2021 B2B marketing trends report – confidence in measuring and demonstrating ROI to leadership (page 15)

October 29, 2021 Zoe Merchant Marketing Effectiveness

How agile marketing will make you a better marketer

How agile marketing will make you a better marketer...

It is likely that most project managers in the tech industry have heard the term ‘agile’. If you haven’t, then sprints, stand-ups, reviews and retros might just sound like techno-waffle. But don’t be fooled by the jargon, agile marketing is actually a simple and effective approach for marketing teams to take, and it will make you a much better marketer as a result.

What is agile marketing?

Rather than a methodology, agile marketing is a mindset – one that is open and embraces collaboration and learning.

In practice, an agile approach uses short, fixed time periods of planned activity (usually 1-4 weeks) known as Sprints. Each sprint is an iterative cycle that breaks down a large project into more manageable bite-size pieces. Within these sprints, activity focuses on continuous improvement using data insights, as well as looking at ways to adapt, problem-solve and learn along the way. At the end of each sprint, there is a Sprint Review and Retrospective, which is a chance to evaluate progress and ensure mistakes aren’t repeated.

One of the most important drivers for success in agile marketing is effective collaboration and making use of cross-functional teams. Traditional ways of working tend to resist change and avoid experimentation. Often there are organisational silos and step-by-step processes which are followed to an end-point, offering little room for flexibility to iterate along the way. This risks spending lots of time and money on a big bang idea that fails to deliver, but you don’t know that result until the damage is done.

Why should I implement agile marketing?

Insights

There is plenty of evidence that suggests agile marketing is the right approach. In the 2021 Bright annual B2B marketing survey, 75% of respondents said they adopted agile marketing and were able to respond faster and adapt at pace. 43% also achieved faster time-to-market. Whilst 60% of traditional marketers still need to make better use of their data to respond to ongoing disruption – agile marketing proved the most effective way to achieve this.

Continual improvement

The ethos of test and learn with fast feedback loops provide the foundation for ensuring success. If something isn’t working… test, adapt or discard it. This reduces risk and shows you are focused on achieving results.

Improved team culture

As teams work closer together with regular open communication and transparency, it means individuals are supported and everyone within a team knows what is going on so issues are resolved promptly. Agile marketing methods help marketers gain better visibility of their tasks and expectations for delivery. As a result, happy employees are more productive!

How will agile marketing make me a better marketer?

Get stuff done quicker

To work with agility, you are working at pace. Regular stand ups update on task progress, their risks and issues, and highlights blockers to be resolved and actioned faster. You deliver outcomes within each sprint, which shows tangible progress towards your goals. How many times have you had a campaign or branding project drag on for weeks and weeks with no progress? Agile marketing forces momentum by its approach.

Achieve better results

By being data driven and using the insights to inform your decisions, you strive for continuous improvement. You won’t need to deal with the ‘In my opinion…’ conversation, when you have the facts and figures to justify your decisions. Plus, with the sprint cycles you will see exactly how close you are to meet your goals and adjust activity accordingly along the way. Constantly learning is good for your project, as well as your personal marketing expertise.

Stay focused and organised

It is a myth that an agile approach is unplanned or disorganised. When putting agility into practice, the process ensures that you are always thinking ahead, but also responding to new information. You feel in control, as you have a plan, but you’re still ready to adapt and adjust as required.

What could get in your way?

Organisational culture

Pursuing an adaptive and iterative approach means that you probably don’t know what the end state is going to look like. It can be uncomfortable for some to start with the minimum viable activity, rather than defining the perfectly polished solution from the outset.

Legacy controls

Typical hierarchical control doesn’t work in agile marketing. Instead, it’s all about working collaboratively, with leadership focused on supporting and empowering teams to succeed. Replacing old style vanity metrics with open, transparent communications and a culture of learning.

Risk adversity

Some people don’t like the idea of failure. Just because something didn’t work, doesn’t mean it has no value. Testing and learning means that risks can be responded to and new things can be tried. The key is to use the learnings to not fail the same way twice.

So, while there may be a few obstacles, the benefits of agile marketing, both to you personally as well as your organisation are plentiful. Taking an agile approach will position you as a leading, results driven marketer who knows how to plan and adapt effectively to achieve success.

If you would like to introduce agile marketing into your organisation, please contact us about our Agile Marketing training or marketing support.

September 30, 2021 Zoe Merchant Agile Marketing In Practice

Four ways agile marketing accelerates company growth

Networks help businesses survive. Getting the clients you don’t know, that’s how businesses thrive

Marketing acts as a business accelerator by reinforcing sales efforts to push beyond existing networks and generate a new pipeline of quality leads. Your personal network will help your business survive but seeking clients beyond this will enable your business to thrive. Here are four ways agile marketing will help you achieve growth.

1.  Refine your value proposition

It doesn’t matter how amazing your offering is, if the messaging to present this to the market doesn’t instantly catch your target audience’s attention, then you’ve lost them without even showing your work. A value proposition is a promise of value and is arguably the most important part of your overall marketing messaging. This needs to be a clear statement that tells prospects why they should invest in you.

Nobody wants the first thing they read about a brand to be a long-winded evaluation of something unrelated to the core offerings. People want to know how you’ll save them time or money, or where they can find some tasty chicken. And that’s why the following brands have thrived.

Use Uber and you’ll get a ‘ride at the touch of a button’. Choose L’Oreal because ‘you’re worth it’. Head to the KFC, and you know you’ll leave with a ‘finger licking good’ meal.

All these brands have spent time clearly defining their product or service offering. They have developed a unique value proposition, branded it, marketed it, and capitalised on it. All things that fall into a marketer’s remit In in the words of Kevin Hochman, brand president and chief concept officer for KFC: “When Kentucky Fried Chicken was at its best and growing the fastest, the Colonel and his values were at the centre of everything we did. … Those values are critical to what makes Kentucky Fried Chicken so great.”

But what happens when your business has a little more meat on the bones and can’t be served deep fried in a bucket?

“Marketing is invaluable in helping businesses to explain their services concisely, so that someone easily understands what you do and why they should buy from you – which is of course key to helping your business grow” – Steve Anderson, Managing Partner at Capitalise.

In short, take time defining the values that make your business such a tempting service – it’s what separates you from your competition. Once established, amplify your value proposition to targeted prospects in a way that resonates with them long after they’ve engaged. In doing so, you’ll remove unnecessary hurdles and instead, give them every reason to invest.

Read more analysis from industry experts in our eBook:  “Marketing as an accelerator”

2.  Build a pipeline

Less is sometimes more – even in the world of business.

Forrester – a market research company – found that 99% of leads never convert to customers. While high numbers look impressive on paper, sales need revenue, not thousands of cold leads in the top of a funnel. This shift from quantity to quality in the B2B space is what prompted the evolution from lead generation to pipeline marketing and now maximisation of customer lifetime value.

Rather than focusing on generating new leads, pipeline marketing concentrates on delivering customers. It does this by aligning marketing and sales’ decision making and goals with revenue generation – not campaign diagnostics.

The pipeline approach is about specifically targeting the customers you want, and those who will benefit from your offering, rather than exhausting your efforts on everybody who owns a computer or email account. Paul Beaumont, Growth Director at Equiteq, views the pipeline as an extension of the value proposition; “once you’ve defined the value your business offers, you can be clear about the clients you’ll market to, and your messaging”.

It’s also worth noting that when it comes to lead prospecting, the more successful businesses don’t buy their fuel from the pump. They also don’t rely solely on personal networks. Instead, they build and nurture a pipeline to maintain velocity in their sales stream. They keep their database up to date, too.

According to LeadGenius data, more than one-third of a business’s contacts become outdated each year, with data becoming dormant at a rate of more than three percent each month. While GDPR gave companies a good reason to audit their database, cleaning data is a necessary evil that needs to be completed regularly. Not only does it keep marketing and sales efforts meaningful, it allows you to effectively monitor the health of your sales life cycle and tweak where necessary.

3.  Establish your brand – inside and out

While consistency in external-facing work is self-explanatory, internal marketing is just as important when it comes to sales. Why? It’s about recognising the foundations of your business, building a brand on those values and remaining true to these as you grow.

It establishes a powerful emotional connection between your team and your products/services
It creates staff loyalty, as you’ll give them a reason to buy into the company vision

Without that connection, it’s likely your employees will undermine the expectations set by your advertising

It’s often easier to live and breathe certain company’s values when these have remained mostly unchanged during a company’s history. However, when a company experiences a fundamental change (new management, acquisition, new team structure, etc.) most experience some form of internal resistance.

Few people like change, and during this time, employees will be seeking direction from senior employees. Seniors on the other hand will be hoping to squash unproductive rumourmongering. These turning points are ideal opportunities for an internal branding campaign to direct people’s energy in a positive direction, to harbour a consistency of thinking across the business and to vividly articulate the value proposition.

4.  Attract buyers

If your company is already making the right noise in the marketplace, it’s likely buyers will come to you with interest. But this is just the first hurdle.

Buyers often make judgements based on first impressions and gut instincts. Expect this and ensure the complexities of your business’s “story” are captured in marketing materials – not just the financial statements. Without presenting a strong narrative, buyers are unable to understand that last’s year numbers were down because a squirrel caused a company-wide blackout, costing the company in downtime –  it happens more than you think.

Mike Altendorf notes, “buyers will often look for businesses that have an effective and proven marketing strategy and delivery model – but it’s also key to attracting the attention of the buyer in the first place.”

Another important factor for buyers is the longevity of the business they’re about to buy. This includes having confidence in revenue streams and staff retention.

A company is far more attractive to a potential buyer when their bottom line doesn’t depend on only one or two large clients. Having a holistic marketing strategy in place shows that you have considered activities that drive growth and new business opportunities. Using an agile marketing approach shows alignment between your marketing and sales team – a task your new investors will not have to orchestrate. A healthy pipeline is equally influential as it will demonstrate movement in the sales stream and pinpoint successful tactics to build on.

Strong internal branding and communication can also bring confidence to investors, as employees are more likely to be loyal to the brand, rather than to individuals. This is important because potential buyers need to know that key employees won’t jump ship after a sale, and that the business is capable of growing with new management or in your absence.

Accelerate with agile marketing 

Using our unique capabilities and agile marketing methodology, Bright helps build integrated campaigns and marketing transformation projects that drive success for your business in both the short and long term. We enable businesses to accelerate growth quickly and profitably — triggering a positive impact, without the disruption.

For more in depth analysis on how you can leverage marketing to enable fast growth, download our latest ebook:  “Marketing as an accelerator”

September 16, 2021 Zoe Merchant Agile Marketing In Practice

Agile Marketing commentator John Case in discussion with leading VP & Head of marketing Mitra Roknabadi on the power of greater marketing agility for fintech OpenFin.

Listen to the podcast

Prefer to read than listen? Here’s a Podcast summary

Bright injects agility into cutting-edge FinTech’s digital transformation journey

Bright’s client, a leading financial industry operating system, set out on a digital transformation journey to pivot their focus from brand marketing to demand gen. Requiring an agile approach, we helped transform their marketing strategy and achieve their business objectives. Vice President and Global Head of Marketing of the FinTech client, Mitra Roknabadi, joins our Client Delivery Director, Lydia Kirby, to be interviewed by John Cass and share their experience of putting agile marketing into action…

1. Move fast, break nothing

In a digital world time is of the essence – Mitra highlights the importance to “move fast but don’t rush”. The qualities of an agile marketing approach align perfectly with the FinTech client’s company motto: ‘move fast, break nothing’. By beginning to work in a series of iterations, we developed a safe foundation to learn more about their digital audience through listening, testing, and optimising. Bright empowered the FinTech client team to “work at pace and learn, iterate, shift and deliver quickly.”

2. Experts, assemble!

There’s more to agile marketing than the methodology. Mitra recalls how her experience with Bright helped her to see “the full extent of what agile means”. As the campaign developed, both Mitra and Lydia as agile aficionados adapted the team’s approach and toolkit to suit the FinTech client’s needs. Demonstrating the ability to onboard and offboard expertise where needed was paramount to the FinTech client, enabling them to identify how and where they wanted to grow as a business.

3. Planning, doing, and reviewing

Keen to shirk the assumption an agile marketing approach is an impulsive one, Lydia emphasises the “planning, doing, and reviewing” that goes into a project. Bright often work in three-week Sprints to allow ample “time for learning, understanding the subject and iteration”. Project management and instant messaging platforms are key tools to unite siloed teams and enable them to collaborate and respond at pace. It’s the way in which we respond that sets agile marketers apart; having an open mind that something may work better than predicted. The review process of continuous self-reflection allows for iteration, optimisation and ultimately, the best of results.

Lydia described her experience with the FinTech client as a “dream, not because they’re simply new to agile marketing”… but because “their scale-up mentality embraced the agile methodology”. Mitra is also confident the campaign experience “will influence what we do as a company” going forward.

As Bright continues to work with innovative FinTech companies, we look forward to delivering fresh, iterative, and data-driven agile marketing approaches, leading the charge to better results, faster time to market, sustainable growth, and the ability to adapt and change at pace.

September 13, 2021 Alexandra Jefferies Bright Videos & Podcasts, Fintech

The power of marketing agility to scale virtual events

A podcast hosted by agile marketing expert John Cass, taking a deeper dive into what it means to practice agile marketing with leading CMO of TECHNIA, Ghassan Sultan and how he empowered his global marketing team with greater agility.

Listen to the Podcast

March 29, 2021 Alexandra Jefferies Bright Videos & Podcasts

The disruption caused by the global pandemic has led to some profound changes in our values, attitudes and behaviours to both our personal and work lives. For B2B marketers, this has accelerated the adoption of some existing trends, such as digital transformation and the increased use of data to understand and respond to changes in buyer behaviour, and embedding new ways of working through a more agile approach to marketing. It also helped to create some interesting new trends which we expect to see gain momentum in B2B marketing in 2021.

Customer centricity at the forefront

Most businesses think they know their customer, but there has been a tendency for businesses to focus on what they want to talk about, rather than what their customers want to know or will find most useful. The disruption of 2020 has certainly shone a light on this. Suddenly people were thinking and behaving differently, both in their personal and work lives, and buying decisions were often put on hold. In a poll conducted at our recent ‘Personas and buyer journey’ online bootcamp, we found that only 10% of attendees felt that their existing personas and buyer journeys were helping them hit their sales targets. In 2021, organisations will be focused on truly understanding what their customers want, their business environments and how they can best support them. Customer centricity therefore needs to be at the very forefront of every marketing decision, campaign and communication. Data and martech have key roles to play in achieving this consistently and at pace.

Being data driven is now fundamental

The need for marketing to be driven by data saw a renewed emphasis due to the chaos of the pandemic and the change in behaviours that followed. Marketers now need to be more data-driven than ever. To do this they first need to get better at capturing data. According to a recent report by IDC and Seagate, 44% of data available to organisations goes uncaptured, and 43% goes unused. Organisations also need to get better and distilling and activating data to turn it into actionable insights for the business. While there is certainly a role here for new AI technologies and machine learning to help make business decisions, most organisations need their marketing teams to get better at harvesting, understanding and gaining insights from data which drive improvements and allow meaningful interactions with the prospect or client.

Location displacement

The pandemic turned how we live and where we traditionally do things on its head. The requirement for us all to stay at home during national lockdowns and to continue working from home if possible, even when restrictions were eased, led to an increased demand for online experiences. These included the rise of virtual events, interactive tools or gadgets that make your prospects’ lives easier (such as this campaign ROI calculator) and personalised social selling that engages at a 1:1 level. This is expected to continue in 2021 and beyond. In response to this, digital marketing not only needs to be front and centre, but ensuring a seamless omni-channel user experience is now a standard expectation in B2B.

Emotional connection

Emotional connection was a big trend in B2C marketing in 2020 as organisations sought to tap into and reflect the emotions that people were experiencing. A study by the B2B Institute at LinkedIn showed that strategies that appeal to emotions are 7x more effective at driving long-term sales, profits and revenue than those just delivering rational messaging. Research conducted by Google also shows that B2B purchasers are almost 50% more likely to buy a product or service when they see personal value (i.e. an opportunity for career advancement or confidence and pride in their choice) and 68% of buyers who see personal value will pay a higher price for a service. B2B marketers need to become increasingly savvy on how to make best use of content and messaging to build an emotional connection with influencers and buyers in 2021. Those who can create campaigns that successfully appeal to people’s emotions will differentiate themselves from the pack.

Curiosity culture

As our approach to marketing at Bright is based on agile principles, we know that experimentation and failure are the start of success. For example, how do you know for sure if an emotion-led or benefit-led message is more effective? You have to test and experiment in order to learn and build. Of course, your data processes and analytics are the key to understanding what is working and what is failing. As more marketing functions adopt agile marketing principles, we expect to see an increase in curiosity and experimentation in B2B marketing campaigns.

Agile is the key

In fact, adopting agile marketing processes is the key to embracing all of these trends effectively. Understanding how to make proper use of data and research to drive decision making is the backbone of agile marketing. Testing different approaches, channels or messages (emotional vs rational) and constantly iterating and improving is another critical element of agile marketing. Agile marketing builds resilience, helping you pivot and adapt to current trends, and ultimately drive better results from your marketing that support your business goals. To find out how you can adopt agile marketing to better manage disruption during this pandemic, get in touch with a Bright expert.

January 25, 2021 Zoe Merchant Marketing Effectiveness

The top B2B tech trends to watch in 2021

In response to the chaos and disruption caused by COVID, in 2021 we can expect to see technology being used to help us navigate our way out of the pandemic and set us on the path to recovery. To help you prepare for what’s ahead, we’ve gathered the top B2B tech trends of 2021.

Is your data agile and adaptive?

One thing that will remain constant throughout 2021 is change. Businesses that are set to react and adapt quickly to change are more likely to succeed. And with the pace of change driving digital transformation at speed, data also needs to be readily available and up-to-date to keep up. Gartner describe ‘intelligent composable businesses’ as organisations with better access to data, insights and the ability to respond quickly to those insights.

Data also needs to be adaptive and tuned for machines rather than humans according to Deloitte. As machine learning takes over, older data models and infrastructure designed to support decision-making by humans rather than machines will slow down progress. Organisations need to disrupt the end-to-end data management chain by deploying new technologies and approaches. These include advanced data capture and structuring capabilities, in-depth analytics to identify connections between random data sets and next-generation cloud-based data stores. These all help to support complex modelling. Essentially, the aim is to allow for growing volumes of data to be agile and adaptive, ready for machines which can then be evolved to make real-time and scalable decisions that humans cannot.

AI or machine learning — place your bet

Machine learning is set to rapidly take over as the driver of organisational performance due to its ability to discover patterns and anomalies, generate insights, and make intelligent predictions and decisions. However, according to Deloitte, many organisations are suffering from clunky development and deployment processes that slow down experimentation and collaboration amongst product teams, operational staff, and data scientists. The solution for 2021? A combination of engineering and operational discipline to drive business transformation known as machine learning operations – MLOps. MLOps is the application of development operations tools and approaches to industrialise and scale machine learning. This ranges from development and deployment through to ongoing maintenance and management.

It’s important to recognise though that as machine learning develops, AI will not stand still. Bain predict the next trend in AI as “edge AI” – a network infrastructure which makes it possible for AI algorithms to run on the edge of a network, closer to or on the device collecting the data. With the shift to home working and changes in network traffic, edge AI is set to accelerate due to its ability to preserve bandwidth and increase efficiency by processing information much closer to the devices that require it. This reduces latency issues and accelerates the generation of insights while lowering cloud services usage and connectivity costs and disruption.

AI engineering is also shifting to incorporate itself within DevOps, rather than sitting as a separate entity, with the aim to increase the value of AI projects and reduce issues of governance, scalability and maintainability. Gartner predict that the operationalisation of AI will allow for more responsibility and accountability when it comes to trust, ethics, fairness, interpretability and compliance.

Get ready for the inevitable crackdowns

Big tech crackdowns are springing up everywhere for large companies within the UK and US. It’s not a surprise that governments are therefore ready to implement new acts, code of conducts, legislation and penalties to regulate large tech companies, with the main focus on increasing competition and data privacy (BBC). But it’s not just governments set to strike. As cyberattacks increase and undermine the current approaches to cybersecurity, Gartner recognise that the threat has expanded due to the increase of a remote workforce. In 2021, a cybersecurity mesh that allows the identity of a person or thing to define the security perimeter is paramount.

Deloitte turn to the growing trend of ‘zero trust’ to implement this mesh – where every access request should be validated based on all available data points, including user identity, device, location, and other variables. Data, applications, workloads, and other resources are treated as individual, manageable units to contain breaches, and access is provided based on the principle of least privilege. Automation and engineering are required to properly implement zero trust security architectures and can help strengthen security posture, simplify security management, improve end-user experience, and enable modern enterprise environments.

The same goes for data – 2021 is set to be the year for blockchain to take centre stage. According to The Drum, as decentralised finance continues to grow over the next few years, and increased demand for online financial products, it will need to constantly address the balance between decentralisation, security and scalability. Government bodies are incorporating blockchain for their activities, which suggests the regulation surrounding blockchain will become ever more key. With the likes of Google Cloud taking steps to become a network block producer, it won’t be long before blockchain will be the new norm.

Operate anywhere

With the increase of home working set to continue into 2021, we’re not going to see the use of collaboration technology diminish anytime soon. Deloitte suggest that as companies further embrace home working approaches, the digital workplace’s deficits can be counteracted by embracing its positive aspects, including the data generated by workers own tools and platforms, and being able to monitor staff productivity. These can help organisations optimise individual and team performance, as well as customise the employee experience with personalisation, enabling remote work to be more productive and cost-effective than traditional offices.

Gartner agree that an anywhere operations model will remain after the pandemic is over. The “digital first, remote first” model should be the default for business going forward and even physical spaces should be digitally enhanced. Both Gartner and the BBC refer to the contactless check-out system in physical stores as an example for 2021. Doors have also opened to a new remote working market for tech firms to exploit. The BBC expect more packages to be offered by internet service providers and tech firms, as well as enhanced security options, IT support and collaboration software.

Equality with technology

With companies embracing, or at the very least introducing diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) as one of their business imperatives for 2021, the need for strategies that address bias and inequality are set to grow. Deloitte note that while HR often lead DEI strategies, technology leaders are required to play a critical role in designing, developing, and executing tech-enabled solutions to address increasingly complex DEI challenges. Deloitte expect to see a rise in organisations adopting new tools that incorporate advanced analytics, automation, and AI. These include natural language processing and machine learning, to help inform, deliver, and measure the impact of DEI effectively and reduce bias.

Keep your finger on the pulse with health tech

Health tech is set to soar in 2021 and beyond as rapid acceleration of health data collection gives the industry a huge opportunity to utilise emerging digital capabilities. These include AI and Machine Learning to improve treatment and care. We’ve already seen how they were critical in creation of the vaccine, as well as in contact exposure tech, and models to calculate transmission rates. Health care apps are set to dramatically increase in users and health tech start-ups are likely to start popping up in droves. The Drum predict health tech will become instrumental in helping us all manage our personal wellbeing, as well as the quality of work for medical staff, and saving lives.

In summary…

Whilst technology trends are set to drive continued disruption, they are also key opportunities for businesses. Organisations who can embrace a ‘digital first’ approach will see themselves recover more quickly in 2021 and thrive in the years to come. The same can be said for organisations who are able to respond quickly, build resilience and adapt with pace – in other words those with agility.

Interested in finding out how agile marketing can increase your ROI and align with your business goals? Book in a virtual cuppa with one of our agile marketing experts – we specialise in working with clients from the IT industry: h ello@brightinnovation.co.uk.

January 19, 2021 Alexandra Jefferies Marketing Effectiveness

Agile marketing teams are more responsive to customers

Discover how to leverage agile for rapid growth

Agile is rapidly gaining popularity, particularly within small and medium sized businesses, where resources are limited, and time is valuable.

Marketing strategy is a perfect vertical to reap the rewards of an agile methodology. The result? Less waste, in terms of time, money, and resources. Rapid output, and more growth.

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Why 69% of B2B marketing leaders believe traditional marketing is ripe for extinction and why future-proofing your marketing strategy is critical

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January 17, 2021 Alexandra Jefferies Agile Marketing In Practice

With exclusive insight from industry experts

Hear from BAE Systems, Tesco, and FT

Businesses need an effective communication strategy now more than ever — one that offers reassurance, increases stability and builds trust. In the UK, we are now facing a period of almost unprecedented uncertainty.

That’s why we have developed this exclusive eBook, with expert insights from global communications leaders, and their take on how to best tackle creating an internal communication strategy during times of uncertainty. Hear from the likes of:

Louise Fisk, Comms and Marketing Director at BAE Systems
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Nick Sunderland, Head of Integration at Tesco

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Discover:

Why flexibility is key when planning your communications strategy
Situations can change quickly, so make sure your communications planning is developed to be agile from the very start.

Which trends, political or otherwise, are most likely to impact organisations
Brexit, the digital revolution and the threat of nationalism will continue to impact businesses globally. Businesses need to be able to adapt and thrive in uncertain and ever-changing environments.

How best to manage negative sentiment during times of organisational restructure
Why demonstrating honesty and empathy to employees is so important during times of change.

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January 16, 2021 Alexandra Jefferies Leading Change

Data trumps opinion

Farsightedness

Patience is a virtue

Breaking down internal silos

How agile marketing will make you a better marketer...

What is agile marketing?

Why should I implement agile marketing?

How will agile marketing make me a better marketer?

What could get in your way?

Networks help businesses survive. Getting the clients you don’t know, that’s how businesses thrive

1. Refine your value proposition

2. Build a pipeline

3. Establish your brand – inside and out

4. Attract buyers

Accelerate with agile marketing

Prefer to read than listen? Here’s a Podcast summary

Bright injects agility into cutting-edge FinTech’s digital transformation journey

1. Move fast, break nothing

2. Experts, assemble!

3. Planning, doing, and reviewing

Customer centricity at the forefront

Being data driven is now fundamental

Location displacement

Emotional connection

Curiosity culture

Agile is the key

The top B2B tech trends to watch in 2021

Is your data agile and adaptive?

AI or machine learning — place your bet

Get ready for the inevitable crackdowns

Operate anywhere

Equality with technology

Keep your finger on the pulse with health tech

In summary…

Agile marketing teams are more responsive to customers

Discover how to leverage agile for rapid growth

Discover:

Download now

With exclusive insight from industry experts

Hear from BAE Systems, Tesco, and FT

Discover:

Download now

1.  Refine your value proposition

2.  Build a pipeline

3.  Establish your brand – inside and out

4.  Attract buyers

Accelerate with agile marketing 