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Value proposition development launched within 4 weeks thanks to agile ways of working.

Value proposition development launched within 4 weeks thanks to agile ways of working.

Rapid launch of a new value proposition

Challenge

TECHNIA wanted to quickly define, develop and launch a Cloud based Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) application solution. The market was moving towards cloud first deployments so time was of the essence. TECHNIA needed to safeguard its existing client base, migrate them to the cloud offering and expand into new accounts globally. It needed to take an agile marketing approach to drive it forward.

Bright was engaged to run a rapid proposition development process with the objective of a minimum viable launch within four weeks. It was important to align the needs and requirements of its 12 territories and bring together multiple stakeholders for the launch to be a success.

Method

The project was broken into sprints so that it was easy to iterate and collaborate with the TECHNIA team and keep the project moving at pace. A combination of market research and perception interviews were used to benchmark the current offering and define the new proposition. Validation was undertaken at key stages to ensure messaging resonated and engaged the target audience.

Bright delivered a go to market strategy to help TECHNIA launch the proposition quickly and took a test, learn and improve approach to quickly understand performance of the launch positioning and messaging. Sales enablement was supported by toolkits including microsite and sales collaterals to support consistency across the global territories.

They understand how to use agile marketing to bring together key stakeholders, create allies and get projects done at pace in a global organisation.

Ghassan Sultan, CMO

Defined value proposition in market within 4 weeks

TECHNIA’s new cloud application was successful launched to market within four weeks, other benefits include:

Introduced agile ways of working to rapidly introduce a new proposition into market and continual improvement

Roadmap for global and local launch, bringing together multiple stakeholders to support and align to go to market strategy across key territories

Snappy, sharp and value led messaging and content to engage leads and convert them faster.

May 10, 2020 Sian Heaphy
Sian HeaphyValue proposition development launched within 4 weeks thanks to agile ways of working.
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Agile marketing approach helps to attract 1200 event registrations

Agile marketing approach helps to attract 1200 event registrations

Smashing the 1,000 attendee target

The challenge

Ghassan Sultan, CMO of TECHNIA a global Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) consultancy set out to deliver a virtual experience worth attending; his primary goal was to attract over 1,000 attendees to a virtual conference to raise brand awareness and drive sales pipeline. After a successful physical event in 2019, with significant investment in content, logistics and event space; the TECHNIA team decided to rethink the ‘roadshow’ approach to develop an experience which delivered on content and engagement whilst aligning to the brand mission for sustainability.

TECHNIA originated from a series of acquisitions – Ghassan also saw this as an opportunity to bring together the local marketing teams to drive attendance for this first truly global event. Ghassan’s vision brought together digital marketing pioneers, embedded agile marketing practices and exceeded KPIs by delivering a standout virtual experience at scale.

TECHNIA’s key objectives:

  • >1,000 registrations for the virtual event
  • Prove that the event could be commercialised by attracting sponsorship partners
  • Create a unique virtual experience that rivalled physical events and would be sustainable with minimum carbon footprint
  • Use agile marketing to bring together a cross functional global team to promote the event and unify the dispersed TECHNIA marketing teams

With the event inception in late 2019, they were ahead of the game and fully launched before global lockdown due to Covid-19.

The concept itself is simple. We wanted industry leaders across a variety of sectors to collaborate together on reimagining the future of PLM. With the focus on sustainability, promotion of the event encouraged prospects to join the conversation. Well-designed booths played host to innovative debate as some of the brightest minds in PLM shared their experiences and invaluable insight with others. It is this interactivity and engagement factor that was championed by TECHNIA and the team and highlighted the true potential of going virtual.

Method

Planning began in November 2019, curating content and working with a third party to develop a platform which could deliver on the promise of an engaging event. Having previously worked on a successful campaign, TECHNIA teamed up with Bright a leading strategic marketing consultancy specialising in agile marketing practice to create the go to market plan.

Introducing an agile marketing hub

With an ambitious target of 1,000 attendees in less than three months, Bright worked with the corporate marketing team to implement an agile marketing hub. The hub is a blended team of Bright and TECHNIA resource that was able to flex and scale based on campaign requirements and supported day to day delivery whilst embedding agile ways of working across the marketing function through on the ground change management. Bright worked with the local teams providing execution oversight and continual improvement of campaign execution using a variety of different channels to drive registrations, testing, learning and improving on results to optimise campaign performance.

The campaign focused on blending an integrated approach to target both existing and new accounts. As a digital event there was a heavy focus on digital channels, including:

  • Localised email campaigns across all regions, including personalised nurture and information comms to registrants
  • LinkedIn and Facebook advertising. Using sponsored posts to retarget key accounts and audience personas
  • LinkedIn Social Prospecting, targeting a global audience with direct peer to peer messaging via LinkedIn
  • Organic social promotion across LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook
  • Partner marketing. Engaging with event sponsors through regular comms and providing a marketing pack of resources to help them promote the event
  • Sales engagement. Engaging with the regional teams through regular comms to ensure personal and consistent promotion to target accounts, especially those already in an active sales process
  • Conversion rate optimisation on forms, continual testing to remove any points of friction preventing sign-up and ensure opt-in for future marketing beyond the event
  • Coverage in the Engineering press. PLMIF – A traditional Physical Event Becomes Digital

Cultural change

Driven by TECHNIA’s core mission to ‘Make Product Creation Sustainable’ this event had the full support of the CEO, Jonas Gejer. Creating a step change in the culture towards agile marketing methods, and the reduction of traditional events, required a collaborative culture. For a company which has grown through acquisition, they have never seen so much cross functional collaboration. Communication and working towards a joint goal have been invaluable in moving the culture forward.

Adapting to market disruption

Keeping a keen eye on market during Covid-19 TECHNIA have been able to reap the benefits of using agile ways of working to quickly flex the target industries moving away from a focus on aviation towards a focus on Life Sciences and rapid manufacturing. Adding new, relevant content and speakers to the programme on topics that would be valuable during Covid-19 and beyond and by shifting targeting, it meant TECHNIA would engage the most valuable audience for sales follow up post event.

With agile marketing, we were able to bring my vision to life, creating an interactive virtual experience bringing together the global PLM community by working as an agile hub at pace in a global organisation.

Ghassan Sultan, CMO

Virtual event success!

The live days of the event were a storming success, delivering on leads, brand awareness and user experience, including:

  • Created a ground-breaking, sustainable virtual event
  • Positioned and promoted a virtual experience to generate >1,200 high value registrations
  • Created an interactive and multifaceted experience blending live and on demand content, large and intimate sessions and allowing networking across the event
  • Increased brand awareness and solidified the brand positioning with an innovative and sustainable event
  • Aligned brand values with marketing activities to deliver business outcomes and support growth objectives
  • Created longevity through its strategy to deliver a month-long engagement within a virtual experience
  • Commercialised its virtual event with sponsorship and well attended booths
  • Brought together a team of corporate and local marketers to execute across 12 territories

The results in numbers

  • 1789 total registrations
  • 1188 total users on live days
  • 3802 Sponsor booths visits
  • 8455 document views
  • 2210 video views
May 7, 2020 Sian Heaphy
Sian HeaphyAgile marketing approach helps to attract 1200 event registrations
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205 C-suite leaders downloading whitepaper thanks to agile marketing support from Bright

205 C-suite leaders downloading whitepaper thanks to agile marketing support from Bright

Virtual marketing team for next-level growth

Overview

ECS Digital is a leader in automation and digital transformation. They’ve helped clients such as Walmart, RBS, and Vodafone to deliver software and services faster and at lower cost through the adoption of DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices. We were engaged by ECS Digital for our technological B2B marketing expertise and agile marketing expertise.

ECS Digital are a mid sized consultancy, based near London Bridge. Initially they had no in-house marketing resource. They realised that building credibility and increasing demand around their brand, to achieve their ambitious growth objectives, would require a marketing team with greater knowledge of the technology and B2B environment and the ability to get off to a fast start.

Agile virtual marketing at pace

Bright worked as the virtual marketing team for ECS Digital. This approach gives companies that do not want to invest in headcount nor have the time to wait to complete the recruitment and set up process for an in-house team or want to extend their existing team. Our service provides clients with their own core team supported by other Bright team resources as and when needed.

We like to really get to know our clients, so that we can add as much value as possible to their organisation, through appropriate marketing efforts. As the virtual marketing team for ECS Digital, we became engrained as a part of the team. The core team spent at least a day a week working in the ECS Digital offices. Through this (and a good number of nights out!) we became well-known faces in the ECS Digital offices, and the go-to for marketing needs.

For a business in a fast moving area, marketing is key. With Bright we get a virtual marketing team that brings the right skills at the right time time. The Bright team are part of our team, couldn’t recommend them highly enough!

Andy Cureton, Managing Director

Scaleable outsourced marketing expertise

The early months of working together focused upon lead generation and building credibility amongst senior decision makers. Clear marketing objectives were put in place aligned to the business targets and growth ambitions. The foundations of the ECS Digital marketing managed service are built upon using agile marketing to test, learn and build on success. Blending content creation, social media, email marketing, PPC, website optimisation, with the addition of quarterly campaigns to achieve specific goals.

Website and blog visits hit an all-time high; social portfolio following tripled; and the ECS Digital contact base grew exponentially with top-level business contacts setting the scene for further campaigning and nurture to build pipeline. Since this early engagement Bright has supported ECS Digital set up and transition its marketing function in-house transferring the agile ways of working which have allowed it to adapt and evolve as the business grows.

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Senior audience engagement success
Campaign whitepaper downloads by CIOs and CTOs

July 9, 2019 Sian Heaphy
Sian Heaphy205 C-suite leaders downloading whitepaper thanks to agile marketing support from Bright
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Engaging creative comms

Engaging creative comms

Creative communications to build rapport

Fluxx is an innovation company, creating new products and services to drive growth for some of the UK’s largest companies, such as John Lewis, Lloyds Bank and More Than insurance. Fluxx offer a unique blend of creativity and practical intelligence to help brands to develop original ideas and deliver digital products and services that are both innovative and highly lucrative.

Marketing performance improvement

Fluxx was exhibiting real potential and already held an impressive client list, but, operating in an increasingly competitive industry, was keen to build on its market share. Its team was eager to establish a systematic marketing approach that would help them to be consistent in their promotional activities and support business growth.

Fluxx’s priority was to educate its target markets on the value of innovation and the role that Fluxx plays as a catalyst and strategic creative partner. Focused on communicating its point of view through thought leadership, case studies and analysis. For this it needed to establish regular and effective contact to build lasting relationships with clients, prospects and key influencers in this space.

Bright helped Fluxx get a targeted and effective marketing program up and running, fast. We kicked off the programme with a perception audit to identify and shape the messaging that resonates among customers, prospects and employees. Working alongside Fluxx’s internal team we used this to shape and support regular content production to augment the existing marketing efforts.

The road to success

The UX and fresh content was developed for the Fluxx website and promoted across multiple social channels. Bright also established a monthly e-newsletter ‘What the Fluxx’ that publicised the latest content and nurtured an increasingly engaged network. Fluxx events were (and still are) legendary, bringing together industry business leaders through unique themes and positioning to create lively debate.

Alongside this we worked to clean up the Fluxx target database by extracting data from the company’s existing system. Analysing the information to create a list of target accounts and contact information, which was cleansed, segmented, and shared with the Fluxx team. It was clear a CRM was necessary for proper management of their data, Bright supported finding the right CRM and establish best practice usage of martech tools and reporting.

Establishing connections within the target market

The communications and data strategy enabled Fluxx to establish connections within their target markets and delivered measurable benefits:

Enhanced brand awareness through consistent creation and promotion of high-quality content.

Improved brand engagement demonstrated by people spending longer on the website, better engagement across social channels and email and an upsurge in recruitment enquiries.

Embedded reporting and improved martech usage, including a new CRM support marketing activity, sales pipeline reporting and ensure rapid follow up with hot prospects.

July 9, 2019 Sian Heaphy No comments
Sian HeaphyEngaging creative comms
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Increasing leads by 800%

Increasing leads by 800%

Integrated agile marketing drives success

IMGROUP now part of Hitachi Vantara, was a multiple award-winning data insight and information management consultancy that helped clients improve business performance, achieve competitive advantage and reduce cost through the effective use of data.

The IMGROUP leadership was looking for a marketing partner that could help reinvigorate their marketing programmes, inject new ways of working and help them to take ownership of early stage pipeline. Bright was chosen to work with them to create an agile approach to campaigning using thought leadership to drive engagement and establishing KPI that aligned to the company’s business objectives.

Injecting agile ways of working

Bright conducted a marketing diagnostic that identified key areas for improvement across people and culture, ways of working and martech. The marketing leadership and Bright then restructured the in-house team to ensure it was results-focused and better integrated with the sales team.

Bright worked with the in-house team to create and execute an agile marketing approach and plan focused on lead generation and brand communications. Built on strong content and integrated across all channels including events, PR, UX, digital and social media marketing.

Bright has the expertise, credibility and gravitas needed to help us instigate change and get support from the senior leadership team. The result was sharper, more targeted and effective marketing that built the brand presence as well as generating leads.

Rav Atwal, Marketing Director

Agile marketing transformation

Bright brought a mix of strategic thinking with a pragmatic, results-based, agile approach. The team delivered both critical short-term benefits and the longer-term strategic approach needed to build a successful programme that met the needs of the business, the results included:

  • 800% increase in qualified leads
  • High quality content used across multiple channels
  • Brand building resulting in acquisition by Hitachi
  • Greater alignment between sales and marketing
  • Transformed the marketing function and injected agile ways of working
  • Improved internal perception of the in-house marketing team
July 9, 2019 Sian Heaphy
Sian HeaphyIncreasing leads by 800%
read more