How To Implement Agile Marketing

Published by Femi Olajiga in Agile Marketing

How To Implement Agile Marketing

If you’re new to Agile marketing and confused about how to implement Agile marketing, then this article is for you! My name is Femi Olajiga, and I have been doing Agile marketing since 2013. I am also the author of the book Lean Agile Marketing. My experience of Agile marketing is strictly marketing-focused and is somewhat contrary to the application of Agile principles in IT software development. So, if you’re IT-focused, this article is not for you, but if you’re looking to implement Agile within marketing, then this article will help you understand Agile in the context of marketing teams.

The article is structured as follows:

Brief Overview of Agile marketing

 There are two fundamental approaches to how people implement Agile marketing:

Prescriptive Agile Marketing Implementation

This approach is primarily focused on getting the marketing function to work in a Scrum way. The focus is very much on making sure that the team understands Scrum and Kanban, and there is less emphasis on marketing strategy and revenue contribution. The whole approach to Agile marketing from a prescriptive perspective is entirely based on the mindset of delivering existing framework-focused training and certifications (e.g. Scrum, Kanban, etc.) which does not necessarily guarantee successful implementation of Agile in marketing. I often see marketing teams approach Agile marketing with the mindset of “Let’s just do Scrum. Once we do Scrum and Kanban, we’ve done Agile marketing.” This approach is popular with marketing teams that are just starting out in Agile marketing. Most people who approach Agile marketing by focusing on setting up a pilot Scrum team often realise at a later stage that they should have focused on problem identification first before adapting Scrum and Kanban to marketing. This is why I prefer the non-prescriptive approach to Agile marketing which embraces a more pragmatic, Lean-thinking mindset.

Non- Prescriptive Agile Marketing Implementation

More advanced teams approach Agile marketing in a non-prescriptive, open-minded way. This approach is focused more on creating an Agile operating model that kind of looks at existing marketing problems and then tries to figure out a solution using Lean thinking, Waterfall, Agile, and whatever methodology might be appropriate for solving existing marketing problems. This non-prescriptive approach is framework agnostic, and it’s not framework specific. I like this approach because it focuses specifically on performance marketing and revenue attribution. It’s focuses more on getting marketing to deliver business results as expected and less on the specific, prescribed application of Scrum, Kanban or other Agile frameworks. Marketing teams start by:

    • Observing the current state of their marketing strategy and team skills and capabilities;
    • Identifying existing marketing problems;
    • Creating counter-measures to solve identified problems;
    • Creating iterative marketing strategies.

The primary goal of Agile marketing, in a nutshell, is to identify the problems within your marketing strategy, planning, execution and their impact of business objectives. You can only do this by constantly observing the current state of your marketing through continuous situation analysis, looking at important KPIs and avoiding focusing on vanity metrics. You must always adjust your marketing, planning and execution in an iterative and continuous way to stay relevant and in tune with changes in customer expectations and behaviours. Another thing that Agile marketing will bring to your marketing efforts is that it will help you improve accountability from a KPI perspective.

One of the major problems with marketing teams is often prioritization. What should we work on and what would get us the best results? When you start working in an Agile marketing way, it helps you reduce and eliminate prioritization issues because everybody has clear visibility to what is important and what the goals is, what tasks are really aligned to the target KPIs. And another thing that Agile marketing is very good at is helping you reduce people issues.

Agile helps improve collaboration between teams irrespective of which specific people work in which specific team. It can help with visibility and collaboration because the whole team starts working in such a way that success is attributed to the whole team, not to specific individuals on the team and this helps to shift the team mindset away from individual contributions to team-level successes. This also helps improve team and individual productivity as well and creates a consistency whereby people working on the team have an understanding of their workflow and how it contributes to the overall team goals. Team members are then able to develop an understanding of their capacity as individuals, as well as what task they can complete and within which timeframe. This helps nurture time efficiencies. Agile also effectively supports collaboration with external stakeholders, because external stakeholders now also have visibility to what the marketing team is working on, which helps build mutual trust. They’re just not like, oh, the marketing team are just running around in the corner, we don’t know what they’re doing. The visibility that Agile marketing brings to senior stakeholders increases trust in the team and collaboration, both within the team and externally.

Bringing Agile into marketing also helps with the planning and gives it more flexibility. As external stakeholders see what you’re working on, they see the KPIs that you’re working towards, so when it comes time to be flexible from a budget allocation perspective, the stakeholders, like the CFO and people in accounts and technology departments, are more receptive to your requests and the collaboration is more natural from that perspective.

Defining Agile Marketing Team Roles

Traditionally, marketing is structured in two ways. You have the leaders within the marketing team, and then you have the marketing team itself. In the context of IT, especially Scrum, you have the Scrum Master, you have the Product Owner, you have the Development Team. The team is always structured in a way where it’s cross-functional and everybody is together and the Product Owner and the Scrum Master kind of shelves the team, reinforcing it. However, in marketing it’s different, because marketing embraces hierarchy and you can’t just change that because with hierarchy, from the leadership perspective, comes experience. You also need to understand when you’re implementing Agile marketing that your marketing team, in most instances, will have different levels and types of experience. So approaching Agile marketing the way it’s being implemented in IT and trying to do the same thing, e.g. trying to do Scrum in marketing in its pure form, is a recipe for disaster.

I have worked in Scrum teams and I have witnessed first-hand Scrum being too rigid for marketing teams. I’ve also interviewed people across the world since as far back as 2016, that have shared their experience of the difficulty of implementing Scrum. So my recommendation is when you’re looking to implement Agile marketing, make sure that you just focus on these two hierarchies: focus on the leaders and then the team, that is all you need. You don’t need to start structuring your team to Product Owner, Scrum Master, etc., that’s overkill, because marketing has a goal and that goal is different to IT. And like I said earlier on, when it comes to marketing, authority is not distributed to the team. The leaders within the team make the decisions when it comes to budget allocation, when it comes to recruitment, all important decisions are kind of motivated and initiated by the leader. Going down the hierarchy then determines the level of accountability and authority within the team. So, for you to be successful in Agile marketing you need to look at your leader, a high-performing Agile marketing team will require a very, very good leader. So if you look at yourself as a marketing leader and your team is not functioning as an Agile unit, you need to review your leadership style and your approach to Agile marketing.

Your Agile marketing team size and roles will depend on your skill distribution, dependencies, and authority. What I mean by this is when you look at a marketing team in different organizations and even across different sectors, the size always varies. You have marketing teams of one, marketing teams of two, marketing teams of 50, 70,… So applying Agile and Scrum methodologies to a team structure that is not consistent is difficult in itself, which is why there is no one-size-fits-all approach. And again, the dependencies are also different. This dependency management is something that has been done well in the IT space, but when it comes to marketing, the dependencies are complex because you’re working with contractors, you’re working with internal and external stakeholders. And the workflow goes within the team, outside the team, and a lot of stakeholders are involved at various levels. So for you to be really, really Agile, you’d need to embrace that hierarchy that just focuses on the leader and on the team. So what I mean by this is the strategy planning is done from a leadership perspective and the execution is done from the team perspective.

So unlearn and forget everything you know about Scrum and Kanban when you’re coming into Agile marketing. You need to approach Agile marketing with a new set of eyes. With a fresh, open mind and an ability to embrace the fact that you don’t know everything, and you’re going to experiment from a process perspective to get what really works best for your team and your organisation as a whole.

Creating the Marketing Backlog

The very first task in your Agile marketing journey is creating your marketing backlog. A backlog in most instances is just your marketing strategy broken down into tasks. So within the marketing strategy you have different marketing channels. You have expectations, in terms of KPIs from different channels. And then breaking those channels down, most channels have a defined workflow. It’s not like IT where you start looking at, okay, what do we need, what tasks needs to be completed? In most marketing teams you know, what search engine optimization is about; you know what tasks are involved; you know it’s paid search, you know it’s social media marketing. Those tasks are defined, and in most instances, they don’t change.

In search engine optimization and PPC you know that you’re going to do keyword research. And you know that that task is broken down into specific workflows. This means that creating your marketing backlog starts with breaking down those workflows into specific tasks: that is what you then populate into your marketing backlog. That marketing backlog can then be further divided into sprints, which I’m going to talk about later on. You group those tasks into two, 1- or 2-week sprints, and that’s how you start your execution.

However, before you get into the marketing backlog, you need to have created your marketing strategy. A lot of Agile marketing training, qualifications, and even literature never mentions marketing strategy. That sits outside of Agile marketing in most instances. And that is why I said a non-prescriptive approach to Agile marketing focuses more on strategy rather than processes.

Running Marketing Sprints

The idea is you create your strategy and you break it down into batches of tasks that need to be executed. Make sure that when you’re breaking your tasks down into one to two-week cycles (sprints), make sure that every task has a direct link to a top level KPI. Whatever you’re working on, you need to make sure that it’s either linked to a short-term or long-term KPI. And you also need to embrace the fact that not all your tasks that you complete at the end of your sprints will deliver something tangible. What I mean by this is that, if the task is supporting at a long-term strategy and the impact is not going to be immediate, the goal is to complete that task and then use analytics ongoing to review its performance.

It is worth highlighting that you might not get the result at the end of each sprint, unlike the IT folks where that end of each sprint, you have a specific deliverable that you can see and you can show. In marketing, some deliverables are not tangible. You need to embrace the fact that the goal is to complete those tasks and then review analytics and other ongoing insights to see the impact of those tasks that are completed. Another thing that you need to also focus on when you’re running marketing sprints, is that you need to allow the flexibility for each person on the team to allocate themselves what they’re going to complete. What this means is the SEO person will break down their workflow into tasks, and they will populate those backlogs and break it down into sprints.

You need to give people that ownership and flexibility to decide what tasks they can complete. And when people are deciding the number of tasks that they’re going to complete within each sprint, they need to have that flexibility to also leave capacity space. What I mean by this is they need to leave gaps. They should not be working at a 100% capacity all of the time. So most marketing teams that I’ve worked in will have like 75% capacity when you’re working, that 25% will leave space for you to kind of allow new tasks coming to the sprint or take even tax out. And that’s where Agile marketing is different to IT. In IT, you have that rigid approach that once you commit to a set of tasks for a sprint, you have to honor that to the end. In marketing it doesn’t (and will never) work that way. In marketing there has to be more flexibility. When you commit to a task to complete, you try as much as you can to complete that task. But if external factors, things that happen external to the sprint, dictate that you need to pivot within the sprint and change what you’re working on, and re-prioritize what you’re working on, maybe because of budget cuts or whatever, whatever situation it is, you need to embrace the fact that: okay, this task can be removed and then added back in a future sprint.

So the main backlog is where you need to continuously prioritize and there’s flexibility for each sprint. Then another thing you want to focus on is when you’re running a sprint, each member of your team should be able to work together. What this means is you should be able to help each other when you’re completing tasks. And for you to be able to help each other as marketing leaders, you need to encourage the members of your team to have T-shaped skills: they should not just be focused on their own silos and not be effective when it comes to managing another marketing channel.

The idea of T-shaped skill-set tries to make sure that your team have that flexibility to move people around, from one responsibility to the next. That’s the essence of Agile marketing: having T-shaped marketing skills, where the role of the marketing leader is to help ‘mix’ those skills within the team in the optimal way, depending on the goals that need to be achieved. As a marketing leader, you are a combination of the Scrum Master and the Product Owner: these roles are combined within the marketing leader role. This means you should be the one that is looking at the external dependencies and managing those dependencies: you don’t have to (and, indeed, shouldn’t) wait for dependencies or bottlenecks to happen. You need to be proactive in sorting them out and understand because marketing has a defined workflow. A content marketer, depending on the level of experience, knows the tasks that they need to do from start to finish. Depending on the level of experience, they are able to allocate what number of hours or days they need to complete those tasks. And they also have clear visibility of the dependencies related to those tasks. You don’t need a Kanban board to tell you about dependencies and bottlenecks, if you can define your workflow well.

So from a marketing perspective, if you’re looking to implement Agile marketing within your team, my recommendation is to start by first defining your workflows, identifying the tasks that sit within these workflows, and then breaking those tasks down into sprints. That’s what you populate into the sprints and then the backlog as well. The purpose of Agile marketing meetings is to help with the planning in terms of strategy planning, as well as execution.

So let’s start by talking about the daily meetings. I’m talking about the meetings in no particular order. With IT there’s a rigid approach that you start with backlog grooming meeting, however, marketing has more flexibility. Whatever works for your team is what you need to focus on. I’m going to start with the daily meeting, not because it’s the number one meeting you should start with, but just to help marketing teams realize that there is flexibility when you implement an Agile. Just chill and relax, and don’t be so rigid that ‘you have to do this, if you don’t do this, it’s a crime’. Agile marketing doesn’t work that way.

So with the daily meetings, the idea is to initiate a conversation with internal teams, as well as external stakeholders. If required, you’re encouraged to invite the agencies, consultants, even external stakeholders to your daily meeting, if the topic of the conversation or the discussion is important and requires their involvement.

The goal is to educate and inform people about the tasks that you’ve done and kind of highlight what KPIs those tasks are linked to. You then talk through which tasks you plan to work on currently, and then the goal is to identify potential issues or bottlenecks that might be stopping you from completing those tasks.

At the end of each sprint, the team should come together to a sort of ‘show and tell’, to tell people within the organization or within the team that, okay, these are the tasks that I work on, and this is the long-term and the short-term KPIs that those task are going to impact. That way everybody has an understanding and a clear visibility of what task you’re working on and how they might potentially impact their own work and the overall departmental or organisational goals.

This is a short article that kind of tells you the top level of how to implement Agile marketing. Click on this link to download a detailed Agile marketing template. This template contains Agile marketing backlog, Meeting templates and more.

 

How to implement Agile Marketing