Bright Ideas

Marketing ideas to make you think

Bringing together the latest trends, tools and news at your fingertips

We’ve given the newsletter a shake-up, bringing you the ‘need to know’ stories for successful marketing, bitesize insights from the Bright team and the latest in market trends. In short, everything you should be embracing to better equip you for a smashing 2023. Looking to deliver Smarter Marketing this year? Look no further…

Embracing a growth mindset whilst being data-driven |
Marketing Metrics

Data-driven insights are your key to continuous improvement and optimisation. They are fundamental to agile ways of working, giving you the data you need to iterate and optimise your marketing activity and better support your business goals. But how do you apply a growth mindset to your data capturing to drive better business results?

A growth mindset is all about the attitude with which you approach obstacles, how you process failure, and how you adapt as a result. Applying this logic when reviewing marketing activity can mean you approach failures as lessons learned.

With a growth mindset, you’ll be able to see what didn’t work well as an opportunity to try something new, doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t. This is particularly useful now when marketers must focus on costs whilst still driving the same results. Marketers are having to do more with less and drive efficiencies whilst still delivering value to the business

If you’re interested in finding how to cultivate a growth mindset within your marketing team, attend our free online event on Friday 3rd February.
Sian Heaphy, Account Director

With the rise of the AI Chatbot, is first always best? |
Tech, tools & trends to pay attention to

It seems like ChatGPT is the talk of the town on LinkedIn, news reports and among marketers! It’s no wonder – with all its exciting new possibilities, it can be hard to know where exactly to start. As competing tech options appear, we ask, is first always best, or are there advantages of learning from your competition?

DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google, has announced its plans to launch a ChatGPT competitor. ChatGPT made headlines last year as the interactive chatbot that can fulfill several tasks for its user, from typing out a human-like text response for someone to coming up with an entire dissertation on any given subject.

Demis Hashibis, CEO, DeepMind, has said their chatbot, Sparrow, will be much safer and have features which the star rival is currently missing.

Set for private beta release this year, Sparrow will be more “conservative and constrained” than ChatGPT but with close links to Google, could this make it the search giant’s answer for ChatGPT?

Google isn’t putting all its eggs into one basket as they have also developed another AI-powered chatbot with DeepMind, MedPaLMa, for the medical community, which could generate safe and helpful answers using datasets covering professional medical exams, research, and consumer queries.

Why is this useful to you? As AI-powered technology makes its introduction to marketing activity, it’s important to remember that we are still in the early stages of AI advancement. Throughout the year we’ll likely be introduced to many more AI innovations, but all need relevant testing and experimentation to see if they work for you and your business. If you’re working agile, this will enable you to experiment to find the right tool for you and your team to help with marketing efficiency. What’s your AI strategy?

– Lydia Kirby, Client Services Director

6 steps to leading successful organisation change | Leading Change

Change enablement focuses on providing employees with essential information and support, alongside tools, processes, and strategies to help them adapt and transition to change within their organisation – it’s often a last-minute consideration! Without following these six simple steps, you’re likely to face organisational barriers to effectively implementing any Marketing Transformation.

Set realistic expectations – Leaders can easily over-promise the benefits of the proposed change, and when those benefits aren’t achieved, trust is broken. Once employees lose trust, it’s hard to regain it.

Address concerns early – The chance of success greatly improves if employee concerns are proactively addressed. This usually surfaces through three main areas; information concerns (what and the why), personal concerns (how will it impact me) and implementation concerns (how will we do it).

Be approachable – Create an environment of psychological safety where your team feel safe putting themselves on the line, such as asking a question, seeking feedback, reporting a mistake, or proposing a new idea.

Over-communicate always – When leaders withhold information, they are showing a lack of trust and lack in confidence in the change by wanting to control what people know, when they know, and how they know it. In the absence of information, people will make up their version of the truth.

You don’t know what you don’t know – Admitting you don’t know something can be one of the most powerful trust-building behaviours you can use. It shows humility and honesty to admit you don’t have all the answers.

Invite everyone on the journey – People take ownership of the plans they create and implement. Successful change efforts are those that are done ‘with’ people, not ‘to’ people.

– Danny Whitebread, Senior Communications Manager

What you need to know about the latest Google Analytics update

This year will bring the biggest changes and opportunities to the Google ecosystem in years. One of the biggest changes that impact marketers will be Google Analytics 4 replacing Universal Analytics (GA3) in July 2023.

Some of the advantages of GA4 for marketers include:

Cross-device and cross-platform tracking: GA4 allows marketers to track user interactions across devices and platforms, giving a more complete view of customer behaviour across the buyer journey. With 90% of leads doing research online before they even speak to you – this information is key to your ongoing marketing strategy
Improved integration with Google Ads: this allows marketers to better understand the impact of their advertising efforts, and often huge budgets, on website traffic and conversions.
Enhanced machine learning capabilities: GA4 includes a range of machine learning-powered features, such as predictive analytics and automatic anomaly detection, which can help marketers make more informed decisions about what marketing is working to drive business results.

Empower your data-driven decision-making and be ready for the switch later this year!

With 90% of leads doing research online before they even speak to you – this information is key to your ongoing marketing strategy

– Sophia Howard, Digital Marketing Manager

Resources to support your agile marketing journey |
Agile marketing in practice

“Bright supported ADP’s international division ably through its agile marketing transformation and continues to be a wonderful agile resource to our marketing staff across various regions. I look forward to continuing our fruitful relationship as we continue our agile journey.”
Els Humphreys-Davies, Senior Director of Marketing Programs

As world-leading in agile marketing, the team at Bright are equipped to guide you through its agile marketing journey, however far into that journey you are. From agile novice to agile aficionado.

Is your marketing traditional, fully agile, or somewhere in between? With a clear view of what makes your marketing tick, we’ll offer valuable insight into applying or optimising agile marketing within your teams and across your business. Try our Marketing Agility Calculator to discover where you fall on the agile marketing scale.

If you’re more advanced, then you may find our marketing transformation service useful like our client ADP.

Check out our free agile marketing resources.

As unprecedented becomes the new normal, ensuring your marketing activity is effective, and engaging and your processes are efficient means you’ll be able to drive better results for your business with fewer resources and be more adaptable to changing markets.

As always, the Bright team is primed and ready to help you reach your goals faster, why not book a short introductory call with one of our directors and see how we can drive the growth your business wants to see in 2023?

The Bright Team

January 31, 2023 Alexandra Jefferies Agile Marketing In Practice

When was the last time you challenged your market knowledge?

The pace of marketing can be relentless. Jumping from one project to another can be challenging, with little time to look up and around at how the industry is evolving. The risk is you miss an opportunity to get ahead of the competition or jump on a new piece of tech without understanding the how or why.

It’s easy to stick to what you know, and it’s no doubt the fundamentals of marketing don’t change – create value for your customer and drive business growth. But as we enter another period of economic difficulty, in a rapidly changing business, it’s arguably more important than ever to look to new and emerging ways of working, technologies and practices.

The market has changed

You’ve likely heard the names. The recent influx of AI developments has impacted so many facets of marketing – for copywriting like ChatGPT; creative designers have DALL-E; audience targeting with AdRoll… there’s a lot to take in.

And that’s just AI. What about newer social platforms like TikTok and Mastodon – how could they help you reach your audience? And these are just some currently in-vogue; precedent suggests there will be newer, trendier channels just around the corner. And then there is the challenge of gathering the right data to inform your marketing with cookieless tracking and Google’s next-gen analytics with GA4 (more on this soon!).

Marketers don’t need to go all-in on everything new, but they do need to be aware of how these tools could be game-changers for their customer target audience.

Shift your team focus, things you can do today

Here’s a few things you can do today that can help shift you towards where you want to be:

Retrospectives: The start of the year is a great time to look back, but it’s something you and your team should be doing consistently. Schedule a retro with your marketing teams to look at what worked, what didn’t, and what the learnings are. Retros are judgment-free opportunities to help improve for the next iteration. We love the Sailboat retro for Marketing teams, Mural has a great example to get you going. I ran a session with our client TECHNIA at the end of last year, and the positive feedback from the team was brilliant – as were the new ideas for 2023 marketing.

Host lunch & learn sessions: Taking time to learn from others knowledge sharing can be quick and fun. It can also serve as an opportunity to connect as a team beyond your project work – there’s a lot of positives. Find a subject you’re interested in – or haven’t ever heard of – and book it into your diaries. This could simply be playing a YouTube how to video, asking a team member to share their knowledge or bring in an outsider to share… show the team you’re invested in their development and generate new ideas for your marketing challenges – win-win!

External POV: Sometimes, all you need is an outside perspective. Bring in someone from outside your project – from an external organisation, or even a team member working on a different project – to facilitate a brainstorm or retro. When you have your head down, getting work done, sometimes you need to shut the laptop (metaphorically if you’re remote!) – to introduce a new point of view. There are huge benefits to bringing in an external view to facilitate and challenge the thinking of your team – set out a problem statement and start creating solutions.

Has this got you thinking? Great! Challenge your marketing team and bring in Bright.

Tips on staying up to date

So how do you create an environment that allows your team to stay up to date and also test the new and innovative approaches to marketing?

Increasing your awareness of the wider marketing world doesn’t need to be a big lift. Here are some actions that, over time, will help increase your awareness of developing marketing trends:

Sign-up to email marketing newsletters – it may sound obvious but signing up for marketing agency and industry newsletters can be a great way to stay in the know about new marketing techniques. They’re generally free, and you don’t have to interact if you don’t want to. Create a ‘must read’ list of your team

Follow marketing influencers on social media channels – by adding some additional industry figures to your social channels, you’ll be able to keep abreast of what those in the public eye are endorsing, and whether it is a good fit for your marketing.

Set alerts – using a tool like Google Alerts, set updates for broad terms like “digital marketing” or be more specific and search for something like “copywriting AI tools”. You don’t have to check your alerts every day but setting aside time to review any news is a handy way to ensure you don’t miss out on anything.

Look at your competition – what channels are your direct competitors using? Are there learnings or changes you can make from this? Perhaps they are seeing good engagement in an area you haven’t even considered – could be worth some experimentation.

Attend industry events – whether in-person or online, it’s good to occasionally attend marketing events; they’re a great way to see other organisation’s marketing tools and strategies, and you could also happen upon something invaluable that you didn’t even realise you were looking for.

As an agile marketing consultancy, we are well placed to offer impartial advice on your current ways of working and marketing agility and implement plans to give your marketing team a structure that allows you to take advantage of new marketing techniques and tools.

January 23, 2023 Lydia Kirby Agile Marketing In Practice, Agile Training and Transformation

Agile marketing leadership: game plans

Our game plans are designed for those who want to build resilience and deliver game-changing marketing at pace. One page is all you need to increase ROI and transform your ways of working. Designed as an overview of the 30 minute bootcamp sessions, the topics cover everything from sprint leadership to building emotional connections in B2B.

The perfect tool if you want to optimise your marketing and inject agility without watching a full webinar.

Agile marketing campaigning

Download your checklist of critical success factors for you to reference and tick off when you’re putting together your agile marketing campaigning.

Vanity metrics

Identify your metrics from your KPIs. Your one page checklist to make sure you’re optimising your use of data to improve marketing performance.

Sprint leadership

Learn how to run a sprint from planning through to retro, and see a clear breakdown of the sprint, metrics you should focus on and expert tips.

Transformative communications

Discover our five top tips on how to drive cultural change in your organisation through communications.

Building an emotional connection in B2B

See the top five ways you can evoke emotion and forge a strong connection with your buyers.

Unsticking your pipeline

From TOFU to BOFU, find out what content will move your leads down your sales funnel and increase your pipeline velocity.

Personas and Buyer Journey Mapping

Everything you need to know to develop, transform or simply begin your personas and buyer journey maps.

Targeting Financial Services

There’s four key steps to targeting Financial Services effectively. Find out what they are in this one-page game plan.

To ABM or Not To ABM

Here’s your guide to kickstarting a successful ABM strategy from selecting accounts to refining propositions.

But is it compelling? Creating value propositions that convert

Learn how to create value propositions that help you convert your prospects into leads.

The rise of social selling and how to stand out

Stand out in what has become an increasingly saturated digital landscape with social selling.

Harness the power of community based marketing

Here’s your recipe for CBM – the ingredients you need to run a successful community.

Show me the money!

Quantify the value of your plans to secure senior buy in through crafting a compelling business case.

January 16, 2023 Alexandra Jefferies Agile Marketing In Practice

Over the course of countless blogs, we’ve talked about agile marketing, why it’s important and how its helping teams improve engagement, marketing performance and driving efficiencies in their ways of working.

As we head into 2023 marketing agility and agile marketing are again key trends and capabilities needed in your marketing to respond to internal and external pressures.

When I talk to marketers about agility, I typically get the response ‘our teams are constantly adapting to market forces’ and that is certainly an element of marketing agility. But I would argue that it is so much more than that. So, in this blog post we’re going to go back to basics and discuss what we mean by marketing agility.

Defining marketing agility

When googling marketing agility, a few definitions appear. The one I like is from the American Marketing Association:

the extent to which an entity rapidly iterates between making sense of the market and executing marketing decisions to adapt to the market.

A couple of reasons why I like this definition:

It incorporates the internal and external – something that marketers are constantly balancing
It uses the term iterate – which is key, because marketing agility is a continual process, something we must look at again and again

Some of you are probably thinking that definition also lines up nicely with the typical response I get from marketers, and it does, to a certain extent. The final reason I like this definition is It includes making sense of the market and executing decisions – two very simple phrases that mask what can be very complex processes. Processes that make or break a team’s ability to be agile.

So, let’s drill down into the key elements of marketing agility.

What is marketing agility made up of?

There are 5 key things to think about when looking at marketing agility as outlined in the diagram.

The top half is what we describe when running our training courses as doing agile, and the bottom half is focused more on being agile.

You can’t have agility without elements of all 5 – but some are more important than others.

Doing agile

This is the remit of tools, processes, and practices. The martech, data analytics and project management tools you use to capture, analyse, manage, and execute marketing activity with as well as your ways of working.

With the technology landscape growing and only increasing in its complexity (Scott Brinker’s martech map puts it at 9,932 solutions) tools deserves its own post and we’ll write one soon.

Processes and practices are interesting because you will see benefits from doing agile in terms of efficiencies and ability to respond more effectively to internal and external forces. Whether adopting pure Kanban, Scrum, SAFE or a combination of methodologies based on your business context there are key elements of the processes and practices that support marketing agility:

Practices	Value
Sprints	Allow teams to tackle smaller amounts of work within a specific timeframe and deliver activity iteratively and adjust plans accordingly based on performance and customer feedback.
Planning	Ensure teams are aligned on what trying to achieve and what the team need to do to deliver these outcomes.
Retrospectives	A chance to reflect on successes, learnings and how they need to inform activity moving forward.
Workflows (e.g., Kanban boards)	Giving teams visibility on all activity and help leads reprioritise and manage tasks accordingly.

However, the real value of marketing agility is in the ‘what’ and being agile.

Being agile

Being agile is about the principles, values, and mindsets your team embody to respond to changing customer preferences and market conditions.

To understand more about the principles and values of agile I recommend reading the agile marketing manifesto. These form the foundation of marketing agility and the standards to work by.

The ones that stand out when thinking about marketing agility are:

Focus on customer value and outcomes rather than outputs
Delivering value early and often
Learning through experiments and data (read our blog post on experimentation to understand more)
Respond to change over following a static plan

In short – the most effective way to inject agility is to focus on what your customers need, and experiment with propositions, messaging, channels etc to understand how prospects and customer engage, using this data to optimise on-going activity.

Incorporating these elements into your marketing can help you stay ahead of the game and ensure your efforts are always relevant, effective, and on target. With a bit of effort, you’ll be able to capitalize on emerging trends, create compelling campaigns and respond quickly to customer feedback – all key components of marketing agility.

December 22, 2022 Sian Heaphy Agile Training and Transformation

The complexity of marketing transformation

…AND THE SIX KEY ELEMENTS YOU NEED TO BE ON TOP OF FOR SUCCESSFUL MARKETING TRANSFORMATION

“Change is constant”

We’ve all heard this or a variation of this expression. And whilst that may be the case, what’s also true is our innate resistance to it.

We tend to underestimate the level of change required in marketing transformation programmes and often aren’t prepared or willing to accept the likely drops in productivity, performance and potentially revenue. Leaders try to maintain current levels of performance whilst also asking their marketing teams to adopt the new/target state. Or worse, don’t actively manage the change and hope it will happen organically over time.

As time goes on, the transformation loses traction and momentum, marketing teams don’t see the results and eventually the programme stalls, leaving you back where you started or worse – with a confused and disenchanted team.

When it comes to marketing transformation there are two things to consider:

What you are looking to transform and why
How you will actively manage the transformation (the execution)

Poor execution is typically highlighted as the culprit when transformation goes wrong, but an interesting study by the Harvard Business Review suggested that not getting the ‘what to change’ part right is equally to blame.

Let’s take a look at both.

What are you looking to change

With any marketing transformation you’re ultimately looking to generate more value – whether that’s through improving marketing effectiveness, creating operational efficiencies or driving growth through better customer experiences

To start to understand what needs to change, you first need to listen – to your team(s), customers, and any other key stakeholders to identify the good (the things you want to keep or build on), the bad, and more importantly the underlying root causes across both.

This will give you insights and clarity on what underlying issues need to be addressed in your marketing – whether that’s process, capabilities, or technology and how you might start to address them.

Actively managing the transformation (the execution)

When it comes to managing and implementing change within your marketing teams there are a few key things to think about:

Shared Vision

Simon Sinek does a great job highlighting the importance of why everything should start with a purpose, including your transformation. Why are we changing, what are we looking to achieve?

If your teams don’t understand the outcomes you’re now looking for, this will lead to confusion, lack of buy-in for the transformation and discord within the team.

Skills

The next factor is skills. What skills or capabilities are needed to drive the transformation? For example agile marketing, data literacy, understanding of new technologies etc. Does your team have these, or do they have the training to enable them to execute on what they are being asked to do?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, and there are no plans to upskill or bring in the right skill sets, then you risk your team feeling anxious about how they are going to drive the change.

This is a great opportunity in the marketing transformation journey to review the skills you need now and in the future for a successful marketing team. Map your team skills and identify the gaps – note this isn’t about job titles, this is about the skills to plan and execute on your marketing activity.

Resources

I see a lot of businesses try to maintain current levels of performance whilst asking their marketing teams to adopt the new/target state or to do more with less, particularly during times of uncertainty and a poorer economic climate like the one we’re in now. This can lead to frustration.

What resources are available? Are they sufficient to drive the transformation? What additional resource is needed? And if it’s not possible to bring in additional resources, what can be deprioritised to ensure existing teams have the capacity to take on the new requirements?

These are all things that you need to consider and guide your teams on – so they can maintain focus on key business priorities and delivering value for the marketing function.

Incentives

When it comes to change, we must remember that we are dealing with people and that means thinking about how we make the change relevant to them, so they see the value and benefits.

Get this right and it can get you the consensus and buy-in needed to make the change work, get it wrong and it can lead to resistance.

When we talk about incentives this doesn’t have to be monetary. Developing new skills, whether that is in different areas of marketing, or new experiences across different markets or products can also be meaningful incentives. Whatever you choose, it’s important to be consistent, follow through with any promise and ensure it ties back into the shared vision.

Strategy

You wouldn’t go to market without a clear strategy so why should your transformation be any different? A clear strategy, milestones to work towards and plan of action for how you progress is key. This helps to monitor the transformation and give your teams a clear direction.

Without this, programmes risk false starts or a sense of moving around in circles and not gaining any traction with the programme.

Governance

Ensuring your programmes have a clear governance and framework in place is critical to success. Without governance it can cause inconsistency and slow progress due to confusion re who is in charge / where to go for support, back-tracking on decisions etc.

That means ensuring:

Clear marketing transformation leadership roles
Clear structure that organises and coordinates the transformation programme
Clear processes and decision-making structure

Manage the change curve to realise impact of change at pace

In any marketing transformation there is going to be a dip in performance in the short term. As business leaders we must accept this with the view that the longer-term gains (improved customer experiences, ROI, and higher performing teams) will outweigh any short-term impact.

The aim of any change management process is to manage and address all the elements above to create a shorter dip and increased pace of sustainable change. If change is constant and inevitable, managing that change for a successful transformation is essential. If you’re not managing the marketing transformation, you are missing a key opportunity to harness change, which is happening in your team, but could be to the detriment of your marketing rather than improvement – direct the change, set a vision, and implement change sustainably.

December 6, 2022 Sian Heaphy Marketing Strategy

Setting clear objectives and key results can transform your marketing

Does it feel like you’re working away on marketing activity, without focusing on the overall business goals? You’re not alone.

Without clear and tangible goals, it can be difficult to measure marketing progress, and to ensure it is aligning with what you want your teams to achieve. By implementing a system to regularly check in on clearly defined objectives, you can create a culture focused on measuring results and delivering value. This is where OKRs come in.

What is an OKR?

OKRs have become pretty well adopted across most businesses now, but it’s always worth a reminder… Objectives and key results – or OKR’s – are a great way to define what your individual and teams’ goals are, and what achieving them will look like.

As the name suggests OKRs are broken down into:

Objectives: the business goal you wish to achieve. Your objective should be aspirational, memorable, and qualitative.

Key Results: results we want to achieve on the way to successfully achieving the objective. A general rule of thumb is to have no more than 2-5 key results per objective.

When used effectively, OKRs allow an organisation to:

Focus and commit to priorities
Align and connect teamwork
Be accountable through tracking
Stretch to achieve ambitious results

Using OKR’s for greater marketing agility

Having well-defined OKRs are a great way to encourage a move away from untargeted, scattered and ad-hoc marketing activity, and towards work aligned with achieving wider business goals.

OKRs can help transform your marketing activities into business value by:

Keeping teams on track – with OKRs set, teams can act more autonomously on their own initiative, with clearly-defined goals. They encourage a “what’s next” mentality which can help drive campaigns & projects forward.

Focusing on results – by adopting OKRs, you’re promoting a results-focused culture. This will have a knock-on effect in terms of your teams’ bandwidth – doing more doesn’t help if there’s no significant impact on the overall goals, meaning the sole focus is on work & tasks that contribute to the right outcomes, rather than quantity.

Prioritising goals – OKRs help with prioritising your marketing backlog, if a user story (or task) won’t assist in achieving your OKRs, it’s not a priority. They can also help you evaluate progress and against clearly defined goals.

Self-organising teams – agreeing on objectives as part of the OKR process allows teams to take initiative, and work towards confirmed goals. This incentivises a leaner, more focused workload, with a lesser chance of teams burning out.

Agile marketing transformation – one of the main obstacles to greater marketing agility is a perceived lack of predictability. With OKRs, you can overcome the unknown, by committing to deliver business results within a set period, such as a quarter. OKRs aren’t about sending a certain number of emails per month for the sake of doing so – they are about working on what delivers the best outcomes and incremental experimenting to discover what works best. Through iteration, you can not only measure progress, but also have the scope to experiment with marketing outputs to achieve results, without using excess time or budget.

Getting started with OKRs

When introducing OKRs, you don’t have to start large – one way to do it is to identify 3-4 key objectives to be achieved across a longer period, such as an entire year. These will be larger objectives and are usually agreed upon at a senior level, such as by the board or leadership team for the business to focus on. Once identified, then marketing needs to decide how they can best contribute and demonstrate outcomes and results to support the business achieving them. The final stage is to break them down within each quarter of the year.

This mixture of a larger, yearly target, alongside smaller quarters can assist in showcasing how objectives in one particular area can contribute to the wider organisation. As well as making it easier for the marketing team to stay focused and work towards larger goals by achieving and calibrating against quarterly targets as well as breaking them down further into shorter sprints.

Setting measurable key results is essential for reaching your objectives. While having an annual measurement may be beneficial, one opportunity a year won’t provide enough insight into whether the work has been successful or not – regular data collection can ensure that goals are being met in real-time across the year!

Questions to ask when setting OKRs

When setting your OKR’s, you should ask yourself some vital questions to ensure they make sense from a business and resource perspective.

OKR setting – questions you should ask

What does the business want to achieve?
Who do you want to target, in a given timeframe?
What milestones are you putting in place to track your goals against your sprint activity?
What reporting are you using to monitor your work? Consider what is available to measure based on your current tech stack.
What performance do you want to see across chosen channels?
Does this data provide insight am I avoiding vanity metrics?

Getting your OKRs right at the start of the process can prove highly beneficial for a campaign, so it’s worthwhile to spend some time thinking about these questions. Well defined and realistic OKRs can have a positive impact on marketing strategy, by promoting learning and reflection.

Performance matters, OKRs give the scope to improve marketing performance

OKRs can have plentiful benefits for your business and teams. They can promote a culture focused on delivering – and measuring – value and help align activity towards achieving business goals. They also act as a safety net to enable timely course correction and demonstrate how marketing is contributing towards achieving the overall business goals. By highlighting areas of underperformance or market opportunities you can adapt and realign your strategy, campaign or project to achieve better marketing outcomes.

December 2, 2022 Lydia Kirby Marketing Strategy

Experimentation is a gamechanger for your marketing

The importance of testing and experimentation in improving your marketing performance

Your marketing campaign isn’t producing the results that you may have hoped for, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to change. With too many variables, how can your team identify what’s working and what isn’t? Experiment – to find out what the customer really reacts to.

One element sets agile marketing apart from traditional marketing – the emphasis on deliberate experimentation. Marketers have a lot to gain from testing their assumptions through experimentation before going all-in on any given idea, and the agile marketing process gives them the freedom to do so.

Experimentation allows marketing teams to make incremental changes, to work out what works best for their customer. And even if the experiment doesn’t produce the desired results, it won’t have taken up too much budget or resources, and you’ll have gained more knowledge about exactly what your customer wants.

Experimentation is an important tool that can lead you to improved marketing success, but that doesn’t mean you should just test anything – making educated guesses based on observations and feasibility can see strong results.

How to identify opportunities for experimentation

When it comes to experimentation, the first step is finding opportunities for testing. Consider areas where there is room for improvement or potential for growth. Is a new product being launched? What campaigns aren’t driving the desired results? Encourage your team to develop solutions and possible tests they would like to run. They may have suggestions for how something could be improved or different approaches that could make a positive impact.

It’s also important to analyse data and track metrics consistently to identify potential areas of experimentation. By continuously seeking out opportunities and gathering information, we can increase our chances of finding experiments with the potential for successful outcomes.

Implementing an experimentation culture within your team

Encourage everyone to brainstorm potential solutions and approach problems from unique perspectives. Give them the freedom to test out their ideas, even if they seem a little out there at first (understand why in our blog on the Power of Curiosity). And be sure to debrief after each experiment – what went well, what could have been improved upon, and how can those learnings be applied going forward? By embracing experimentation, you might uncover the next big breakthrough for your team, in how they work and where they focus their efforts. The worst case scenario is that things don’t work out. Failure is the perfect opportunity to learn, drive your team to continually improve and achieve business outcomes. Be open to the growth mindset, always asking “what did we learn?”

The importance of data-driven decision making in marketing

In today’s highly competitive business environment, relying on gut instinct alone isn’t enough to remain successful. That’s where data-driven decision making comes in. By gathering and analysing relevant data and insights, marketers are able to make informed decisions about their strategies and tactics. This not only increases the effectiveness of campaigns, but it also helps companies save time and resources by eliminating any guessing or trial-and-error approaches. Additionally, data-driven decision making boosts efficiency by identifying key performance metrics and areas for improvement. It’s clear that those who incorporate data into their marketing efforts will see a significant advantage over their competitors. For modern marketers, embracing a data-driven approach is no longer an option – it’s a necessity.

Measuring the success of your marketing experiments

Gone are the days of lengthy and rigid marketing campaigns – enter agile marketing. Agile marketing allows for a more fluid approach, allowing for experimentation and quick pivots in response to results. As already mentioned, measuring success is key. Set clear goals and metrics from the beginning, such as conversion rates. If you’re going big with your experiment, you might want to consider gathering feedback from customers through surveys or focus groups, asking them about their experiences with your brand. Keeping a close eye on data and listening to customer responses can help you determine whether a particular experiment was successful and guide your decision-making moving forward. By embracing an agile mindset and constantly assessing the effectiveness of your experiments, you can ensure that each decision made leads to maximum success for your marketing strategies.

By experimenting, you can increase your chances of success while also learning what works and what doesn’t. Not all experiments will be successful, but that’s okay! The important thing is to learn from each one and apply those learnings to future campaigns. Ready to get started? Download our quick guide to experimentation, plus a framework to start designing your experiments. And remember to measure what you test, so you can take the learnings forward.

Download our helpful PDF

November 7, 2022 Lydia Kirby Agile Training and Transformation

The power of curiosity in marketing

A Marketer’s untapped SUPERPOWER

“I am neither clever nor especially gifted. I am only very, very curious”
Albert Einstein

I love this quote, because whilst there are a lot of smart people in the world, the greatest innovations in history all started with curiosity, and probably one of the following questions: ”why, what if, and how could we…”

As children, we are innately curious, but the older we get, the less our curiosity is nurtured, particularly in the workplace. A survey in 2018 by the Harvard Business School showed that only about 24% reported feeling curious in their jobs on a regular basis, and about 70% said they face barriers to asking more questions at work.

Since then, more research has been released demonstrating the power of curiosity for business, but speaking with fellow marketers, bringing curiosity into their jobs remains challenging.

So why is curiosity so powerful and what can we do to bring it back?

The power of curiosity

“You must ask why? Why? Because if you know why you are carrying out your mission, when things **** up…you will know how to achieve what you set out to achieve in a different way”.
Jack O’Connell

Spoken by Jack O’Connell in BBC’s new drama SAS Rogue Heroes and it gets to the crux of why being curious can be so powerful. For businesses defining a shared vision/purpose, business outcome or goal, ensuring a common understanding can be difficult and only gets harder as the size and complexity of a business increases. Understanding the why can be a powerful way to achieve that common understanding, strategic alignment, and buy-in and give your teams the empowerment to deliver it.

It also:

Increases innovation and creativity – curiosity removes confirmation bias and the trap many businesses can make by making decisions in a vacuum. Challenging assumptions, not settling for the first solution can result in great and better alternatives to meet market challenges or opportunities head on
Improves team performance – curiosity helps us better understand our colleagues and our customers, increases empathy so teams can collaborate and work together with less conflict and better serve their audiences
Increase adaptability and resilience – studies have shown that curiosity helps us view and better respond to tough situations

Why do teams find it difficult to be more curious?

As alluded to above, there’s a cultural component at play and the same research from Harvard Business School showed that despite the perceived benefits of curiosity, the associated risks and costs outweigh these.

For many marketers, making time to be curious is challenging, as teams do more with less and balance competing priorities across the business, curiosity drops. Even with time, the next challenge is knowing where to start, what data to collect, assess and analyse to generate meaningful insights that informs activity.

So, what can we do to bring curiosity back?

There are several ways businesses can encourage curiosity but the one thing that will have the most profound effect and can be the most challenging to implement is creating a culture of curiosity.

What does that mean in practice?

For business leaders it means thinking about how you can:

Ensure psychological safety – there are more qualified experts to share insights on this (shameless plug coming) like our client LIW but giving people the autonomy to try and potentially fail is critical. Leaders need to empower their teams to push the boundaries, learn from them and keep trying.
Encourage teams to challenge and probe – leaders must be open and welcome individuals to question and challenge current norms and conventions. Leading with a growth mindset that focuses on continual improvement is important and something we look at in our agile marketing leadership training.
Model curiosity – ask questions, actively listen. Acknowledge that regardless of experience and expertise there is always more that we can learn and when the answer isn’t clear accept it and work with the right individuals to fill that gap.

For marketers and their teams you need to think about:

How you can ask more why. Why did our activity work well, didn’t work well, or perhaps more importantly what didn’t work as we expected and why?
Incorporate experimentation into your activity – this is quite common across digital channels with A/B testing etc but how could you expand this? How can you incorporate experimentation at a strategic as well as tactical level? Targeting, channel activation, products and propositions provide great opportunities to experiment, innovate and fail forward faster.
Make time for you and your team to be more curious. This could be in the form of curiosity sessions, brainstorms and even in your planning or wrap-up activity. In agile marketing, sprint planning sessions and reviews and retrospectives provide great opportunities to ideate and evaluate how your activity is performing and how you’re working together as a team and what you can be doing differently to achieve business outcomes

What next?

Wherever you start, the key is to get going. Whilst you shouldn’t underestimate the level of change or support your team or organisation will need, it’s very easy to overthink the process. Identify a pilot, find your team, work together to establish your rules of engagement together and with the wider business and use the learnings from this pilot to refine and build. Think about the skills you need to develop (particularly around data analysis) and start small. Momentum here is more important than speed and the benefits are potentially endless.

Get in touch if you want to find out more about how you can nurture curiosity in your teams for better marketing performance.

November 4, 2022 Sian Heaphy Agile Training and Transformation

How to optimise your existing marketing tools and empower your team to use them effectively through agile ways of working

The world of martech (marketing technology) can be quite a murky place. What tools are out there? Which ones are best for your needs? And how do you make them work for you to achieve your goals? Let’s wade through the muck to find the answers.

Picture this: You’ve got data spread across your organisation in various CRMs, data lakes and even a few Excel sheets. To put it plainly, your data has more duplicates than an identical twin convention – but you know there’s valuable customer and prospect data hidden deep within, just waiting to be utilised. If only you had the tools to get it all in order, you’d be the marketing Rockstar of your organisation!

And so begins your quest for the latest and greatest martech tool, suffering through demos with approximately 34 different sales reps. They make each tool look better than the last and you agree that you would like to use every single one. But, here’s the catch – you don’t actually need them. Well, not all of them at least.

Evaluate your existing tools

Like the old adage that your mother used to say, “we have food at home” – or in other words, take a look at what you already have, then decide what you really need. So, before you go on that endless hunt for a new marketing tool, make sure you’re really making the most of your current tools and take a real look at the goals you want to achieve. To do this properly, there are two crucial places to start: data and education.

1. Get your databases clean, up to date, and most importantly, compliant, before deciding on your next steps, or you risk falling into the same pitfall as many organisations before you. You’ll take your bad data from one tool to the next which then won’t deliver any tangible business benefits, because guess what? The data you’re feeding it is terrible. You’ll need a solid foundation to clean your database – clear targeting criteria and personas.

2. The next step is to make sure your team is using your marketing tech properly. Take marketing automation tools for example – we love them for the power they give us to run campaigns, send emails, create landing pages and much more with great ease. Their downside? That power is available to all your colleagues, and the temptation to abuse it is strong – why not send this email to a few more personas? Will it really hurt the click / open / bounce rate? Yes, yes it will.

And on top of that, marketing automation tools will happily put restrictions in place to stop unnecessary email sends that may hurt their bounce rates. Suddenly that great tool you had doesn’t look so shiny and bright when you have one hand tied behind your back because the new marketing intern sent the quarterly newsletter to your entire database. How can you avoid this? To quote a mid-90’s Tony Blair, ‘education, education, education’.

Inject agile into your marketing

A simple solution is to adopt agile ways of working.

With a test, learn and build approach, your team will gain the skills and know-how for using and optimising your tools properly and effectively. With an expert team you can trust, you’ll make the most of your existing tools while testing new tools with ease. What’s more, you’ll learn to integrate and maximise the value of your automation tools across your business as a team – streamlining marketing activities and delivering reports with clear KPIs.

It’s easy to assume that the perfect martech mix is only achievable with the latest top tools on the market. However, the more you invest in your current marketing tools with greater support, knowledge-sharing and training within your team, the more value your users will get out of your system – making it more effective and better performing. A winner all round. Rock on, Rockstar.

Want to learn more about agile marketing? Check out our agile marketing hubs.

November 1, 2022 Lydia Kirby Marketing Effectiveness

How to get ahead with a blended approach to outsourcing

We work with a number of businesses that start our conversation by saying “we need support as our current team just don’t have the time.”

What they really mean is “our current team don’t have the right skills to execute what we need.”

There is nothing wrong with this at all, agile marketing brings people together to work as a cross-functional team and supports deploying the right skills at the right time.

Often, what is needed are skills that are not core to the business, so it doesn’t make sense to keep them in-house. Augmenting or fully outsourcing a team can quickly, and cost-effectively give you the skills you need when you need them. You get access to a team of specialists, who collaborate with key stakeholders in your business to deliver great campaigns and support your team.

This is not a new concept. Businesses have been outsourcing skills for centuries, it’s just that the skills needed in marketing have changed. So, if you need skills that your team doesn’t have, think about augmenting through outsourcing. It’s a great way to bring a fresh perspective, boost energy levels, foster innovation, and test new ideas. Whilst also transferring skills and embedding new ways of working with your internal team.

If all this is true and let’s assume that it is. Why do businesses engage with outsourcing and then feel that the right course of action is to stop outsourcing and try to bring the skill in-house? To save money is my first thought. I get that, not wanting to take money out of your business when you can employ someone to do it and they might be able to add some value elsewhere. Not terrible logic but does it really work like that?

In the cold light of day, no, it isn’t that simple. You’re replacing a team of people with one person, in one industry or sector. Compared to your outsourced team that works across multiple brands, has deep industry & sector experience, combined with unparalleled insight into what’s working and what’s not gleaned from across the clients they support. Your hired individual just couldn’t get that range of experience in the same time period. It’s not their fault it’s just a benefit of using skilled specialists.

Your outsourced team spends all day, every day working for other businesses to expand their experience. From this, they can spot trends in the market, and know what works for different audiences across the board and not just in your industry. Testing and learning for other people to apply those learning to improve your marketing in areas you may never have considered.

Consideration of the impact of outsourcing on your Opex is also important. With outsourcing you can negotiate and benefit from a short-term commitment in terms of termination or changing the arrangement so you can scale up as you grow or downscale at short notice.

Conversely, you can achieve greater marketing effectiveness faster by bringing in an experienced team with less ramp time than hiring and upskilling. At the end of the day, investors and your finance team may value the predictability and stability of cash flow that outsourcing some or all of your marketing brings.

The benefits to outsourcing are huge vs the downside (having to pay money out of your business). If you engage with the right team (Bright!) at the right time, you will find that they quickly become an extension of your business and care just as much about your success as you do.

If you would like to explore this option further, please get in touch

October 27, 2022 Alexandra Jefferies Marketing Strategy

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