How do you sustain competitive advantage in a world of increasing transparency, where everybody has instant access to the same data and is using the identical technologies to manipulate it? That’s the challenge facing today’s enterprise marketer. But it’s not going to be solved by applying legacy processes, it needs a fundamentally new approach. We need to get agile!
‘Agile’ is a project management technique that has become the default standard in software development circles. The belief is that developers need to assess value at every stage of a product’s development so that they are always focused on customer requirements (so that changes can be made quickly and without significant cost). To achieve this, production teams have to have an in-depth understanding of customer buying behaviour and work in smaller batches (sprints) to focus on the minimum functionality needed to get a product to market for assessment.
Applying the same principles to marketing and it becomes a way to break down projects around customer requirements, focus on delivery and measure impact continuously, and it’s the future of marketing!
Why?
In the past, once you figured out what customers responded to, you could build marketing programmes around that for a few years. But staying above the noise in such a dynamic and increasingly transparent market is becoming increasingly difficult.
You simply can’t rely on the creative process alone to do that anymore. Marketing teams have to be more efficient to be effective. They have to be developing sources of deeper customer insight and constantly questioning the effectiveness of their marketing vehicles. That manifests itself in smaller scale, more focused initiatives, and that is extremely resource intensive if you’re marketing teams aren’t structured appropriately.
Agile thinking essentially moves the marketing team away from a predetermined annual plan and into a world of constantly evolving initiatives based around the latest customer data. It means that teams are executing more focused campaigns, more frequently. Which in turn, drives better qualified leads and more measurable outcomes.
If delivered properly, it’s not uncommon for agile marketing teams to report productivity increases of between 50 and 100 per cent!
Most marketers report spending about a third of their time on the tasks that create value, and the rest on emails, managing ad hoc requests and other work. Regulating the flow of day-to-day requests to marketing via a ‘backlog’ is a key internal selling point for agile marketing, as it ensures that teams always prioritise working on higher-value projects.
At first, agile practices, such as regular stand-ups, can feel to some like micro-management. But in fact, they are designed to encourage team members to own their work and demonstrate how each individual contributes to the team. The process is designed to empower individuals and give them the tools to make decisions and move projects forward without waiting for every decision to be approved as it would be in a traditional top-down structure.
There are many ways to implement agile marketing, the most popular processes including ‘lean’, ‘scrum’, ‘kanban’ and ‘scrumban’.
In a typical ‘scrum’ team, a ‘user story’ is written to quantify the value of a project to the customer. A list of projects or tasks, known as the backlog, is then compiled and prioritized.
The team estimates the size of each task or project and typically, a two-week ‘sprint’ ensues, during which time the team commits to completing a certain number of tasks or projects. Daily stand-ups ensure team members stay on track or request the help they need and at the end of the sprint. The team showcases completed work to the business and reviews its processes and learnings to improve the next sprint.
But if new work arises during a sprint it is either placed on the backlog by the team leader or other work is pushed out of the current sprint. And once marketing teams get into this way of working, productivity goes through the roof!
Most agile marketing teams have a meeting – or showcase – at the end of a work cycle, where they present what was completed, share the thinking and learnings, celebrate results and discuss what could be improved next time. Bringing management into that meeting gives them great insight into what the team is working on, and why.
Agile is not for everyone or every project, but if your company operates in a fast-moving, competitive market, that is a great argument for implementing agile marketing. You don’t need to replace team members but you will need to train them on the basic principles of agile marketing. There are also new roles that need to be filled: at a minimum the team leader or ‘scrum master’ must champion Agile, and someone needs to take on the role of ‘product owner’ (the voice of the customer) to prioritise new work.
The great thing about agile is that you don’t have to embrace the whole concept to see the benefits. Most companies start by cherry-picking initiatives. And you can start agile marketing with a whiteboard and a post-it note, but to scale the process you will need collaboration tools to help get campaigns to market quickly and keep everyone on the same page.
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