Transcript

My name is Femi Olajiga, I am an Agile marketing coach and trainer.  The agenda for this video will cover what is Agile marketing, the Agile marketing model, how to implement Agile marketing. And then I’ll finish up with questions and recommendations. The questions are not questions that I will ask, is questions that you can ask yourself as marketers when you’re implementing Agile marketing. So what exactly is Agile marketing? I’m sure a lot of you have heard about the phrase, it’s not a fad, or is it just a buzzword.

It is a way of working that was started by the IT industry and now it’s being rolled out across markets and teams globally. The definition of Agile marketing will depend on who you ask. If you ask someone that works with a company that sells project management software, they will tell you Agile marketing is about using software to improve your process. If you ask a coach, for example, he’s going to tell you Agile marketing is about improving the psychological safety of the team. If you ask a CMO or someone in a leadership team, what Agile marketing means, that person will come with an answer that deals with improving the effectiveness of his team or her team.

What is Agile Marketing?

Agile marketing’s definition has different perspective, depending on who you ask. But the ultimate goal of marketing still remains the same. Marketing is about planning and implementing those plans, and making sure that those plans align with the business strategy, the business objective, and the strategic goal of the organisation. So in my opinion, Agile marketing is an iterative approach towards making your strategy planning, and your implementation, iterative. What this means is you’re going to apply elements and practises that are present in frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, Lean and other methodologies. So Agile marketing by itself, it’s not just about framework or processes. It’s more about marketing, and how you can implement your strategy in a way that focuses on customer experience.The iterative approach is centred on data, and a feedback loop to inform your business strategy. What this means, in essence is you have a strategy. Most of the time, we’re all aware of 12 months planned. Some companies even go as far as five year strategy and things like that, which is fair, but the world we live in at the moment is so fast and it changes so quickly that you cannot afford to just believe that you’re going to have a long term plan, and not iterate and review those plans ongoing.

Customer experience is a word that has been thrown around, that doesn’t really have a good meaning. But the ultimate definition of customer experience is where you compete. What I mean by this is if you look at brands like Apple for example, as a person, I use Apple products. And the reason why I use the product is because it gives value. I’ve used other products in the past, but the value that I get and the experience that I get using Apple products, it’s far different and superior. So the experience is what makes me loyal to Apple.

The same applies to other organisations. So if you really want to be Agile, your customer experience will be your feedback loop. And what are this metrics? The metrics you use to measure customer experience, does not necessarily have to do with vanity metrics. It’s more about how many customers are you able to retain, and how many customers will refer your products or services to other people. That is the competitive advantage, and the data that you get from customer experience, then feeding back into your planning and your strategy. That is what Agile marketing is about. I’m not going to go into much detail about customer experience and all this stuff about strategy, but this is my definition of Agile marketing.

Everybody has different definitions, but core elements of Agile marketing is eliminating waste. What are the waste in your marketing plan, or your marketing strategy? And whatever marketing campaign activities you’re doing, where is money being wasted? Being able to identify that and removing that waste, that’s the old elements of Agile marketing.

Now, let’s go to the next level. There are three elements that you will think about when you’re thinking about Agile marketing.

Agile Marketing Model

The model starts with your strategy. Strategy sometimes is often confused with tactics. A marketing strategy is different to a marketing tactic. I’m not going to go into too much details about the marketing strategy here. But it’s important to understand that, if you’re tactical and not strategic, then you cannot be Agile. That’s one thing I want you to know. The other part is the people element of Agile marketing.

People within a marketing team will influence and impact the success of your campaign. A lot of organisation don’t necessarily want to talk about people elements. But the fact remains that the internal politics within organisations, within teams, impacts the output and the outcomes that the organisation gets.
If you look at organisations that have gone bankrupt and have gone out of existence, the culture has an impact on the strategy. I’ll remind you about a popular quote by Peter Drucker, he said, culture eats strategy for breakfast. What this means is, no matter how good your strategy is, if your people and your cultural elements is not top notch, then you will go out of business.

Your team will not be high perfo rming. And then the other part is the process. I’m going to talk about this in more detail, but let’s start with the strategy. In summary, an Agile marketing strategy is one that utilises a combination of qualitative and quantitative insights to inform your business strategy or your marketing strategy. Continuous improvement, true dynamic and fluid tactic. So what I’m trying to say here is, for your strategy to be truly Agile, you need to pivot from one channel to the other, based on the return on investment.

What this means is listening to each channel performance and understanding what channel drives the best value. So, the next part is the process. The processes in the Agile marketing model comes on the methodologies and the frameworks that you use to implement your marketing strategy. So we have processes or some people call it methodology. Some people don’t like to call it processes, but Scrum is a framework is a methodology, that is a process. And I would go further and say it’s a project management methodology, which people in the Scrum community don’t want to hear, but that is what it is.

It’s a process, a way of working that makes teams effective as a unit, but Scrum was developed for single teams, and then you have Kanban, you have Lean, and then you have the waterfall model. Some people will preach that waterfall is bad. But before you say waterfall is bad, try and take a step back and think of some projects that you know what you’re going to deliver, You know, everything, it’s a repetitive thing that you do all the time. That is waterfall. So if we go by the same bad publicity that waterfall has had in the software community, we get that mindset that waterfall is bad, but someone that works in marketing will understand that things like events marketing, things that, you know, for example, a website redesign, it’s a project, you know what you have to do first, you know what would you will do next. So it’s a sequential way of working, and it’s not evil. So as marketers we need to remove that thought that waterfall is bad.

The bad thing that is being preached about waterfall, is the decision making, the phases, and things that doesn’t really help people to iterate. But again, there’s an
argument about waterfall, I’ll leave you to decide what your final conclusion is. But when you’re thinking of Agile marketing processes, you have options, Scrum, Kanban, Lean, waterfall, and other processes. The idea is for you to look at practises in all these different frameworks and methodologies, and figure out what works for your team. Create a flavour that works for you and your team.

Don’t base your Agile marketing, implementation or transformation on what people say, but kind of create your own story. And then the people element. First is leadership. The performance of a team, the effectiveness of a team, is based on the type of leaders in the team. So when you’re looking at Agile marketing, one thing you have to come on realise is, your team performance will be based on the type of leadership you have. If you have a command and control leader, a leader that tells people what to do, but refuses to harness the skills and the wisdom of the crowd, the wisdom of the team, then you cannot be Agile.

Because you have people within your team with capabilities and capacity, that is not being utilised because they’re being told what to do. I’m not saying Agile marketing means you don’t tell teams what to do, but there’s more collaboration, managers and leaders listen, and work as a unit, it’s just like a football team. On a football pitch, you have the captain, and then you have the whole team, and then you have the manager on the touchline. The whole team is a unit, every individual is a leader on his own, and they are all working towards a unified goal, which is winning the match. So the leader within that team is also part of the team and doesn’t really just tell people what to do.

Everyone within the team is empowered to express themselves. That is the beauty of sports. So, as marketing teams, the leadership teams and marketing needs, or should look at other functions within sports, and kind of learn from the, learn leadership. The way you kind of relate with your kids, people will say it’s different to the organisation, but you show them respect, for those that are good parents. You show them respect and you bring them up in a good way. That same leadership traits that you have at home, you can bring it to work as well, understand that your direct reports will have different skill level, and would need mentoring and coaching.

So again, this goes back to all the conversations that people leave organisations because of bad managers. So it sometimes amuses me that we have a lot of
leadership books and leadership training all over the place yet a lot of people that lead teams are not leaders, but they’re managers. So for you to be truly, truly Agile, what I’m suggesting in this model, is the leadership needs to be reviewed and you as an individual, as a leader within a team, you need to look inward and ask yourself what kind of leader am I?

The next thing is communication. The most important part of a team’s effectiveness is how they communicate. And communication hinges on listening within the team. So if you have a team where people have, difficulties understanding each other, the communication then becomes a problem. I’m not going to go into too much details. But for your team to be truly Agile, your communication needs to be seamless, needs to be transparent, needs to have a way where people feel safe to say what they feel, and express themselves.

And then we’ll talk about the reward systems. The funny thing about teams is, you have a situation where everybody within the team works as a team, but people are rewarded differently. What I mean is the individual bonus system, organisations reward people based on performance, or you have your own review. You get paid on, you get the bonuses on your personal, individual performance, but yet you’re working in a team where everybody is supposed to work towards a common goal. Some organisation has abolished the annual review process and things like that.

So this, again, is one of the problems with marketing teams and with organisations in general, the reward system doesn’t really encourage teamwork. Because if you’re working as a team, but everybody still has their own personal agenda, because their personal agenda is, how they can get promoted individually, how they can get a raise, or a bonus, I’m not saying anything is bad with being promoted, but what I’m trying to say is, for a team to work as a team, the reward system needs to reflect that. So then people will be open to collaboration, because they know that, okay, we’re in this together as a team.

And then the diversity. I talk about diversity a lot, and I get a lot of pushback with that because, when you have a black man talking about diversity, the default is oh, he’s talking about having different ethnicity in a team. No, that’s not what I mean by diversity. That is part diversity. But what I mean by diversity is diversity of thoughts, diversity of perception, and diversity of background. This diversity will help the team because for you to be truly high performing, you need to have this diverse views, and diverse backgrounds in your team.

So, for example, an international team that would have people of diverse backgrounds, it’s not because it’s international, but it’s because their customer base is also global and international. So those individuals from different backgrounds will be able to understand the different markets and different segments that you serve as a global organisation, and the diversity of thoughts as well. You have different demographics within your customer segments. So you have male, female, different races. So why does a team not reflect the diversity of a customer base? But what I’m trying to say is for most organisations, you have a diverse set of customer base, the same should be reflected in your team.

This is another conversation that we could talk forever. But what I’m trying to say in essence, the people elements of the Agile marketing model talks about your leadership, communication, reward system, and then diversity.

How To Implement Agile Marketing

Let’s talk about the implementation of Agile marketing. The first thing is, you need to know what to do. So, my recommendation in terms of implementing Agile marketing is “self study”, or you could hire someone to do it for you. Go online and research materials like the Agile marketing Manifesto, research the Agile Manifesto, and look at books. popular books, like Kanban books.
I’m going to put some links in the notes below the video.

So, I will put a list of recommended reading that you can read to learn more about Agile, and then how you can then apply that into marketing. The second stage is to clarify what problems you’re trying to solve. So for example, if you have a team, and you want to go Agile, why are you going Agile? What exactly is the problems within your team? And if you go back to what I mentioned earlier about the frameworks in terms of the processes, so if you know your existing problems, then you are able to choose what elements of those individual methodologies that you can then apply to your team to solve those problems. So say for example, if you have a problem that everybody’s always busy in terms of back to back meetings, and people just spend the whole day in meetings and not really getting anything done, then you know that that’s a problem.

So when you’re doing your research about Agile processes and frameworks, you then need to identify what ritual within the Agile family will help you solve that problem. So when you’re implementing Agile marketing, first clarify what problems you’re trying to solve. And then from that, then you can then look for solutions in the Agile framework family like Scrum, Kanban, and all the others, Lean. That is one way I would recommend. And then, we mentioned this earlier on that, the marketing strategy is important. But if you want to go Agile, and you don’t have a marketing strategy, you just have tactics. You don’t really have the set objective that you’re trying to always set, outcome that you’re trying to achieve, that is a problem.

So, when you’re implementing Agile marketing, review your existing marketing strategy. Look at what strategy you have in place, do you have like this three to five year strategy, look at your, like really review your strategy. I’m not going to cover a lot about marketing strategy here, but read up about marketing strategy, which is different to tactics and then review that, then you can then set your objectives and set your target per quarter for the next three months, six months, and then you know that in every, maybe every month or every quarter, you review that strategy, and that’s where the iteration comes into play. So when you implement in Agile marketing, this is really important because, Agile in software, and IT is perfect, but when you bring it into marketing, it’s an all different kettle of fish.

What I mean by this is, IT teams have maybe, front-end developers, back-end developers, and all these people, they know this stuff. But when you come to marketing, it’s different. It’s not like marketing doesn’t know this stuff. But the skill level in marketing teams varies. So you have someone that is an exec. So if you really want to go Agile, you need to look at okay, what is the capabilities and limitations within our teams? Because if your teams don’t have the right skills, then you have to outsource.

And then when you’re outsourcing, you’re outsourcing to external agencies. That is, it’s a tricky one, but I’m not going to go into the complications between having in house or external teams and things like that. But for you to be really Agile, and when you’re looking to implement Agile, one of the things you need to look at is, review your internal scaling capabilities to understand those limitations that your team members have and that, that would then inform you on the next step of okay, how are we going to improve and develop our skills as a team to make us that really functional team. If you look at sports theme, for example, you have each unit within the team, and everybody knows their strengths and their weaknesses.

So people individually within a sports team work to improve what they know they’re weak on, and improve the things that they’re even good at. So the same applies to Agile marketing, work with your team, review your skills, and kind of have a plan to improve those skills and if you cannot improve those skills, how can you bring in external resource to kind of compliment your team to move forward. So when you implement in Agile marketing, I mentioned this earlier on about the, the umbrella, the family of Agile methodology. So you have the Scrum, you have the Kanban, and then you have all the practises.  One thing that I’ve seen from teams that I’ve worked in, and people that I’ve interviewed is, it’s quite easy to fall into that trap to say, oh, this team practises Scrum. This team practises this. So to avoid that, when you’re implementing Agile marketing, you need to embrace an agnostic approach.

What this means is, look at all the methodologies and all the frameworks, and pick and choose elements of that methodology and apply to your team. I’m not going to go into much details about this here. But one of the ways to implement Agile marketing is to embrace an agnostic approach to Agile. One size doesn’t fit all. Blend and create your own methodology internally, what works for your team, what works for your demographic, that is what you should focus on. And then, when you’re implementing Agile marketing within a team, another thing you need to look at is, the tools, the software that you would use, it’s very easy to start buying all the software’s available.

But again, that starts to affect the communication within the team, because if someone is getting a message on one software and another message of the email, and another message on the instant message, and another message by the corridor, or another message verbally, so it’s difficult. So when you’re implementing Agile marketing, look at the tools and make sure that those tools that you decide to use, do not end up becoming a problem, where there’s information overload, and it then becomes a situation where vital information gets lost because you don’t even remember what channel, the information came in through.

And you don’t even know how to store it. So one of the recommendations, and one of the things you should look into when you’re implementing Agile marketing is to select the right tools and softwares that works for your team. And when you’re doing this, your team is either co-located where you have all team members in the same office, or they’re distributed, where you have team members in America, Europe and other places. So the kind of tools that you use would then determine how those teams will work together effectively, considering the time difference in the time zone as well. Earlier on, I talked about self study. You can buy a bunch of books, distribute it across your team, have each member of your team read that book.

So let’s take for example, you have a team of seven people, and one manager. The manager can buy like six books, give each team member one book, the manager will read one as well. And give yourself a deadline that okay, at the end of four weeks, each of you should have finished reading this book, and you should create a summary and present your findings and teach the team, what you’ve learned from that book. That’s one approach to implementing Agile marketing on the training perspective. The other approach is to hire an Agile marketing trainer, someone that would help your team in terms of their knowledge and development of Agile marketing.

So what I mean by this is, you can read a book about Agile, but when you’re implementing it, you’re going to come up with problems, you’re going to learn as you go along. You can avoid those mistakes by hiring someone that has already gone through the process. So this is another option of implementing Agile marketing,
you can bring in a trainer to train your team. But one thing I want you to be aware of is, when you hire a trainer, you need to understand that a trainer cannot impact knowledge in two days. It’s just information on overload. For you to get the best out of the training,

what I recommend is you have a trainer come in and develop a training material and an on-demand training, just like IBM and all this big multinational companies are doing, they have their own internal training portal. So people have on-demand training where they can go to and learn. So by this you reduce cost of having to hire a trainer every now and then when you need training. So bring in a trainer, develop a training material, have it internally. So when you have people move into your team, and people leave your team, you still have that resource and then that brings down the cost as well.

There’s two things when you develop an Agile marketing that you need to understand. There’s the Agile trainer, and there’s the Agile coach. The word coach has kind of lost its meaning because everybody calls themselves a coach. But what is an Agile coach? An Agile coach is someone that is formally trained as a coach, and it’s different to a trainer. There are two types of coach that you’ll come across, a coach that will come into your organisation and prescribe a framework for you to use. That’s one type of coach. Another type of coach is a coach that will come into your organisation, and will first try to understand your problem, and then work with you to devise a solution.

What I mean by devise a solution is, a coach will coach you, based on the trainings that you’ve had on Agile frameworks and methodologies, on how best to implement that framework in the context of your team. That is a coach. A coach will also be able to coach each individual within your team, one to one coaching, team coaching and leadership coaching. So when you’re deciding to hire a coach to help you implement your Agile marketing, do your due diligence to understand if that coach is actually qualified. It’s easy to have someone with all due respect that has worked in an industry, and after like 30 years decides to resign his job and go freelance. And it’s easy for that person because they’ve worked in that organisation, or that industry for 30 years to call themselves a coach.
But that’s not necessarily a coach. A coach is someone that is formally trained, that has a model, a model, a coaching model, like I have a coaching model called the GROW Model that was developed Sir John Whitmore.

This model has been in existence for more than 30 years. So if I’m doing one to one coaching, I use that model. And there’s another model called the Co-Active Model. So, whoever I’m coaching, I follow those same set of models. This models have nothing to do with Agile, they’re models outside of Agile. These are coaching models, team coaching, life coaching and all these models, is what differentiates a coach from a trainer. A trainer is someone that would just know  how to help you understand, the pros and cons of methodologies like Scrum Kanban. So when you’re implementing Agile marketing, the first stage is for you to self study, learn on your own.

The second stage is to hire a trainer that can come into to your team, so you can avoid all the mistakes you can learn from those trainers experiences, and so it will help you with the speed at which you implement Agile marketing And the third thing is hiring a coach that will be coaching your team, ongoing maybe between three to six months or 12 months. But for you to really get to that level where your team has matured, and Agile marketing is not, it’s a journey, it’s not a sprint,
it’s not something that oh, we’re Agile, fine everybody go home.

No, it’s ongoing, that’s why you need someone to give you a different perspective. A coach that comes in to coach your team maybe once a week, it can be done virtually, but you need a coach to really, really maintain that momentum moving forward. When you’re trying to implement Agile marketing, as a manager, or team lead, first, you need to clarify what Agile marketing means for each person on your team, because if you have a team that is trying to apply Agile, and they have different views, and different interpretation of Agile marketing, that by itself is a problem.

So how do you do that? You hire a coach. If you kind of hire a coach, then you just make sure they have a conversation in a meeting to clarify what Agile marketing means to everyone on the team. The second question is, you ask yourself, why do we want to apply Agile? Why do we want to implement Agile? Do we have a problem that we’re trying to solve? Do we want to make a strategy more Agile? What’s the reason behind Agile? Are we just tried to do it because everybody else is doing it? Are we trying to do it because our competitor is going to drive us out of town?

What else are we trying to solve with Agile marketing? So this is one question you need to ask yourself. If you don’t have any justification to apply Agile marketing, then please don’t. Because you can apply Agile marketing within a team that has a command and control, toxic culture. And Agile is just going to ramp up the pressure on people. I’ve seen it happen from experience, so if your way of working that you’re doing is working for you, by all means maintain it. But you need to ask yourself what you want to achieve with Agile marketing. After asking yourself that question, the next thing is okay, what is our expectations from Agile?

You need to have that clear goal. That clear outcome. After you’ve looked at the why, the motivation behind applying Agile, then you ask yourself that question again that okay, what do we want to expect? What will success look like, after we’ve implemented Agile marketing? Remember I mentioned that Agile, an Agile way of working, it’s ongoing, continuous improvement. So it’s not like something that you just implement and bam, it’s at the end. No, it’s an ongoing, evolving way to improve your team, collaboration, communication, improve transparency across the team, improve how you eliminate waste in terms of time.

Waste is not just money alone, how you eliminate time waste, how you release and reduce pressure from the team. So what is your expectation from Agile? Do you want to increase employee engagement? Do you want to prove your net promoter score? That needs to be clarified when you’re trying to apply, or implement Agile marketing. How will Agile marketing affect each member of your team specifically? This is a question you need to ask yourself. When you implement an Agile marketing sit down as a team lead, or someone that leads multiple teams. You need to understand how it will affect people, specifically, because I’ve seen Agile marketing, and Agile way of working rolled out in companies and at the initial stage, people tend to leave.

So if you implement Agile or Agile marketing, and the best performer on your team leaves, how are you going to replace that person? So you really need to try and understand that okay, if you’re trying to implement or apply Agile way of working, some people go in, oh, we want to make the whole structure flat. And I’m thinking, what is the incentive in terms of progression for people, if you say you want to implement Agile, and we want to have a flat structure.

So how would people gauge their progression? As humans, we always want to progress. We always want to see the next page of our careers. So if you say, oh, we going to have a flat structure, just apply a little bit of common sense and ask yourself, if we do this, how is it going to impact or affect the best performance on our team? And then how is he going to even affect how we bring in skilled people into the team?

Because some people would not like to work in a place where there is no long term progression that is just a flat structure. Does that mean I’m going to have one role and that’s it. So some of those things require common sense. It works with some teams if it’s a project team, you can have a flat structure. If it’s a team that is static, then you really want to have a think and understand how Agile or Agile way of working will affect each member of your team. Another thing you need to think about, a question you need to ask yourself is, what incentive does Agile marketing provide to each person on your team? I cannot answer that question for you. But you need to ask yourself that question.

And by asking that question, the answers you come up with will help you in your Agile marketing implementation. If you look at most of the Agile marketing implementation, you would realise that, the initiative comes from maybe a marketing director or CMO, someone from the top, which is good. But the question you need to ask yourself, if you’re a manager or a leader, is how do I get buy-in from everyone on the team? How do you get buy-in? Are you just going to say, oh, we’re rolling out Agile? Nobody is going to say no.

But how do you make sure that you get that by-in that two, three months down the line, your best performance of the team will not leave? So that’s a question you need to ask yourself. Ask your team, look, and make sure that you really get in by-in, not because you’re a manager or a leader, but people actually believe in Agile marketing, and their whole heartedly bought into the idea. So you need to figure out a way to get buy-in when you are implementing Agile marketing. We mentioned this earlier on how you plan to develop Agile marketing skills across your teams. The first option is to self study. Another option is to bring in a trainer, to first train your team. Another option is to then bring in a coach, or bring in a coach at the beginning that will train your team and then develop the whole team.

So one option that I recommend is make sure that you consider cost, because if you start sending each member of your team, to trainings by all this training providers that cost, like 1000 per person, then that becomes an expensive thing to do. So another question you need to really, really look at, from a cost and continuity perspective is, how you plan to develop the skills across your team. So again, we talked about this earlier on, what are the resources that your team needs, in terms of software, in terms of tools, for them to really, really help with the Agile marketing journey?

This is a question that you need to ask yourself as well. And the final question is, how many campaigns and projects will retain the waterfall model? I specifically left this question for the end because, there is this perception that if we go Agile, then waterfall is evil. Waterfall is not evil, waterfall is just a sequential way of doing stuff, that’s what waterfall means. But if you look at waterfall in the software industry, it is bad for software companies and software teams. Because in software, you cannot do those things in batches.

So for example, you want to develop something, you develop the whole thing at the beginning, then you test and all those kind of things. You need an iterative approach. That’s why Agile was developed in software, and it’s perfect. But when you come into marketing, you need to understand that waterfall in software is different to waterfall in Agile marketing. So when you talk about waterfall in Agile marketing, you’re talking about a website redesign project, you know that the first thing you’re going to do is this, the next thing you’re going to do is that, one thing has to finish before the other thing starts,because that’s the way it works.

And if you’re planning an event, you have a set date for the events, like a trade show or something like that. It is a waterfall way, you cannot do Agile in that because you know everything you’re going to do. So you do it that way in a sequential way. So waterfall in IT, is different to waterfall in marketing. So while waterfall is bad, and terrible for IT teams, in software development, waterfall in marketing is not necessarily bad. If don’t right.

So, my name is Femi Olajiga and I’m an Agile marketing coach and trainer. I am also the author of the book Lean Agile Marketing. If you’re interested in developing your Agile marketing capabilities, drop me an email at Femi@cxconversion.com, or connect with me on LinkedIn. Thank you very much.