Bright Ideas

Securing new pipeline and over £125k investment within 6 weeks for community platform Zapnito

Securing pipeline and over £125,000 in investment

The challenge

Zapnito needed to build a pipeline of investors to pursue for its seed-round funding while also raising interest and awareness of the company within the investor community. It was also key to build the CEO’s personal network for future brand-building and sales opportunities.

Method

A 6 week agile-lead demand generation campaign established across the UK, US and Europe.
Rapid, iterative approach to optimise key messages and nurture investors towards conversion.
Established audience motivations and analysed the data to curate highly engaging and targeted communications.

Results

28 qualified, opted-in leads who were actively investing
16 new meetings with prospective investors
12 new angel investment groups
£125,000 in confirmed investment after 6 weeks
320 warm contacts within the target criteria
Over 100 positive responses

£125,000

in confirmed investment within 6 weeks

July 8, 2021 Alexandra Jefferies

Lead generation campaign success!

Challenge

TECHNIA wanted to validate and launch their hybrid cloud Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tool to generate pipeline within the UK and Nordic markets as well as develop its relationship with its cloud partner Dassault Systemes.

Method

Bright proposed an agile marketing campaign, integrating LinkedIn prospecting, social advertising and email marketing activities to drive the desired outcomes. Majoring on the key challenges many manufacturing with existing cloud-based and on-premise solutions face. Bright created demand and built pipeline for TECHNIA’s services, through a Gartner industry report validating their offering.

Bright focused on reaching outside TECHNIA’s known market, to drive demand from new prospects. To move the campaign forward at pace, Bright got off to a fast start by repurposing existing TECHNIA content and visuals to bring the campaign to life.

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

Building qualified opportunities at pace

Proved viability of hybrid cloud proposition, creating an engaged database of contacts within target accounts with strong pipeline.

At the close of campaign:

524 leads generated
70 Report downloads
17 meetings booked
1 identified opportunity

Increased brand awareness in UK and Nordics and strengthening joint partner marketing opportunities

May 11, 2020 Sian Heaphy

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

Using marketing agility to build pipeline

Claremont are the UK’s leading independent provider of Oracle Managed Services. With offices in Guildford and Newcastle, Claremont work with clients like National Trust, Stagecoach, Arqiva and JLT.

With a market moving towards Cloud and with ambitious growth targets, Claremont required a marketing partner with knowledge of the Oracle industry who would be able to build the brand and feed the sales pipeline. Bright provided Claremont with an agile virtual marketing team to support three core business goals:

Increasing demand from new & existing clients
Increasing brand awareness amongst target audiences
Increasing brand awareness with strategic partners

Since we started working with Bright we have seen an increase in sales leads by over 40%, good attendance at events and improved relationships with key strategic partners.
Mark Vivian, CEO

Increased demand from key accounts

Bright ran a range of agile marketing campaigns to generate opportunities for Claremont’s core propositions from both new and existing accounts. Blending tactics and messaging appropriate to the target audience, the campaigns have allowed Claremont to meet monthly sales lead KPI’s to feed their sales pipeline by leveraging:

Events aimed at HR, Finance & IT decision makers
Lead generation campaigns, using thought leadership content, backed up with social prospecting, digital marketing and telesales
Nurture and retention campaigns to sell additional services to existing clients

Increased brand awareness with Oracle

As an Oracle partner, building a strong relationship with them is key to Claremont’s success. Claremont’s virtual marketing team created a campaign aimed at raising awareness within Oracle, tactics included:

A quarterly email newsletter featuring relevant thought leadership and case studies
Working with Oracle on joint marketing campaigns into target sectors to create new leads for joint pursuit
Collaborating on joint customer video case studies
Social prospecting targeting key Oracle stakeholders to build engagement and extend Claremont’s network within Oracle

July 9, 2019 Sian Heaphy No comments

Agile marketing from scratch

Flo Group (formerly MavenWire) delivers transportation consulting services and solutions to large global firms. They aim to improve logistics and support the evolution of the supply chain across a wide range of industries – from retail to manufacturing.

MavenWire had the credentials and the experience as a market leader, but struggled to communicate effectively to its target audiences, who were difficult-to-reach senior decision makers.

Bright were engaged to create an agile marketing strategy for MavenWire to transition its brand to Flo, create a new identity, build reputation in the EMEA region and differentiate itself in the market to better engage the right prospects, build strong alliance relationships and attracting new talent.

Creating a brand identity and brand voice

Bright formed an agile marketing hub including subject matter experts, data and reporting specialists, project sponsor and Flo’s existing marketing resources to develop a strategic roadmap and use an iterative agile marketing approach for activity execution – focusing on the website and the core collaterals to support business development.

Initially, Bright created a joint brand identity to showcase MavenWire and Flo’s expertise, elevating it to a market leadership position in preparation for the transition to Flo Group. Starting with creating a website built upon clear, consistent messaging and a clean look. The website was validated with key audiences, so that only the successful elements were retained whilst reworking areas of underperformance.

New content and messaging drove search engine traffic, supported by a social media campaign and other marketing activities, resulting in increased time spent on the website and greater social following from key audiences.

A consistent brand voice was woven through the off line collateral to support the business development process via sales toolkits and to use at events. Up-to-date case studies gave the brand visible credentials to approach the right decision makers and provide evidence of success.

Once the foundation marketing was underway, a demand generation strategy was developed based on campaigns to build pipeline for key go-to market propositions.

Bright created a marketing foundation for Flo Group by implementing a strong brand identity and driving multichannel demand campaigns, that delivered results that supported our business goals.
Barry Hayes, CEO

Driving further demand

The campaigns were designed to deliver fast results and used agile marketing to quickly execute, gather feedback, validate and restructure the propositions in order to best exploit market demand and maximise response. Bright also proactively used this approach with Flo’s alliance partners such as Descartes, Oracle, FourKites and Flexis to quickly develop and execute joint campaigns to drive further demand.

Bright added value to Flo’s annual conference presence by bringing consistency to communication outreach prior to, at and post events. This was combined with identifying, following up and nurturing new opportunities with key prospects.

After feedback and research, Bright recommended creating a stronger event and market presence through adding video content to explain complex ideas in an accessible format, create higher impact and drive engagement.

July 9, 2019 Sian Heaphy No comments

Building better business together

MavenWire (now Flo Group) is a recognised leader in delivering Transportation Management Solutions, with many years of experience in implementing logistics solutions for customers from a wide range of industries, and working with a selection of world-class suppliers. MavenWire recognised that many EMEA companies struggle with supply chain optimisation, and identified an opportunity to strengthen its own business by capitalising on that need.

MavenWire understood the value of developing a close relationship with Oracle in order to fortify its brand and create new sales opportunities within Europe. Oracle has a large number of partnering organisations, so it was important for MavenWire to stand out from the crowd; and establish itself as the go-to Oracle supply-chain consulting provider, if it was to achieve its business goals.

MavenWire wanted to improve it’s Partner Experience (PX) strategy and work on joint marketing campaigns to strengthen its relationship with Oracle, and build up a pipeline of well-qualified sales opportunities.

Bright appreciated the importance of building a strong relationship with Oracle through effective PX and were able to make this a reality.
Barry Hyes, Executive Director

Agile lead generation campaigns

MavenWire engaged Bright to help develop its PX marketing approach with Oracle. Bright planned and initiated a series of lead generation campaigns, initially independent of Oracle involvement but always sharing the results with the Oracle team. The campaigns focused on an integrated agile marketing approach, testing, learning and building on success by using:

Engaging content and collaterals
Consistent direct and indirect communication to the target audience
Major industry conference and event sponsorship
Social media outreach

After sharing the results with Oracle the approach evolved into a series of joint marketing campaigns with Oracle, to establish a pipeline of new license, implementation and consulting opportunities within key target accounts.

A joint campaign approach combined Oracle products with MavenWire’s delivery expertise to offer prospects a complete solution. The lead generation campaigns enabled MavenWire to identify new sales opportunities and win new business jointly with the Oracle sales team.

Joint partner marketing success

In building this alliance through proactive marketing, MavenWire leveraged the Oracle brand to validate its own propositions, and become a go-to partner for Oracle implementations and consulting.

Results

Improved PX

Resulting in investment in joint marketing campaigns as a proven and proactive partner

Campaign surpassed its target by 200%

Resulting in increased investment and further support from Oracle

Strong sales pipeline established

3-4 qualified sales meetings generated per month for MavenWire and the Oracle sales team to jointly pursue

July 9, 2019 Sian Heaphy No comments

Injecting agility into creating a strong brand identity

Unifii is a ServiceNow automation and integration specialist but had been so busy doing what they do – helping clients align their technology with business goals – that they hadn’t aligned their own brand with their core values and offerings.

They came to us to help them develop a strong, differentiating brand identity that does justice to their key offerings – innovation, integration and implementation.

Our clients and partners have been incredibly positive since the launch and the new branding has been adopted across all aspects of our business. Working with the Bright team has been very enjoyable, we really appreciate their professionalism and dedication throughout the project.
Stephen Mamelok, Director

Fast forward to a rebrand with agility and pace

Using a sprint based approach to market research discovery, environmental analysis and proposition messaging development Bright identified a need for a complete rebrand of Service Integrators. We brought the new Unifii brand to life with a fresh, flexible visual identity.

The new visual identity had people at the heart of its design – creating a feeling of inclusiveness and trust. We used agile marketing to weave this into a full new branding positioning, visual identify, messaging framework and tone of voice – testing, learning and improving to create the final brand outputs.

This theme was driven by a proposition workshop that delved into the particulars of the brand. With the voice of stakeholders and market research as the foundation for the workshops we created one unified and modern identity that triggered the right emotional and business response from Unifii’s target audience.

Brand foundation and playbook

We test the new brand we developed a content rich campaign strategy deploying an integrated mix of marketing and sales support materials using the new tone of voice and visual identity.

Using a three-colour palette, we created clean and simple branding that was flexible and adaptable across all communications. Backed up with brand guidelines and a messaging playbook to safeguard the new identity and positioning. The results speak for themselves:

Results

47% increase of website traffic from LinkedIn

43% uplift in page views

Validate messaging and identity using agile marketing to test, learn and improve throughout the development process.

July 9, 2019 Sian Heaphy