Four pillars your marketing team needs to be Agile, right now
Effective teaming and connecting with customers can be challenging, even in the best of times. Focus on these four pillars to help your marketing team truly succeed when going Agile.
It’s a challenging time to be a marketer. Everyone is in the middle of juggling existing marketing strategies, remote teams, changes in customer needs, and many other obstacles, personally and professionally.
How can you help your team prioritize what will have the biggest impact? How can you help break down large marketing programs to not only respond to these changes, but be more effective in the process?
We’ve put together a simple, four-pillar process that helps marketers to examine how they can update their processes, goal structure, and internal culture to remain effective and innovative: the four pillars of Agile Marketing.
Each pillar represents an essential function for the effective adoption of Agile Marketing principles. By focusing on these pillars, your marketing team can develop their skills and update their processes to integrate more adaptable, innovative, and responsive marketing techniques.
Pillar one: Cross-functional collaboration
Incorporating cross-functional collaboration is a key piece of achieving agility as a marketing organization. Creating a culture of transparency and feedback allows the marketing team to develop a more responsive marketing plan. Key components include:
Communication. Marketing can transform their approach through frequent and transparent communications across marketing functional areas. While this sounds easy in practice, marketers need to address how to communicate out not only their successes but key learnings by function or program. Understanding the details of each program allows the team to iterate faster and plan based on known processes.
Structure. Collaboration in Agile Marketing centers around defined opportunities for structured sharing. Key questions to answer in each team huddle include “What’s going well?” “Where are there gaps?” and “What activities will drive strategy?” To make these insights actionable, identify how to create a cross-functional team or group to review these three key areas, and begin applying these to upcoming activities. An efficient process and application of this structure require time — set up your teams for long-term collaboration. (In Agile Development, sessions are noted as Sprint Planning and Sprint Retrospectives).
Culture. Preparations for Agile Marketing will include understanding whether the marketing team and organization encourages a culture of open and frequent communication. If these principles are new to the organization, Agile Marketing “implementors” will need to identify and share out top scenarios that show the value and impact of cross-functional collaboration. Engage key stakeholders in a value mapping session or phase the Agile Marketing implementation to ease the organization into these pillars. Instilling an open culture is essential as the organization integrates more experimentation and customer feedback into the marketing processes.
Pillar two: Fluid strategy
Transitioning from the traditional annual plan to a fluid strategy gives marketing teams more flexibility to adjust the associated programs or activities to align with goals and the customer experience. Moving to Agile Marketing does not replace a long-term strategy; rather, it allows organizations to evolve strategy investments and prioritization based on innovation and customer feedback. Components of the fluid strategy include:
Increments. Instead of defining large programs that require cross-functional investment and long turnaround time, marketers can optimize by aligning to their plan incrementally. An incremental approach allows marketing to produce viable “bite size” programs (in Agile Development, this is described as the Minimum Viable Product) that work toward a larger goal or strategy (Hacking Marketing, Scott Brinker). The benefit of incremental updates is tied to the marketing team’s ability to start the feedback loop earlier and optimize before achieving the larger goal. Each of these increments stand on their own but, linked together, can achieve the larger program that historically would not be released or activated without full completion.
Customer-centricity. Marketing strategy is centered around a series of goals to drive customer experiences, so achieving customer-centricity only takes this idea further by helping marketers evaluate how each of their activities impacts the customer experience (AgileSherpas.com). Marketers should think and align their upcoming activities to the defined buyer’s journey. As the team integrates these agile approaches, creating the associated tasks or user stories with customer language will also keep this principle top of mind.
Innovation. Reacting to customers in a digital world is as much about innovation as personalization. As the marketing team reevaluates their activities to be customer-centric, Agile Marketing encourages a mindset that centers on how to deliver the best value for customers in ways that traditional plans did not account for or allow time for investigation. This is only more important as marketers aim to deliver experiences that connect with a customer in an increasingly digital (and evolving) world.
Pillar three: Iterative programs
Creating iterative programs allows the marketing team to continuously improve based on performance and execute deliverables quickly — without sacrificing quality. Marketers rarely know how their programs will work in advance, so iterative delivery gives the flexibility to test more ideas and invest based on performance (Brinker). Iterative programs include:
Performance over scale. While incremental strategy focuses on building toward a larger goal, iterative programs focus on creating many deliverables to test toward a goal. This aligns well with the agile component known as Sprints. Sprints are a time-boxed period for delivery, and their application in marketing allows the team to time-box their activities (tests) for frequent execution and analysis.
Experimentation. Programs in an Agile Marketing environment thrive off frequent testing and experimentation. As marketers share ideas through Sprint Planning sessions, they can decide where there are opportunities to test variations of an idea further or where they need to divest time and dollars to further align with the long-term strategy. Experimentation is especially important for programs with long cadences (IE: nurture programs), allowing marketers to test and optimize toward the best version of the deliverable.
Prioritization. The move to smaller iterations and bold ideas requires marketers to keep a firm grasp on the team’s priorities and what work must be completed in each Sprint. Marketers must work together to prioritize upcoming work and define the level of effort (LOE) versus impact. In Agile Development, this process is called Grooming. Agile Marketing prioritization helps marketers balance incoming requests, new ideas, and high performers against their existing KPIs and plan.
Pillar four: Constant measurement
Creating an Agile Marketing environment depends highly on the organization’s ability to expand marketing’s KPIs beyond the traditional engagement and ROI metrics. Agile Marketing balances strategic goals with real-time feedback to help marketers optimize faster and reevaluate alignment to the marketing plan and the customer experience where needed. The components for constant measurement include:
Milestones. With larger-scale programs, marketers are often reliant on measuring their success based on “long-game measurements” like revenue or ROI. With the integration of Agile Marketing, upstream milestones provide value and insight to marketers once a program launches. These will change based off your tactical integration, but to evaluate what milestones will be most effective start with an analysis as part of the program planning process. The marketing team will want to evaluate what should happen as a result of the program within the first 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days as a way to define milestones that direct the program toward the long-term goal.
OKRs. These encourage agile practices due to their structure and definition — a single achievable objective (O) measured based on the key results (KR) marketers achieve along the way. Goal planning for marketers should also move to an agile approach to align with the culture of experimentation, incremental planning, and iterative programming (AgileSherpas.com). These are also usually time-boxed and limited to 2–5 results per objective, meeting the needs of a lean process like Agile Marketing. The move to OKRs also helps marketers align their efforts with value-based objectives and act as a guiding parameter for prioritization.
Feedback. Integrating an iterative program approach only works when marketing has access to real-time results. This does not have to be limited to metrics measured in a CRM or Marketing Automation platform. Instead, marketers can collect more Voice of the Customer (VOC) feedback to ensure their programs align with customer needs and influence the expected customer behavior. While this can be automated with VOC tools in your marketing technology stack, utilizing your existing social channels and your sales teams can be a good place to start.
Putting it all together
On the surface, Agile Marketing’s success could be correlated to quick responses for internal needs or new customer experiences. This four-pillar framework reveals the components required to truly adopt Agile Marketing. These practices can help organizations effectively put customer experiences at the forefront of their marketing strategy.
While it’s not the sole method for success, Agile Marketing offers a new path forward for marketers. In a time when many teams are adopting new structures and work processes, moving to Agile Marketing is an opportunity to test new programs without sacrificing your existing strategy.
Slalom Customer Insight is created by industry leaders and practitioners from Slalom, a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation.
