How to Succeed with Agile Marketing
How to Succeed with Agile Marketing
Agile Marketing Planning
Creating an Agile marketing plan is based on adding iterations and increments to the traditional marketing planning process. It requires aligning all the individual marketing functions to a common strategic objective while creating transparency about how individual objectives and key results align.
Details of Agile Marketing Plan
Most marketing strategies are focused on Customer acquisition, Engagement, Conversion and Loyalty. The most effective and efficient marketing strategy prioritizes customer retention through improving customer experience. However, the sad truth is that the bulk of marketing strategies being implemented are just tactics which focus only on the top of the funnel lead generation and awareness.
Agile marketing takes planning to the next level, with iterations and collaboration that integrates ideas from frontline marketing executives and with a standard agenda that encourages flexibility with budget allocation. Here, the CMO or Marketing Director creates iteration plans and objectives with input from managers or executives responsible for SEO, PPC, Social Media, Web Analytics, conversion rate optimisation, UX and others.
The main purpose of an Agile marketing plan is to encourage transparency and collaboration within the planning and execution phase of marketing campaigns. The objective or any marketing strategy focuses on customer acquisition, conversion and retention. Most marketing strategies fail because of the extreme focus on customer acquisition strategy alone, with little to no concerted efforts towards improving customer retention. In recent times, established companies have been chased out of business by new start-ups because most companies refuse to pay attention to competitors and are unprepared for the challenges they bring. So how does Agile marketing help solve this problem? Steve Blank said it best: ‘Get out of the building’. In other words: integrate qualitative research with quantitative analytics in an iterative continuous and holistic manner.
Facilitated by the CMO, Agile marketing planning includes all internal stakeholders, consultants and marketing agencies involved in creating and delivering digital marketing campaigns. With the main focus of allocating budget fluidly to the best performing channel throughout the year in an iterative manner, Agile Marketing plan takes place in 2 stages:
Stage 1: Based on data from the previous year, define your targets for the following indicators:
- New Customer Acquisition
- Conversion Rate Per Channel
- Average Order Value Per Month
- Total Revenue Per Month
Stage 2: Using past performance data, create channel-specific targets with a focus on the following:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Email Marketing
- Paid Social Media Marketing
- Offline Marketing (Events)
- Paid Search Marketing
For this step the CMO will work with channel-specific subject matter expert individually to determine their projections for:
- Budgetary requirements
- Monthly traffic targets
- Cost per acquisition
- Conversion rate
- Revenue projection
- Upskilling and training requirements.
Working with the CMO, the subject matter expert will create a breakdown of the above requirements into a 12-month period with regular weekly, monthly and quarterly review points. This is the purpose of Agile: the CMO working closely with the subject matter expert to make adjustments to campaign budgets based on near real-time conversion and ROI performance data.
Benefits of Agile Marketing Planning
Agile Planning delivers many benefits to the marketing team, including:
- Encouraging planning inputs from all team members because senior management (CMO) works with the entire team to integrate everyone’s ideas.
- The transparency that the agile way or working introduces to marketing helps individuals within the team to communicate better with each other, which inevitably improves alignment towards achieving visible business goals.
- Because Agile marketing planning is conducted in an open space where each team member is aware of the budget, target and activities of everyone else, this helps the CMO identify dependencies between marketing campaigns and tactics, which ultimately increases team communication and collaboration.
Work environments that promote a culture of Agile
An agile culture can mean anything depending on the context it is used. In the context or marketing, I liken the Agile culture to the type of culture that exists in companies like Google. Although no company culture is perfect, Google is well-known to promote psychological safety, personal development, open communication, and collaboration. Creating a culture that promotes high performance is not rocket science because culture is a reflection of an organization’s leadership and recruitment approach. That is why the most successful and disruptive companies like Apple, Google, and Airbnb have the same noticeable pattern, they all have a strong CEO. This does not mean companies with a so-called toxic culture do not have the potential to maintain sustainable growth but the question is, will they stand the test of time? So what is needed to create an Agile culture? In the context of my experience of researching companies like Google while writing my book Lean Agile Marketing, I came to the conclusion that the following characteristics are extremely important (although this is not an exhaustive list):
- Team Emotional Intelligence
- Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose (Daniels Pink), to which I would also add Money (Good Salary) and Job promotion.
- Team Structure
- Skill level, distribution, and development.
Creating Agile Marketing Team
Creating a high-performing Agile marketing team does not happen by accident. Just like in the case of high performing sports teams, the senior management put a lot of effort into recruiting the right people with the right level of skill, experience, mindset, and personality compatibility with the rest of the team. The same applies to Agile marketing teams. Listed below are some of the things to consider when creating an Agile marketing team:
- Start with a detailed assessment of the skills gap within your team.
- Working in collaboration with the team, create a team working agreement.
- Define team roles and specific responsibilities for individuals within your team. Make sure everyone on the team understands the difference between a group and a team. Also, understand the importance of external stakeholders because marketing teams cannot be effective if they work in a vacuum.
- Work with individuals on the team to create individual and team goals that are aligned with the organization’s overall vision and objectives.
- Introduce team lifecycles. Teams must have milestone points to plan, execute and review their work. Just like in Agile frameworks like Scrum which split the team process into sprint planning, review, and retrospectives. These rituals and stages are important in creating high-performing Agile marketing teams.
- Introduce one-on-one training to encourage learning and development through skill transfer within the team (peer coaching).