March 2024 - Bright

The interplay of key components in B2B Agile Marketing

In the high-octane world of B2B marketing, standing still is not an option. Agile marketing is not just changing the game—it’s rewriting the rules. This approach, with its heart set on adaptability and laser-focused on the customer, is propelling forward-thinking businesses into new realms of success. It’s about being nimble, quick, and, most importantly, effective.

So, let’s dive into the nitty-gritty, the bread and butter of agile marketing: epics, user stories, tasks, and deliverables. These aren’t just buzzwords; they’re the gears in the engine of change. Through our adventures in transforming marketing strategies with our clients at Bright, we’ve seen first-hand how these components can revolutionise practices and align with OKRs and KPIs to deliver unmatched value.

The essence of Agile Marketing: Where strategy meets action

The core quartet: Epics, user stories, tasks and deliverables

Epics are the grand visions, the “what ifs” turned into “let’s dos.” They’re ambitious missions tied to the heart of your business goals or defined by the critical functions of your marketing strategy such as lead generation or customer retention.
User stories are the soul of your customer persona, sharing their desires, needs, and aspirations. These stories draw you closer to your audience, guiding bespoke marketing initiatives.
Tasks are where thoughts turn to action. These are the steps that transform user stories from dream to reality, aligned with your epic ambitions. They’re the day-to-day on your Kanban boards, the pulse of progress.
Deliverables are your battle scars and trophies; they’re tangible proof of the journey from concept to completion, marking your path towards conquering your epics. They’re milestones that measure success, learning, and adaptation.

Real success stories

Informa Markets Pharma market leadership: Their leap into agile marketing was based on an epic focused on market leadership. Breaking down this monumental goal into actionable user-stories led to ground-breaking engagement and a dominant position in the pharma industry, surpassing key tradeshow objectives.
Reward Gateway conquering a new segment: They took on the epic of penetrating a new market segment with agility on their side. Focused on “Rapid SME market entry,” they tailored their user stories breaking down their approach into tasks and deliverables that tested, learnt, and adapted, turning feedback into gold and smashing their KPIs.
TECHNIA embracing the virtual shift: The epic was to capitalise on the success of their physical event investment to captivate and grow their audience with virtual events. By weaving the magic of their physical events into the digital fabric, they created user-stories that crafted immersive experiences that not only retained but enhanced the value of their community in the virtual space.

The interplay of components: The engine of marketing effectiveness

Diving deep into the mechanics of agile marketing illustrates the importance of a harmonious interplay between epics, user stories, tasks, and deliverables. These components combined with agile marketing ceremonies, principles and critical success factors to create strategic coherence, responsiveness, and iterative brilliance. It’s about moving with purpose, making every note count, and every action sing. In the end, agile marketing isn’t just a way to do marketing; it’s a manifesto for doing business in the modern world, brilliantly orchestrated for those ready to lead the charge.

March 26, 2024 Zoe Merchant Agile Marketing In Practice, Marketing Effectiveness

Streamlining B2B Marketing Effectiveness: A guide for senior marketers

In the fast-paced world of B2B marketing, staying ahead means being agile and focused. At Bright, we understand the challenges you face, from making the most of your martech & data to managing resources wisely. Our approach is about being smart with your strategy, how your teams work and making the most of your resources, ensuring you’re always driving towards measurable success.

For senior marketers navigating the complex terrain of B2B marketing, understanding the delicate balance between strategic alignment, collaboration, and customer lifecycle management is pivotal. The long sales cycles, high customer lifetime values, and the cumulative impact of brand investments necessitate a thoughtful approach to marketing strategy.

We’ve put together this guide as your roadmap to a more effective marketing strategy, crafted with agile marketing at its core.

Considerations before you start

Before diving into the actionable steps, it’s crucial to address the foundational elements that underpin marketing effectiveness in the B2B landscape:

Strategic alignment: Ensuring marketing strategies are directly linked to business goals is key (and obvious!). This alignment drives more focused and impactful marketing efforts but it’s easy for marketing teams to get bogged down in BAU so take a look at where your team is focusing it’s efforts.

Collaboration across revenue-generating functions: Marketing, sales, alliances and customer success teams must work in harmony, leveraging each other’s insights and collective KPIs and strategies to drive growth. Start with sales – this is a key stakeholder for making sure your marketing really achieves it’s potential.

Balancing Marketing priorities: Given B2B’s inherent long sales cycles and the significant value of customer relationships, it’s essential to appropriately distribute focus across acquisition, retention, and expansion.

Brand investment: Investing in your brand is vital for long-term success. However, may be hard to convince your CFO or CRO who is looking at much shorter time horizons in most cases. Investments bolster not just your market position, but they will improve the effectiveness of your demand generation activity. You’ll need to find measures (such as increased Lifetime value/ARR/Retention) that show impact on sales cycle, conversion rate etc over time so key stakeholders feel confident and can see how brand supports both immediate and future revenue streams.

With these considerations in mind, let’s explore practical steps to enhance your marketing effectiveness, starting with quick wins and evolving into comprehensive, long-term strategies.

Enhancing Marketing Effectiveness: Practical steps

Quick Wins for immediate impact

Refine your personas and messaging: Quickly audit your personas and make and adjust your messaging to ensure it’s resonating with your target audience. Clear, compelling messaging can significantly boost engagement and conversions

Optimise digital assets: Review your website and social media profiles for quick improvements. Simple updates can enhance user experience and SEO, driving more traffic and engagement

Reuse, repurpose and shatter content: Review and reuse your content – shatter into new derivatives and reuse across channels.

Leverage data insights: Use existing data to gain quick insights into customer behaviour and preferences, allowing for immediate adjustments to campaigns and strategies.

Strategic Initiatives for sustained growth

Develop agile marketing toolkits and playbooks: Create guides and resources based on successful strategies and tactics. These toolkits should be agile, allowing for quick adaptation as market conditions change. Consider how AI tools could help you here – creating or using marketing or persona based GPTs.

Invest in customer journey mapping: Deeply understand the paths your customers take. This investment helps in tailoring your marketing efforts for better acquisition, retention, and expansion outcomes.

Strengthen cross-functional collaboration: Establish regular touchpoints between marketing, sales, and customer success teams. Shared goals and insights lead to more effective and cohesive strategies. Consider how RevOps principals could help bring alignment and accelerate success.

Measure and adapt brand strategies: Continuously evaluate the impact of your brand investment, balancing short-term gains with long-term objectives. This approach ensures your brand remains a powerful asset in achieving business goals and amplifies your demand generation efforts.

It’s an infinite game

For senior B2B marketers, the path to enhanced marketing effectiveness is multi-faceted, requiring a balance of strategic foresight, agile execution, and continuous adaptation. Backed up with a growth culture and a focus on test and learn to enable innovation to flourish and support your goals. By focusing on both quick wins and strategic, long-term initiatives, you can ensure your marketing efforts contribute significantly to your business’s growth and success.

To further explore strategic alignment, collaborative strategies, or agile marketing methodologies, contact the Bright team for more in-depth guidance and support.

March 14, 2024 Alaina Roberts Marketing Effectiveness

Maximising marketing effectiveness – Reading list

Welcome to a curated collection of inspiring and insightful reads and podcasts to help you maximise your marketing effectiveness.

Report:

The language of effectiveness by Kantar – Report which tracks how the marketing effectiveness landscape has changed and explores narratives around effectiveness

Video:

Meet the marketing genius behind Steven Bartlett – This video highlights the importance testing and iteration ideas that helped take the Diary of a CEO Podcast from 5 thousand followers to 4 million.

Podcast:

WARC – Effectiveness is as important as efficiency – In this first episode of WARC’s Marketing Truths series, Ann Marie Kerwin, Americas Editor, and Mike Menkes, SVP, Analytic Partners, discuss how organisations can measure and prove how and where their marketing works.

Book:

Design Thinking and Innovation Metrics – Powerful Tools to Manage Creativity, OKRs, Product, and Business Success. This book shares a simple and straightforward playbook to manage and measure innovation, how to use design thinking and how leaders manage Explore and Exploit portfolios to create impact.

Articles:

There’s one true measure of marketing effectiveness: Marketing(t) – Mark Ritson discusses the importance of thinking about long term effectiveness of marketing.

From efficiency to efficacy: 2024’s B2B marketing revolution – 2024 calls for a deeper analysis of marketing initiatives, focusing on outcomes and finding the 200% better idea.

Dive into these resources to learn and feel inspired to enhance the impact of your marketing, empower your team and drive more value. Each recommendation is carefully chosen to enhance your understanding and inspire insightful discussions.

March 12, 2024 Alaina Roberts Agile Marketing In Practice