Download - What is agile marketing?
As marketers, we can all agree that today’s marketing is evolving at
an extremely fast pace. This is primarily due to the influence of
technology and the number of devices, media channels and touch
points available to consumers. Consequently, companies
are becoming increasingly concerned with understanding how
to adapt their marketing activities
to the continuously changing customer behaviour and competitor
landscape.
A big part of successfully responding to the changes in the external
environment consists of actually being able to anticipate and embrace
change in a proactive manner. This article will present the definition
of agile marketing, its key advantages, as well as how to adopt agile
marketing that some of the agile frameworks experience in the
context of marketing.
What is Agile Marketing?
Agile marketing is an optimised approach to people, processes and
tools in marketing planning and execution, in response to changing
customer behaviour and market trends. It provides a way to add,
remove and/or modify marketing targets, strategies and tactics on an
ongoing basis. Agile marketing centres on a change in business mind-
set from the traditional marketing structure to a more flexible (agile)
structure that has been so successful in the information technology
industry. It champions data-driven marketing decision making, with
an emphasis on value creation from a customer’s perspective. Every
member of the agile marketing team must embrace the core values of
the agile methodology in order to facilitate this shift in mind-set and
support the successful completion of the team’s activities and the
achievement of the team’s objectives.
This shift in mind-set is most visible within the creation and
execution of the marketing plan. An agile marketing plan is one that
is continuously reviewed and updated within each quarter, even
though the overall allocated marketing budget and time remain
constant. This article won’t cover the ins and outs of
creating a strategic marketing plan, but it is important to
emphasise the importance of creating a marketing plan
before actually attempting to implement agile marketing.
Certainly, traditional marketing has already adopted some elements of
agile methodologies. In particular, this refers to the iterative structure
of the marketing calendar. Most strategic marketing plans are
structured in four iterations (quarters) of three months each, which
aligns with the iterative nature of agile methodologies. Each quarter
in the marketing calendar can then be subdivided into three sprints of
one month each.
Agile marketing recognizes that short term marketing plans are more
stable than long-term plans. You will definitely know what you want
to be doing and achieving in the first quarter of your marketing plan,
but do you know what marketing channel, Google update or
technology will emerge or dominate the market in the next 12
months? Adopting agile marketing provides the flexibility needed to
abandon (sometimes at short notice) the marketing strategies and
tactics that don’t work and redirect the remainder of the marketing
budget into channels that fit better with the profile of your target
audiences. This helps to address the biggest challenge of marketing:
creating and successfully executing marketing campaigns in the face
of uncertainty with changing customer expectations and buying
patterns.
To better understand the needed change in mind-set, consider the
following scenario:
Sharon is the CMO of a global B2B technology company with her
marketing team spread across four continents, where she is supported
by multiple country managers. Due to the time difference
between the regions, she schedules the daily meeting (scrum) to 4pm
UK time to accommodate team members in Europe, North America,
Middle East and Africa. They also meet at the end of every month to
review how everyone is preforming in relation to the predetermined
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) as defined in the integrated
marketing plan. Each team member also presents a summary
PowerPoint presentation to the entire team at the end of each quarter.
The meeting’s attendees include the heads of departments for Social
Media, SEO, PPC, Lead Generation, Marketing Automation, Web
Analytics, Conversion Optimization, Website Product and
Content Marketing. Each attendee updates everyone with any new
developments or hindrances within their department’s scope of
work. At the end of each month, each member prepares a Power
Point presentation to provide a summary report of the positives and
negatives during the month and how it impacts other
marketing channels and the strategic marketing plan as a whole,
following which the CMO meets with each head of department to
review the lessons learnt during the month and define what needs to
change for the following month.
In addition to benefiting the company externally (i.e. with engaging
its customers), adopting an agile approach to marketing also helps
break down tactical silos within the organisation and improve internal
company communication. More specifically, it helps to foster more
open communication and better information flow amongst team
members and across different departments (teams) within a business.
Agile can help marketing teams think more effectively from a
customer’s perspective to make smarter marketing decisions that
remove the ‘us’ against ‘them’ mentality and this can have a
significant direct impact on the company’s return on investment
(ROI). Agile marketing does this by reducing duplication of
marketing goals and enables flexible campaign planning and
execution, which in turn helps to reduce marketing waste and overall
marketing costs, so that more profit is retained within the company.
Although the agile methodology has been extremely successfully
implemented in IT software development, its framework would
require some tweaking to be adopted successfully within marketing
teams. In the previous article we presented the agile values and
principles that need to be integrated within marketing teams to
increase the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and their success
rates. This article presents in some more depth the key advantages of
agile marketing and some considerations for its implementation
across the industry.
Advantages of Agile Marketing
Although agile marketing is gaining traction due to its flexibility and
applicability in a range of different business contexts, this does not
mean that agile will work for absolutely any business. There are still
some industries that need to work with the waterfall approach, either
due to the nature of their products or their target audiences. However,
for those companies willing and able to switch to agile, here are the
key advantages (benefits) that their marketing teams can expect to
experience:
Management Visibility. Managing large marketing teams can be
frustrating for people in senior management, lower level managers
and even team members. Agile marketing provides tremendous
visibility and transparency through daily meetings and the use of agile
project management tools which highlight the contribution
of every team member in terms of tasks they are working on and
objectives they are trying to achieve.
Increased business revenue through customer
satisfaction. Agile projects involve obtaining regular
customer feedback on an ongoing basis and not just at
the beginning when we create an integrated marketing plan.
Feedbacks from customers helps form a better understanding of what
is working as it relates to our marketing strategy.
Ability to respond to change. We all agree that the modus
operandi of our customers and competitors changes – and
frequently. Being able to identify and accommodate these changes
relatively quickly is the key reason why the methodology is called
"Agile Marketing".
Motivated Marketing Teams. Agile marketing team members relate
to each other in a positive and encouraging manner, which is based on
Respect, Openness, Commitment, Focus and Courage. These core
values contribute to the high employee engagement and
retention experienced in companies that practice agile marketing.
Productive Marketing Teams. The agile
marketing methodology includes several practices that enhance
productivity. The collaborative and cross-functional nature of agile
teams means that each and every member of the team
is continuously learning from others, as well as contributing to the
learning of others.
Things to consider with Agile Marketing
Agile includes a range of different frameworks and some of them are
not necessarily useful for marketing. However, there are a number
which can be adapted by most marketing teams. The two most widely
accepted agile frameworks that marketing teams could adopt to
improve marketing process, communication and team interactions are
the Scrum framework (created by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland)
and the Kanban framework, which originated in the manufacturing
industry in the 1950s and has since then entered the IT industry and
(now) the marketing industry. But what about large corporations
heavily reliant on large marketing teams? As a point of illustration,
have a look at the following scenario.
Rachel is the global CMO of a cosmetics company which
employs 7,000-strong worldwide marketing team. She decided to
introduce agile marketing across the entire marketing team but she is
confused as to how 7,000 people will all attend a daily standup
meeting of 15 minutes. What can Rachel do to successfully introduce
agile to her team?
Industry consensus is that the recommended team size for agile teams
using the scrum framework is between 3-9 people. This is said to
guarantee optimal performance, interactions and effective
communication within the team. For global marketing teams with
hundreds (or, as in this case, thousands) of members, it would make
sense to adopt an enterprise agile framework. This would involve
providing on-the-job training for the entire marketing team about
agile, working through the Scrum framework as a foundation, and
then adapting any of the other frameworks mentioned below,
depending on which one is the most suitable one, given the size,
scope and complexity of the marketing function within the company.
The first value in the agile manifesto is "Individuals and interactions
over processes and tools." – this means that the key to implementing
agile is to foster open and positive working relationships within the
marketing team. Although virtual communication tools like Skype
and WebEx can complement communication within agile teams, it is
extremely important to have agile teams co-located in the same office
space if possible. Additionally, it would also be needed to hire
an independent contractor to coach the entire organization (not just
the marketing team) through the agile marketing adoption
process. Clearly, with 7000+ members of the marketing team it is not
possible to implement co-location and face-to-face communication on
such a great scale. However, a framework can be devised which
would allow country marketing teams to implement scrum on their
micro-scale, and the transnational activities and decision making can
then be supported by one of the scaled agile frameworks, such as:
SaFE (http://www.scaledagileframework.com/)
LeSS (https://less.works/)
Disciplined Agile
Delivery (http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com/)
Nexus (https://www.scrum.org/Resources/The-Nexus-Guide).
We will look at these in greater detail in a future post.
Conclusion
Marketing teams today are often siloed by default and this makes
consensus-driven decision making difficult, particularly in large-
scale organisations that operate in a number of global markets. The
bureaucratic, hierarchical, demand-and-control driven nature of most
marketing teams does not empower team members to be self-
organizing, proactive or flexible, because targets are usually set top-
down, with little input from grassroots marketing) and a culture of
fear dominates the workplace, which stifles creativity and interest in
trying new approaches.
Agile marketing can help in dealing with these issues and
transforming the way companies communicate with their customers
and the impact this has on the final ROI, however, the key is in
identifying and adapting the agile frameworks that are appropriate for
the particular industry the company operates in, the product(s) it is
selling and customers it is serving. The process of how companies can
adopt agile marketing will be discussed in my next LinkedIn post. In
the meantime, if you want to learn more about Agile Methodologies
with an emphasis on the Scrum framework, feel free to download the
document below, watch the videos and interpret them for yourself in
the context of marketing (no email registration required).
Download The Scrum Guide
http://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2016/2016-Scrum-
Guide-US.pdf#zoom=100
Introduction to Scrum: https://youtu.be/9TycLR0TqFA
Intro to Kanban in Under 5 Minutes (What is Kanban, Learn
Kanban) https://youtu.be/R8dYLbJiTUE
To get certified or learn more about Scrum framework
visit https://www.scrum.org/ or https://www.scrumalliance.org/
Attend local Scrum, Kanban and Agile meetup groups near you to
learn from the experts in the IT industry https://www.meetup.com/
About The Author
Femi Olajiga is an independent consultant: Agile Digital Marketing
Consultant (Web Analytics, Customer Experience and User
Experience). You can connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter or visit
my website CXconversion.com
Share and find out more about Agile Marketing in my previous post -
Agile Marketing Mindset: Explained
The Principles of Agile Marketing: Explained
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