Bright Ideas

Is RevOps B2B marketers next big move?

Times are tough, changeable and high pressured for most senior B2B marketers and CMOs. Aligning to business goals and demonstrably driving business growth is more important than ever.

Over the last few years working with senior marketers to deliver greater marketing effectiveness and agility I’ve learnt about and applied the ideas of Revenue Operations (RevOps) with the principles of agile marketing. Agile marketing, the foundation of Bright’s ethos to help marketers demonstrate value through delivering great work; champions adaptability, customer centricity, and efficient collaboration. The introduction of RevOps expands these benefits across all revenue-generating functions, through improved alignment, efficiencies and effectiveness, and quantifiable growth against shared goals.

Before diving into the relationship between agile marketing and RevOps, I’ve identified common indicators that signal the need for a RevOps framework in B2B organisations:

Misalignment between revenue generating functions:
– including Sales, Marketing, Partner & Alliances, Product and Customer Success: Operating in silos indicates the need for the unified strategy that RevOps provides
Inefficient use of data:
If leveraging data across customer touchpoints is challenging, RevOps’ integrated data analytics approach offer a cohesive view for informed decision-making
Inconsistent customer experiences:
Disparate customer experiences suggest a coordination gap, which RevOps addresses by harmonising interactions
Operational inefficiencies:
Manual processes or redundancy point towards the process automation and efficiency enhancements facilitated by RevOps
Difficulty in measuring Marketing ROI:
The inability to directly link marketing efforts to revenue outcomes underscores the need for RevOps’ accountability and clarity.

Lots of firms have these challenges many of them are perpetuated through the organisational culture, the ways of working as well as team and departmental silos. As I share how the integration of agile marketing principles with RevOps, the emphasis on collaboration with the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), cross-functional teamwork, and a cultural shift towards alignment and collective goal pursuit becomes increasingly significant. These are critical success factors for marketers committed to making an impactful contribution to revenue growth.

Collaborate with the CRO

We all know that a productive partnership between marketing leaders and the CRO is critical for sales and marketing alignment and forms the bedrock of RevOps success. For example, when one of our software client’s CMO and CRO began holding regular strategic sessions, they achieved a unified view of the customer journey, enhancing cross-sell opportunities by 10% within six months. This partnership ensures every initiative is directly linked to revenue, creating a united approach to growth.

The power of cross-functional collaboration

Cross-functional collaboration is a key principle of agile marketing and underpins the success of a RevOps approach, reducing and removing (where you can) silos to create greater cross functional collaboration to continually improve the customer experience. An example from our work at Bright is a project with a global HCM software marketing team that focused on improving cross-functional collaboration to improve efficiencies and formed cross functional agile squads/hubs including their sales stakeholders and product Subject Matter Experts (SME), which led to a 20% reduction in lead follow up times and improved conversion rates by >5%. This collaborative approach and culture ensure all departments are working towards common business goals.

Cultivating a culture of alignment and collective goals

RevOps necessitates a shift towards an alignment and collective goal pursuit are prioritised. Everyone moves in sync and are focused on KPI and OKR that are shared and aligned to the business goals. A Bright client – a continual improvement product and services firm – implemented agile marketing and activated RevOps to define, agree and set common goals and metrics as well as ensuring there was data & reporting to support this approach. This included the CRO, CMO and CFO as well as cascading across the sales and marketing teams. This culture of alignment enabled the organisation to adapt to changing internal and external market factors effectively and meet strategic objectives with greater cohesion.

How to get started

Implementing a RevOps model is a strategic shift that focuses on aligning cross-functional teams and cultivating a culture of shared goals and objectives. For B2B marketing leaders, establishing common goals and KPIs is the first step. This ensures alignment across all teams contributing to revenue generation.

Quick-start Agile Marketing & RevOPs checklist:

Align on objectives and KPIs:
Ensure revenue generating teams such as marketing, sales, and customer success teams agree and share common goals
Review current processes:
Identify gaps in collaboration and alignment
Establish regular cross-functional communication:
Keep all teams informed and engaged
Implement shared reporting:
Use dashboards for transparency and to track collective progress
Pilot small agile marketing projects:
Demonstrate the benefits of agile marketing and RevOps approaches by starting with manageable initiatives such as a pilot customer acquisition or retention campaign.

This approach offers a clear framework for beginning with RevOps, guiding organisations through the early stages of adopting a more aligned and efficient revenue generation strategy.

Integrating agile marketing principles with a RevOps framework is an effective strategy for not only elevating the role of marketing in revenue generation but creating alignment and strategic focus to propel your businesses forward towards its objectives.

April 9, 2024 Zoe Merchant Agile Marketing In Practice, Leading Change, Marketing Effectiveness

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

Marketing leaders are faced with an ongoing barrage of challenges from fast-evolving AI to the pressure of achieving better results with fewer resources, as well as getting the most from your CDP investment and needing to balance short term KPIs with long term goals. We understand that marketing leadership is a tough job right now!

In our webinar on ‘How to maximise your marketing effectiveness’, our panel of B2B marketing experts address some of these key challenges, and share insights and practical solutions to address these issues – we’ll cover people, process, data and tech.

Listen to the podcast

Download your Marketing effectiveness reframe cards

Reframe Cards enable you and your team to have a different kind of conversation, re-think strategies or tactics and highlight learnings that you can take forward to optimise and generate better outcomes.

These Reframe Cards are focused on having conversations to help improve your marketing effectiveness, and empower your team to challenge their thinking. By changing their frame of mind to continually learn and grow, you can yield real business results and make a positive impact on your businesses bottom line.

Marketing Effectiveness: Recommended reads

Check out our suggested reading list of articles, reports and videos to help take your marketing effectiveness to the next level

On-demand video on Maximising your marketing effectiveness

Watch to learn how to improve the impact of your marketing machine, including:

People: Improving ways of working, determining future skills and developing a growth culture
Process: Optimising your operating model to improve revenue and customer centricity.
Data: Achieving optimal RevOps and KPI setting
Tech: Maximising the value from your existing martech stack and optimising GenAI opportunities

You’ll also hear examples of how you can find hidden value within your existing marketing and how to prioritise your efforts for the biggest impact.

Our panel includes:

Emily Nicols, Group Marketing Director, Informa Markets
Sian Heaphy, Certified Agile Trainer and Director, Bright
Zoe Merchant, Managing Director, Bright

Meet the speakers

Emily Nicols

Group Marketing Director, Informa Markets

Emily Nicols is a seasoned marketing professional with a passion for driving growth and creating impactful campaigns. As Group Marketing Director at Informa Markets, Emily has successfully implemented comprehensive marketing plans that have consistently delivered measurable results.

Sian Heaphy

Accredited Agile Marketing Trainer and Director

Sian uses agile methods to encourage creativity, curiosity, and data-driven decisions in marketing. She works with teams to design experiments, gain insights, and achieve business goals. Sian promotes continuous improvement through experimentation and learning.

Zoë Merchant

Managing Director, Bright

Zoë is an agile marketing aficionado — a passionate believer in staying ahead of the competition with resilience, adaptability, and pace. After 20 years of delivering B2B marketing strategies. Using agile marketing to test, learn and build on success. Zoë leads the team in delivering results through continual and focused improvements to support clients’ business goals.

February 28, 2024 Alaina Roberts Marketing Effectiveness

The power of Kanban boards in marketing: a project-level view

Marketing’s remit is forever expanding, requiring a blend of creativity, strategy, and effective project management. One tool that has increasingly become central to effective marketing is the Kanban board. As with any tool, the effectiveness of Kanban boards lies in how they are used and managed.

A key tool in the application of agile marketing, Kanban boards have crossed over from many other industries due to their ease of visualising workflow, managing tasks, and fostering collaboration. Marketing, with its multiple tasks and objectives, can particularly benefit from this approach.

However, a common question arises when everything in Marketing is connected: should we maintain a project-level Kanban board or a tactical one?

Project-level boards vs tactical boards

The project-level board provides a broader view of the whole project, including the diverse tasks needed to achieve a marketing campaign’s goal. It tracks the project’s progress from start to finish, showing the status of all tasks at a glance: what’s been completed, what’s in progress, and what’s yet to be started. It’s like looking at a map of a journey from a bird’s eye view.

On the other hand, a tactical board is more focused. It manages individual or interrelated tasks that make up a project. While this micro-level view can be handy in managing the intricacies of tasks, it might not show how these tasks fit into the overall project, and it can lead to losing sight of the big picture and end up increasing the siloes rather than removing them.

In marketing, where campaigns often involve interlinked activities (content creation, social media promotion, email campaigns, etc.), it becomes more advantageous to opt for a project-level board. This broad outlook ensures that all elements are interconnected and moving in harmony towards the campaign’s overall goal.

Managing your Kanban board

Regardless of the type of board you use, its efficiency boils down to proper management. Here are some tips to guide you:

Regularly update: Ensure the board is frequently updated with the status of tasks. It should be an accurate reflection of the project’s state.

Prioritise tasks: Use a system (like color-coding and tagging) to signify task importance or urgency. It helps to focus the team’s efforts on what matters most.

Limit WIP (Work-In-Progress): Kanban encourages completing tasks before taking on new ones. Set a WIP limit to prevent the team from being overwhelmed and to enhance productivity.

Feedback and improvement: Have regular reviews and retrospectives. Use feedback from these sessions to streamline processes and improve the board’s functionality.

While tactical Kanban boards can be useful for managing detailed tasks, the interconnected nature of marketing activities makes the project-level board a more effective choice.

Team benefits of Kanban boards

As previously mentioned, Kanban boards contribute to maximise project management efficiency but how do we see the benefits play out within our teams?

Accountability: Teams can prioritise tasks based on the appropriate coding system ensuring high priority tasks are not missed as well as enabling teams to have full autonomy through clear accountability and ownership of tasks.

Simplicity: Kanban boards can be replicated, changed and adapted resulting in a simple, intuitive and swift adoption practice within teams.

Remote collaboration: Whilst we are all still trying to adapt to new ways of working – especially across different verticals, industries and geographical locations – Kanban boards allow cross-functional teams to collaborate without missing key updates – wherever they are in the world!

Well managed, a Kanban board can be a game-changer, promoting transparency, increasing, improving and maximising efficiency, and ultimately, driving your marketing campaign towards success.

If you are looking to improve your ways of working to enhance your team’s agility and effectiveness, our Agile Marketing one-day training bootcamp is a good place to start.

Run by our team of accredited B2B agile marketing trainers and practitioners. Quickly empower your team to:

Work smarter – make the most of your people, budget, tools and time
Implement experimentation to drive continual improvement
Use data & insights to inform decision making
Demonstrate results and ROI at pace
Pivot or persevere – easily adapt to market forces

Resources/reading list:

January 16, 2024 Alaina Roberts Agile Marketing In Practice, Marketing Effectiveness

How to use content AI and remain authentic – practical guidelines

If you are someone who writes content for a living, you may have entered 2023 a little worried about your job following the launch of ChatGPT in late November 2022. There’s no denying that on first trying out the tool, it was impressive just how quickly it could write something that was clear, well-structured and seemingly accurate. But by the third or fourth go, you quickly realised that it all looked and sounded the same, and it was glaringly obvious when someone had copied and pasted straight out of it. Content writers everywhere breathed an audible sigh of relief. The robots haven’t replaced us just yet!

However, it’s exciting to explore how we can achieve productivity gains and access these vast knowledge banks to lift our own content, striking the balance between AI and human capabilities. Here are our guidelines on how to get the best out of content AI tools while still sounding “human”, authoritative and authentic.

Your research helper

Use ChatGPT or other content AI to help you research your topic and develop your key points for your piece, alongside your other previous research methods. It can also be used to research clients, client prospects, the state of the industry and so on. But asking the right questions is critical and you should never accept the first response you receive. So much so that some companies are now hiring “prompt engineers” with expertise in this area. You must keep refining your prompts to get higher quality responses and reach the level of depth you require.

Note that ChatGPT has limited knowledge of events after a certain date and nobody seems to be clear when that date is according to a recent article by ZDNet. You may need to stick with traditional research methods if it’s recent events you’re interested in. Take an agile approach to testing what research methods work best to produce an outline which is comprehensive and accurate.

Creating personas

Open AI has given ChatGPT a carefully chosen tone of voice which is designed to appeal to the majority and is best described as neutral and professional, i.e. a bit generic and boring. However, you can train ChatGPT to create content that reflects your organisation’s unique style, vocabulary and tone of voice.

To do this, you need to create a training dataset which consists of a range of content examples that reflect your organisation’s tone of voice. This should include blogs, social media posts, articles and client-facing emails and cover a variety of topics.

If you produce content for multiple organisations, you can create different ChatGPT personas for each organisation which reflect their individual writing style. Building on an agile approach, you could set up different personas for an organisation to help test different styles and see which achieves the most engagement.

Need for speed

Like the famous racing game series, the pressure to increase efficiency and speed impacts us all. Content AI can absolutely help you to write and produce content much faster than previously, by speeding up the phase that takes the most time — researching and planning your piece. This can allow you to focus on the tasks that require more creativity and innovation.

Be careful though, ChatGPT isn’t perfect and can sometimes generate inaccurate information. It’s only as good as the data it’s trained on and as with all things, fact-checking and a good pinch of common sense is required.

Overcoming writer’s block

Sometimes getting started is the hardest thing when it comes to writing and we all suffer from writer’s block from time-to-time. Asking content AI what it thinks about a certain subject can be enough to kick-start the creative juices. Once they start flowing again, it’s time to step away from the AI.

Run a pilot

We always recommend taking an agile approach and running a pilot to test and learn before deciding which content AI to adopt within your organisation. This provides the opportunity to demonstrate to leadership how the tool can help improve your team’s productivity without compromising on quality. As with all AI, privacy and security should be a key consideration. Leaders need to ensure guardrails are in place for their teams to be able to test and adopt AI solutions safely. This agile approach enables you to test and learn then quickly scale where value is demonstrated.

Human’s rule

ChatGPT and other content AI are still powerful tools and can speed up the content writing process, but they cannot replace human creativity, intuition and empathy. It’s essential to strike a balance between AI and human capabilities to achieve the best outcomes. Any piece of content should always reflect your organisation or client’s tone of voice to ensure it remains consistent and authentic.

Content AI can’t compete with your insider knowledge about your market and your audiences. Always remember you are the expert in your area!

Get in touch to find out how Bright can help you harness agile marketing to deliver your marketing strategy in 2024.

Resources/reading list:

December 20, 2023 Alaina Roberts Leading Change, Marketing Strategy

Discover new possibilities with Reframe Cards!

Download your cards to re–frame conversations and spark fresh perspectives.

The Reframe Cards are designed to bring creativity and agile thinking into your team’s communication.

By offering specific prompts, these cards encourage team members to share their thoughts, ideas, and opinions more openly, fostering a culture of transparency and collaboration.

Each Reframe Card aims to stimulate problem-solving discussions, driving the team towards actionable, goal-focused solutions.

Reframe your thinking

Ready to reframe your mindset and your conversations? Download your Reframe Cards today!

Great to use in team meetings or to kick-start internal workshops, these cards cover the following areas:

⭐️ Design thinking – Challenge conventional strategies, embrace a fresh perspective and find innovative solutions to complex problems.

⭐️ Activating agile – Unlock agile methodologies to enable adaptability, perform efficiently and drive a results-focused approach.

⭐️ Experimentation – Experiment with new ideas and strategies, encouraging a culture of continuous improvement and learning

⭐️ Growth mindset – Re-think your current practices, iterate towards exciting outcomes and deliver exceptional results through continuous learning.

⭐️ Change enablement – Say goodbye to outdated approaches and enable your team to embrace change to stay ahead of the competition.

Here are some additional resources you may find useful:

December 14, 2023 Alaina Roberts Marketing Effectiveness, Marketing Efficiency, Marketing Strategy

Journey through time: A curated reading list for the retrospective of 2023

Welcome to a curated collection of thought-provoking reads and podcasts as a retrospective of 2023. Embark on a journey through the realms of AI, agile marketing, design thinking, and growth mindset with our carefully selected recommendations.

AI Insights for content marketers

Articles:

Seven ChatGPT experiments content marketers should test now – Uncover ideas from InformaTech on experimenting with ChatGPT for compelling content and enhanced market research.
Black Mirror meets marketing: The ethical implications of AI Delve into privacy and ethical concerns around AI from Informa Tech.

Podcast:

The future of search in B2B marketing – Join Kate Cox, CMO at BrightBid, in a podcast exploring how AI is set to revolutionise search engine marketing for B2B.

Activating agile marketing

Book:

Agile Marketing” by Neil Perkin – Explore adaptive marketing principles and practices, offering guidelines to redesign marketing structures fit for today’s changeable environment.

Design thinking unveiled

Books:

Alchemy: The magic of original thinking in a world of mind-numbing conformity by Rory Sutherland – Discover the alchemy behind original thinking with insights from TED Talk superstar Rory Sutherland.
Value proposition design by Alexander Osterwalder et al – A practical guide to creating compelling value propositions using design thinking for business growth.

Podcast:

Design together” hosted by Abby Guido – Explore how design thinking can solve complex business problems, including marketing challenges.

Embracing a growth mindset

Books:

Start with why & leaders eat last by Simon Sinek – Gain insights into leadership with Simon Sinek’s renowned works.
Mindset: How you can fulfill your potential by Carol Dweck Delve into the concept of mindset and its impact on personal and professional growth.

Podcasts:

Adam Grant: ReThinking – Engage with Adam Grant’s podcast exploring innovative and transformative ideas.
Elizabeth Day: how to fail – Join Elizabeth Day in her podcast that celebrates the wisdom that comes from failure.

Dive into these resources to prepare yourself for 2024. Each recommendation is carefully chosen to enhance your understanding and inspire insightful discussions.

December 13, 2023 Alaina Roberts Marketing Effectiveness, Marketing Strategy

AI, RevOps and emotion! A look back at the top B2B marketing trends of 2023

It’s that time of year where we all start to reflect on the trends that have had the biggest impact in 2023. At Bright we’ve spent our year reinventing marketing with our amazing clients, including injecting greater agility into how marketers work together and with other revenue generating teams to refocus on the customer. It’s been a big year for marketing transformation. Marketing is emerging stronger, leaner, more data-driven and able to be more effective and efficient at engaging audiences.

It’s been a rollercoaster from a macroeconomic perspective and as a business founder and MD there’s been a lot to navigate personally, as well as helping clients become more adaptable and able to manage change.

One of my highlights was being selected as a juror for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for the B2B Creative Lion. Not only was this an amazing experience but it gave me unique insights into some of the biggest trends and critical success factors in B2B. Ranging from why you need to forge an emotional connection with your audiences, to the need for investment in long-term brand building to augment your demand and performance marketing.

As well as this, we have seen the growth of AI and RevOps (my personal favourite), and marketers moving further away from a traditional funnel to a fly wheel model. Throughout all of this, an agile marketing approach is fundamental to being able to quickly test and adopt these developments by staying responsive, data-driven and collaborative.

The importance of emotion and patience

During my time as a judge at Cannes Lions it was clear that a shift towards a more creative approach (akin to the boldness of B2C) is increasingly evident and showing results in B2B. It’s evident in successful campaigns such as Workday’s Rockstar and Disco’s Lady J [add links] B2B marketers to use emotion in their campaigns to achieve cut through and connect with their audiences.

Research has shown that using emotion, storytelling, and humour leads to better audience engagement. Campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31% vs. 16%) with only rational content according to neurosciencemarketing.com. This is still fairly new ground for B2B marketers so using agile principles to test and measure what works and what doesn’t is key.

The other trend I saw emerging at Cannes Lions was that patience is a virtue in B2B. From the entries we consistently saw more of a focus on long-term brand building, and a move away from over-reliance on performance marketing. According to LinkedIn’s B2B Marketing Benchmark report, 59% of B2B marketing leaders say their C-suite has increased the importance of brand building given economic conditions. Fellow B2B Creative juror Ty Heath, Director of Market Engagement at LinkedIn’s B2B Institute commented: “Brand building is the single greatest opportunity in B2B. We see that most B2B marketers are over-leveraged in lead generation, but brand building is what drives future cash flows.”

The AI wild west

No 2023 wrap-up would be complete without mentioning the impact of generative AI. This was the year when AI really started to disrupt B2B marketing, and beyond. The areas where we have seen the biggest impact from generative AI has to be in content generation with the launch of ChatGPT back in November 2022, what a difference a year makes! Other content AI tools soon followed. Lead generation tools such as LeadIQ and Kartra are also helping to identify and generate high-quality leads for B2B marketing campaigns.

AI in marketing offers unpreceded opportunities, with many starting to realise efficiency gains through simple use of AI apps within their existing martech. Longer term marketing leaders will need to understand which types of AI to test and invest in and how to approach it. Privacy and security related issues are a key consideration. Leaders need to set up their teams to be able to successfully test AI solutions by putting in place the guardrails for successful and safe adoption of AI. This points to an agile marketing approach and being able to test and learn then quickly scale where value is demonstrated. Marketing leaders need to be careful to safeguard and remain customer centric and authentic. Quick efficiency gains could spell disaster without proper consideration around effectiveness and the impact on engagement. There is plenty of upside in AI adoption as long as developed within a proper framework.

From funnels to fly wheels

The move away from a funnel view of our customers to a fly wheel model continues to gain traction. In a traditional marketing funnel model, the focus is on attracting customer prospects and then converting them to purchasing customers. But marketers have realised that it’s not just about acquisition and customers can fall out of the model. Smarter marketers are recognising the full value of a customer and the need to market to clients at every stage of their lifecycle. By fostering loyalty and advocacy you can maximise the customer lifetime value.

The flywheel model focuses on keeping existing customers engaged and turning them into repeat customers who are also willing to act as promoters for your business. The flywheel business model is more effective and should drive higher revenue because it prioritises the customer.

The rise of RevOps

Another big trend in B2B marketing this year has been the growth of Revenue Operations or RevOps . Aligning your revenue generating teams – sales, marketing and customer success functions across the customer life cycle to drive growth and keep teams focused on the same metrics and KPI is quickly becoming table stakes. This cross-functional alignment clearly requires an agile approach, breaking down siloes to improve communication, collaboration and alignment to business goals.

Agile remains key

What’s clear is that 2023 has been one of the most exciting years for B2B marketing. All of these trends have the potential to transform how we engage with our audiences and increase marketing effectiveness. While the developments and trends in our industry are exciting, it can get overwhelming to keep up and remain innovative. An agile, growth mindset, alongside the related tools and processes enables marketing teams to respond quickly and effectively to changing customer preferences, market conditions and developments to ensure they are delivering the best results for their companies and clients.

Get in touch to find out how Bright can help you harness agile marketing to deliver your marketing strategy in 2024.

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