Agile marketing transformation programme
Challenge
Softwire are a well established and innovative software engineering firm. With ambitious growth plans the leadership team wanted to understand how marketing could contribute best to supporting their business goals.
Softwire are traditional in their structure, with a business development sales team and dedicated marketing team focused on events, online and communication outreach. The leadership team wanted to understand the maturity of the marketing function and how they could best invest to create a marketing team that could adapt and move at pace to meet market change and scale as the business grew. They wanted to create a consistent approach to lead generation, try new tactics and use agile ways of working to get better results, help the in-house gain new experience and develop a culture of curiosity and continual improvement.
Method
Bright ran a marketing diagnostic to assess and understanding Softwire’s marketing performance, results and capabilities. Working in conjunction with the in-house team to gather data, understand current marketing effectiveness and dig into the operational and martech barriers they faced. Whilst understanding the state of Softwire’s key markets, the competitive landscape and exploring perception of the Softwire brand through perception interviews with key contacts in clients, prospect accounts and channel partners.
Bright ran a number of workshops with senior stakeholders internally at Softwire to further understand key stakeholder experience of working with the marketing team, strengths and weaknesses and what marketing support would be best deployed to support business goals in future.
The diagnostic findings were synthesised and pulled into a strategic marketing plan, a roadmap for executing the plan along with recommendations for quick wins, medium and long term projects to transform the way marketing worked and the anticipated benefits to Softwire.
This was quickly translated into a marketing transformation programme with work streams that focused on transforming lead generation campaigning, data and targeting, content strategy, martech and lead management over a 4-6 month period.
Working with Bright to move towards an agile marketing model made total sense for Softwire. We benefit from being more adaptable, confident in our data driven decision making and have the ability to quickly improve areas of underperformance whilst the team remain focused on the activities that deliver against our business goals.
Transformation at pace
Rapidly evaluated and understood areas of strength and weakness within the Softwire marketing operation. Created a strategic approach and plan for rapidly transforming the marketing team by establishing KPI, fostered curiosity and embedding new ways of working.
Embarked on a 4 month transformation programme to work alongside the in-house team to transfer skills through learning whilst doing, embed agile ways of thinking and working whilst optimising the use of tools to improve marketing effectiveness, elevate the Softwire brand and build sales pipeline.
Broke down internal silos and created a cross functional agile marketing hub model bringing together the right people and skills to drive campaign success. Demonstrated results and drove continual improvement through data, insight, clear reporting and risk and issue management.
Data driven approach so that marketing contribution is clearly understood and how agile ways of working help them adapt and pivot to market change at pace, especially important post Covid. Regular updates to the leadership team helped them understand how best to invest and champion the new marketing approach.
