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.

Women in Crypto event takeaways:

Check out the event here

Last week I attended a great event with some fantastic speakers – Women in Crypto: How will the metaverse affect you? It got me thinking as a B2B marketer – there is a lot to unpack and explore to harness the opportunities Web3 presents. The event made clear that Web3 is a long-term strategy; spanning a 3 to 5-year time horizon and needs to be considered alongside other marketing channels and tactics. As the world becomes more immersive B2B marketers need to think about how they will complement Web2 experiences and how it can be used to build their brand and generate leads.

Lavinia D Osbourne founder of the Women in Blockchain talks brought blockchain to life by sharing a simple train metaphor – think of blockchain as the train tracks, the trains as the platform providers (such as Coinbase) and the train carriages as the assets such as NFTs and tokens. Lavinia focused on the opportunities for mass adoption to create a more diverse and inclusive web experience within the Metaverse.

Seema Khinda Johnson, founder and COO of Nuggets, a leading self-sovereign verified identity and payments platform, spoke about the potential for Web3 to level the playing field. One area that is ripe for change is KYC (know your customer). In Web2 you provide a lot of data to organisations who then control that data. With Web3, you own your data and can share it with organisations on a permission basis. This has massive implications for marketing as we know it today, where organisations have access to large amounts of data that they can use to target individuals, including selling it off to unknown buyers, and presents a huge risk if it falls into the wrong hands.

Kerry Elsdon, VP of Global Digital Marketing at Mastercard talked about three areas that we’ll see shifts in and marketers need to consider. Firstly, fun & social interactions will change hugely and we’re already seeing a shift in newer generations focusing on how they present and express themselves via avatars, wearables and NFTs. Secondly, the way we shop and why we shop – how shopping will become more immersive, interesting and accurate (yes! the demise of multi-buying and endless trips to the post office for returns!). Finally, shifts in how we learn and work as the Metaverse provide new immersive and interactive experiences.

A thought that I agreed with was that marketers should avoid feeling overwhelmed by the new environment by asking questions and not being afraid to seek assistance and advice; much is still developing, and you’ll get there sooner if you’re nimbler in your approach.

It was reassuring to hear some war stories from Camilla McFarland, VP & Head of Customer Success at Mojito, an NFT platform for brands entering Web3. Camilla shared how major brands such as Nike are taking a long-term 3 to 5-year view of their Web3 strategies and projects and are still very experimental.

Marketers have a huge opportunity with Web3 to become more inclusive and create truly engaging and immersive experiences that transcend geographic and economic boundaries. Now is the time for B2B marketers to get Web3 ready and take an agile approach to understand how they can offer a valuable and meaningful experience to clients, partners and employees. Start small, test, learn and improve to build out a strategy that works harmoniously with their Web2 presence and will allow users to direct how they want to engage in a Web3 world.

The event was informative (Bravo to Lauren Ingram from Women of Web3, Wirex and The Cryptonomist for a great real-life event). It was great to hear from some of the industry leaders about their thoughts on Web3 and the Metaverse. My biggest takeaway was the importance of being agile and taking a long-term view when developing a Web3 strategy. It’s also important to remember that we are still in the early stages of adoption and experimentation so it’s important to be open-minded and willing to learn.  Web3 and the metaverse will provide new opportunities for B2B marketers to reach their target audiences through more engaging and interactive content whilst allowing more efficiently and accurate data collection.

What did you think of the event? What was your biggest takeaway? Let me know in the comments.

Many businesses promote a fixed mindset amongst their employees without really knowing they do so. This usually leads to a reluctance to change, a need for direction, rather than finding solutions independently, focusing on the negatives when something doesn’t work out as planned which impacts innovation. This way of thinking can be detrimental to not only your employees, but your marketing efforts as well.

In a recession, it’s critical your teams work with a growth mindset where employees continuously look for ways to improve, become critical thinkers, problem solvers with an eagerness to learn, adapt and continually question processes and ways of working to generate the best results.

How do you make the shift?

A fixed mindset is intrinsically linked with the company culture. The way to encourage the shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset lies within promoting accountability with your employees through self-reflection and open constructive feedback, encouraging acknowledgement of areas for improvement.

This also means encouraging employees to step out of their comfort zone and embrace challenges and the possibility of failure. That means from a resource perspective giving employees time and budget to test and experiment and adapt their activity. Individuals and leaders need to place value on the process and journey, not just the destination.

Empowering your employees through a new way of thinking is not only extremely valuable to your business, but to your clients as well. Helping your business to overcome obstacles, improve marketing effectiveness and generate better customer experiences through a better understanding of your customers resulting in a closer alignment of activity to business objectives, improved results and brand perception.

Teams that have a growth mindset push boundaries, are more creative and are willing to try new things – failing forward. This puts them immediately ahead of their competitors.” Zoe Merchant, Managing Director, Bright

Download Bright’s book of insanely valuable agile marketing hacks that will give you the know-how and confidence to supercharge your marketing and ride out the economic downturn.

Discover how to focus on what matters, how to get the best results from your budget, tools and people, how to demonstrate value from lean marketing tactics and how to meet your marketing goals with agile ways of working.

The modern marketer has a myriad of tools and data that they can use to measure their efforts. A challenge that we see many times is a lack of clarity on what success metrics they should be measuring. Establishing what metrics matter and defining your key performance indicators (KPIs) will ensure your activity and business goals are aligned to achieve the right outcomes.

When setting your KPIs avoid ambiguity and vanity metrics, vanity metrics are metrics that make you look good to others but do not help you understand your own performance in a way that informs future strategies. For example, instead of ‘more website visits’ instead, focus on ‘5% growth in website visits with a 13% form conversion rate from your key personas’. This will give your teams a clear goal to work towards and an understanding of the data they need to collect to report against these KPIs. Ensure there’s a clear cascade down from your annual goals and KPIs, to your key initiatives, programmes, and projects.

Here’s a checklist to ensure your KPIs meet the mark:

• Does your KPI align with your business goals?
• Have you removed any vanity metrics?
• Does your KPI tie back into what you want to achieve?
• Are you able to measure your KPI?

Download Bright’s book of insanely valuable agile marketing hacks that will give you the know-how and confidence to supercharge your marketing and ride out the economic downturn.

Discover how to focus on what matters, how to get the best results from your budget, tools and people, how to demonstrate value from lean marketing tactics and how to meet your marketing goals with agile ways of working.

During times of business hardship, the marketing budget is often cut. This becomes more likely when a recession hits and businesses look to further cut costs. Smarter businesses continue investing in marketing and R&D at the same level (or sometimes higher) to help sustain business growth and success in the long term, whilst looking for operational efficiencies that can be gained through introducing new ways of working, optimising systems and tools and focusing on data-driven marketing.

When budgets are reduced, there is often increased pressure on the marketing team to demonstrate the value of their efforts. Marketers can combat this by clearly demonstrating the impact and contribution of their efforts. Moving towards more agile ways of working and becoming more data-driven in your marketing approach is key. Not only does this allow you to report on performance more accurately, but also delve into insights that inform your strategy and provide evidence to support where to prioritise your limited resources.

Not only can data provide insight into the effectiveness of current activity, but it also aids informed decision-making to drive improvement. Working within an experimentation framework, and using the data generated to provide valuable insight early into what is and isn’t working, helping you make an informed decision on whether to pivot or persevere quickly.

Data-driven marketing increases ROI, with campaigns that leverage data-driven personalisation reporting 5-8x ROI for their campaign spend.

Download Bright’s book of insanely valuable agile marketing hacks that will give you the know-how and confidence to supercharge your marketing and ride out the economic downturn.

Discover how to focus on what matters, how to get the best results from your budget, tools and people, how to demonstrate value from lean marketing tactics and how to meet your marketing goals with agile ways of working.

During a recession, prospects behaviour and selection processes may be different. What has worked well previously may not be as effective within the current climate. Taking an agile approach to your marketing will help your teams adapt to market change more easily and quickly. A key aspect of this is experimentation.

For many marketers, when they think of experimentation they think of A/B testing, and this is one mechanism for continually improving your activity. But experimentation goes beyond this. For example, look at trialling ads across different social platforms to determine which site generates a higher number of quality leads, or look at trialling different pieces of content to see what resonates with your audience.

True experimentation starts with defining hypotheses and developing a framework and series of tests that can prove or disprove these. Understanding how these changes are impacting reach, engagement and conversion and providing insights to inform your activity and how your marketing needs to adapt accordingly.

Start by establishing an experimentation framework so that you have defined your hypothesis to prove or disprove and have set out the data points you will measure (KPI, timeframe, segment etc) to assess impact. When you are experimenting don’t throw everything up in the ai, you already know or have some understanding of what tactics, channels and topics are working with your audience. Think about what risk you are willing to take – put 60- 70% of your efforts into activity and tactics you understand and tinker with the tone of voice, images or headlines, 20% of your effort into testing brand-new tactics, adjacent audiences or more radical changes to messaging or images; finally think about putting 10% of your effort into high-risk tests such as bold new messaging or calls to action. Take the time to explore your learnings – bring the team together at the end of the sprint or experiment cycle to run a retrospective and extract all the learnings you can to drive optimisations and support the next wave of experiment setting.

Experimentation can provide data and more confidence in the decision-making process, particularly when looking to invest more in a challenge or approach that is generating results but don’t be afraid to divest if something isn’t working. Make sure you give ample time for your activity to run and generate meaningful data to inform strategic decisions on the allocation of budget. To get the most from experimentation leadership needs to foster curiosity and enable a growth mindset within the marketing team and wider business.

Agile marketers swear by experimentation to help them fail faster and it is an important tool in their arsenal to rapidly validate assumptions, test ideas, tactics, channels, messaging and even propositions to optimise marketing performance and deliver ROI for their businesses.

“Embedding experimentation into our marketing approach has helped us take a data-driven approach and allows for continual improvement to optimise and drive better outcomes from our campaigns and activities.” Dan Meek, CEO, LIW

Download Bright’s book of insanely valuable agile marketing hacks that will give you the know-how and confidence to supercharge your marketing and ride out the economic downturn.

Discover how to focus on what matters, how to get the best results from your budget, tools and people, how to demonstrate value from lean marketing tactics and how to meet your marketing goals with agile ways of working.

Customer and content go hand in hand, a recent report by Netline found that overall B2B content consumption increased more than 9% in 2022, with c-level consumption rising by 15.8% YOY. The stats are compelling, in part driven by the pandemic and a lack of in-person events and networking driving the need for research and learning through other means. Research from FocusVision suggests that as many as 13 pieces of content are now required before a prospect is ready to engage.

The pandemic has also cemented the link between content consumption and intent, providing valuable insights into where your prospects are within their buying cycle and how likely they are to be considering or close to a purchase decision.

This poses a few challenges for marketers in a recession – the type of content to invest in and how much?

Type of content

To tackle the types of content to invest in you need to shake down your personas, get to grips with relevant industry trends and what you’re hearing from your customers are all essential insights when looking at what topics are of most value to your audiences. Identifying evergreen topics for content will give you longevity and you can blend topical reactionary content alongside them.

Overall eBook registration volume grew by 15.5%, accounting for 43.3% of all downloads in 2021. Short-form video had the highest ROI in 2021 of any social media marketing strategy as 30% of social media marketers plan to invest in it more than any other trend in 2022. Video exponentially outperforms other content for engagement and consumption but remember to understand its role in the buyer journey and invest in the right type of content.

Level of investment

Content creation isn’t easy, many businesses often find creating content a challenge, however establishing a content theme is an efficient way to meet your audience’s needs, without substantially increasing the workload of your team, and an even better way to do this is by leveraging content you already have.

Decide on a content theme, establish an informative piece of content on a specific topic or theme that can be broken into many derivate assets, such as whitepapers, eBooks and guides. You likely already have this within your arsenal and will be simpler and faster to shatter into multiple assets.

This reuse, repurpose and recycle approach is an efficient and process-driven way to cover all your content bases, ensuring you’re providing content that resonates with your audience through different topicality, messaging and format at each stage of the buyer journey.

“In the ever-changing world of search engine optimization and content generation, AI can give marketers the edge they need” – Todd Van Hoosear, Principal Ground Control Communications and Lecturer, Boston University College of Communications

Download Bright’s book of insanely valuable agile marketing hacks that will give you the know-how and confidence to supercharge your marketing and ride out the economic downturn.

Discover how to focus on what matters, how to get the best results from your budget, tools and people, how to demonstrate value from lean marketing tactics and how to meet your marketing goals with agile ways of working.

Being a customer-centric business in a recession should not be understated. Customer centricity, with a strong focus on audience development principles (building and nurturing a community of loyal supporters and customers around your brand), is a winning strategy. Building trust with your client and prospect community will help you identify and test new ways to market your products and services.

What does that actually mean in practice?

During a recession, it’s time to revisit the importance of customers within your marketing model. Marketers typically use the funnel approach, focused on attracting new leads at the top and working down to converting into customers at the bottom, which inevitably puts customers low down on the list.

In contrast, the flywheel approach puts customers at the centre, surrounded by proactive client service, marketing and sales support. Creating a holistic view of your clients by creating a cross-functional approach to your sales, marketing and client support really helps create a frictionless and positive client experience. This means all the teams working across your client touchpoints need to learn to work together to break down silos and make sure the client is always put first.

The flywheel model shifts teams from an inward focus (we want to tell prospects and customers what we want to) to a customer-centric focus (we want to listen to prospects and customers and deliver remarkable experiences), enhancing a prospect’s journey even after they’ve matured into a customer.

Customer centricity flywheel

This model helps businesses take advantage of how customers purchase today – through their network, third-party review sites and other peer networks (e.g., social media).

Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable compared to companies that are not.

Putting the customer at the heart of your marketing is a key principle of agile marketing and encourages teams to think and prioritise marketing efforts to maximise where and how you add value to your customers. Becoming more customer-centric pays off – keeping a loyal customer is cheaper than net new, and a net new customer that feels valued can become a brand advocate and embark on a continued partnership in the long term.

“Changing our approach to be more customer-centric our client satisfaction rates increased by 10%, which then resulted in a 5% increase in yearly spend.” –  Agile Marketing Manifesto

Download Bright’s book of insanely valuable agile marketing hacks that will give you the know-how and confidence to supercharge your marketing and ride out the economic downturn.

Discover how to focus on what matters, how to get the best results from your budget, tools and people, how to demonstrate value from lean marketing tactics and how to meet your marketing goals with agile ways of working.