Learn how the bcm agency invested in its martech stack and established a dialogue with suspects and prospects cognitively.
About the client company
bcm was set up in 2017 to become the marketers’ agency of choice for B2B marketing support. As a B2B cognitive marketing agency, bcm is customer-centric and follow a clear 5 step process to help simplify the complicated. Their capabilities encompass strategy, branding, digital, lead generation and content, and they work with a range of clients, both in the UK and internationally, across a multitude of sectors, including engineering, manufacturing, building materials and construction.
Specific issues or challenges to be addressed
Modern day marketing has seen an acceleration in the volume of data available, but quantity is often pitched higher than quality. At bcm, they are all about putting the person back into persona, and they wanted to generate high quality data that could help their clients really understand their individual customers and for bcm to target suspects and prospects too.
With the average DMU now having 7 people, all of whom need to be communicated with in a timely, relevant, and above all engaging way, and 95% of buyer’s decisions made in the subconscious mind, they repositioned bcm in 2020 to focus on a cognitive approach.
To enable them to do this correctly and effectively, their biggest challenge was how to accelerate their granular understanding of individual decision makers and create a seamless sequence of dialogue, which is paramount to building trust and overall marketing success.
The solution – they needed to invest in their martech stack and for bcm to establish a dialogue with suspects and prospects cognitively.
The target audience
Their key target audiences are the Marketing decision maker, the CEO or business owner and the financial decision maker.
However, marketing today looks very different from how it did even 5 years ago, so understanding who the decision makers are in an organisation is more complex than ever.
Their biggest challenge was selecting the right technology that would enable them to drill down into an organisation to correctly identify those key individuals, assess where marketing sat within the C-suite, and ultimately ensure their communication approach was correct for each individual.
The martech solution
Key to solving their challenge was being able to access intent data, to really understand what people were interested in. As a small boutique agency, they needed to ensure the technology they invested in was not cost prohibitive. They also wanted to ensure that bcm contained their martech by using a small number of complementary solutions as opposed to a large number
of different solutions that can prove hard to manage and require greater resources.
bcm spent time and effort researching the available martech solutions. Careful consideration has now seen them invest just over 10% of their turnover into their comprehensive martech stack, allowing them to deploy their cognitive marketing correctly and be able to compete effectively with bigger agencies.
Their martech stack consists of:
- Zoominfo – for intent data.
- SharpSpring – for CRM, email automation platform, lead tracking functionality, social media and sales platform.
- Crystal – to understand communication and phrasing preferences.
- Hotjar and Google Analytics – for website insights.
- EMO Technologies – for social listening.
Deployment
They spent between March and October 2020 researching martech options and working on their rebranding initiative, so that they could relaunch bcm in October 2020.
The whole team was invested in this research period, and fully onboarded with all technologies as they knew that bcm had one shot to get it right and clearly explain their competitive advantage. Each team member took specific responsibility for certain elements:
- CEO and Creative Strategist – overall strategy and implementation.
- Client Insight and Relationship employee – data.
- Head of Creative – branding, social media and email elements.
- Cognitive Professor and Non-Exec Director – overall process.
The investment and acceleration of their martech gave bcm the ability to understand their audience on a more granular level, allowing us to grow their brand awareness, increase lead generation and position us as educators and an informative resource for B2B marketers.
Impact on the business
Acceleration of bcm martech and the strategic repositioning of bcm has already had considerable impact on the business in the past 4 months.
Since the relaunch in October 2020 bcm has already seen a 50% increase in turnover and a 20% time saving in their processes.
This is way above target, especially against the backdrop of the global pandemic.
As Miriam Drahmane, CEO and Creative Strategist explains: “Before adopting our existing martech stack we were guilty of being busy fools. We were rushing around with various platforms, wasting time measuring KPIs trying to make sense of them, when none of the metrics were actually aligned. Now with our existing stack we have real transparency of not only where it is working well, but where we have gaps, allowing them to continually improve. We are very excited for what 2021 will bring.”
ROI (and budgeting)
Having invested 10% of the turnover, they needed to implement robust and strict KPIs to ensure effective ROI. Increase in new business and revenue were high on the agenda, but we also set KPIs for the softer measures such as engagement rates, brand awareness and strength.
bcm has already seen a 50% increase in terms of client revenue and, based on our projections, they have ambitious growth targets and are looking to double in size again over the next two years.
“I have been in general talks with bcm for several years but it is only in recent months that I can honestly say the agency came onto my radar as a good agency fit for the business. I engaged with their emails and informative social media posts, and through further in-depth discussions with their CEO, who evidently understood my needs and challenges, I have now partnered with bcm for strategy, insight, branding and comms”
