Developing a Lean and Agile Marketing Process
By Douglas Cook
…why we fail fast and early…before we spend at scale.
As part of the Skyscanner shift from Marketing to Growth, we have undertaken a transformation in our integrated Marketing campaign development process, from a very traditional ‘big bang’ development process to an iterative process that pulls on a number of sources for inspiration. Our end process loosely follows the principles of the Agile Marketing manifesto but pulls on many Lean, Agile and Growth Hacking influences, along with some of the things that do work from more traditional process, to build a way of doing things that is right for our business.
At its heart, rather than spending weeks (or even months) developing ideas and testing them in artificial environments such as focus groups before launching and hoping for the best, the process works to ‘Lean Start Up’ Build-Measure-Learn principles; come up with an idea, create a hypothesis, pick a growth metric, develop a minimum viable campaign (rather than a minimum viable product) and launch it on a small scale to users to assess reaction, continuing until we have a scalable idea.
Developing the process
Our first iteration was quite pure to this principle and worked fine for small single channel activities, but when scaling up to more complex integrated campaigns there were too many variables to properly assess why things didn’t work; was the design wrong? Were our channels under-performing? Or did the idea itself just suck in the first place? Our end solution merged those initial Lean start-up principles with some back to basics W’s of Marketing.
- Audience Validation Stage- Who might be interested in this topic?
2. Idea Validation Stage- Are my chosen audience interested in my idea?
3. Execution Validation Stage- Are my chosen audience interested in how I’ve executed my idea?
4. Channel Validation Stage- Does the execution work in all my channels?
Although each stage is a Minimal Viable Idea, it does build as you go through. In the early stages you might be testing a simple concept among different user groups, like these examples for a concept on temperature related content. The end idea would be a live tracker of beach temperatures to encourage bookings, but to test it we simply made a range of ads to compare the performance of temperature vs. no temperature.
By the time you get to the end of the process you will have a campaign validated and ready for full launch, such as our food and travel guide. At that point it’s simply a question of putting the required resources behind it to get it out there at scale.
Validating and testing concepts
How each stage is validated varies between primary and secondary sources; there is a great summary of some good tools for secondary research here.
However, in true Lean start up fashion there is really no substitute to getting things out in the wild in front of real consumers to see how they react, assessing it against the same growth metrics you’d use at full launch. As a rule of thumb we work to 10% of the campaign budget being used for various tests. These need only be seen by a few hundred people at any one time, but we may need to go through each feedback loop multiple times until we nail it (the above Spanish example had 12 iterations over the course of a few days), or by the same measure we need to be prepared to fail at any point. We have multiple campaigns that have never even made it past audience validation.
How has this worked for us?
The speed and volume of work that has been produced through this process has increased significantly as time has gone on. The last major campaign I was personally involved in prior to using our own new tools took around 6 months to go to market, while a similar sized campaign recently went through in a little over a month, and some smaller scale ideas in 2–3 days. But the real win has been in the quality of ideas going to market. Those that now scale are the ones that have shown success in the real world, against real metrics, while we fail fast and early in finding the ones that don’t work during our validation process… before we spend at scale.
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About the author
My name is Douglas Cook and I am Product Owner for the EMEA Growth Factory Squad here at Skyscanner. Our squad helps to develop and implement the processes, tools and techniques that are helping take us from a more traditional Marketing to Growth orientated business. Having started life as a ‘traditional’ marketer, I’ve loved being part of the Growth transformation, not just because of the impact on the business but also the development of my own skills and expertise over this time, which epitomises what makes Skyscanner such a great place to grow and learn.
