Agile Marketing — What You Need to Know

An overview of agile and it’s effects on your organizational structure

7 min readNov 6, 2020

Collaboration… (photo by Mitchell Luo on unspash)

“According to Simon Wood, Marketing Director at Clearvision, agile marketing is a collaborative and structured approach to managing marketing campaigns and teams.” - Lean Agile Marketing: How to Become Agile and Deliver Marketing Success

Maybe you are hiring a marketing director or CMO for the first time and you are considering ways to structure things. Or you just want to improve the current structure of your existing team. A strategy move you can consider is the adoption of agile for your marketing efforts.

My own curiosity led me to put in quite a few hours of research on the subject. I set out to understand how agile works and what it takes to integrate it into a system. I read quite a few articles, a book, podcast, a manifesto, and a bunch of videos to learn just enough to be dangerous. We’ll follow a case study of one such team that implemented it company-wide. There are a lot of moving parts to this, so I will do my best to get you up to speed on what agile is, where it started and some examples of how it’s used. I hope my research benefits you on your journey.

The agile methodology started with a group of visionaries that made it for the software development industry. It was 2001 when they wrote the Agile Manifesto and it was a time when development was increasingly complex. The industry needed a system that could operate in a fast-paced and changing environment with accuracy. The framework, in many ways accelerated the industry and consumers benefited from these efforts.

Since that time, many adopted the principals of agile in other parts of the organization. Leaders like Netflix, Spotify, Menlo Innovations and ING Bank are known agile organizations. It only makes sense to integrate a system that works in fast paced environments such as marketing. In today’s competitive environment, brands are vying for our attention as the industry gets more complex.

In a recent survey, executives ranked agile over traditional style project management. The results show teams were better at responding to changes, handling big projects, and meeting projected timelines and budgets.

Agile marketing is adaptive planning, customer data-driven, iterative sprints of a larger plan. A collaborative culture is also formed and boosts employee morale.

CASE STUDY INTRODUCTION

I’m featuring one such company called SEMRush that adopted agile company-wide. SEMRush offers a marketing platform that helps companies improve online visibility. The organization decided to select two specific agile systems to integrate; Scrum and Kanban. Olga Andrienko is the head of global marketing at SEMRush and explains the results during a brightonSEO Conference. I’ll take you through the key points she makes while explaining some of the concepts.

SCRUM

Scrum is a rugby term when a formation of players, work together. In software development scrum is the process of producing product to the customer in small doses — with a team. A Scrum Master leads the team in two-week sprints. Each sprint starts with a sprint planning meeting led by the Scrum Master. The team discusses the highest priorities and most likely items from the product backlog that can get done in that 2-week sprint. This is the pull. The items go in the sprint backlog and only those items are worked on during this sprint. There are daily meetings that are no longer than 15 minutes to discuss anything needed. A visual board is used to track build status, test and complete items. At the end of the sprint, the items completed are packaged and sent out to the customer. SEMRush modified this process to 3-week sprints as more effective for them.

KANBAN

They also incorporated Kanban framework. Kanban in Japanese means billboard or signal board and was originally used for lean manufacturing at Toyota. The board is split into 3 categories, to do, in progress, and done. Since more work is remote, online tools such as kanbanize.com, trello.com and leankit.com can be used. This method is also normally used as a continuous process; no 2-week sprint. There are more daily meetings — specifically daily stand-up, and retrospective meetings.

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

Agile is an autonomous leadership style that works in a de-centralized organization. Transparency of the whole marketing plan must be shared and available to everyone. Everyone is given unrestricted access showing what everyone else is working on.

The day starts with a quick stand up meeting. During the meeting, they discuss what got done and what’s next. Also they schedule a retrospective meeting at the end of each sprint. I found this quote best to describe retrospectives:

“The purpose of fostering constructive conflict is to have everyone put all their cards on the table, dissent, disagree, diverge, be ‘ambiguous’, be inconsistent with ‘conventional wisdom’ and be out in the open with their views or perspectives — regardless of their role, position, or place in the hierarchy. In an environment of constructive conflict, ideas can be refuted, disagreed with, countered, but cannot be silenced, cut off or shut down. There’s a lot of noise, excitement, passion, and involvement — but nobody gets hurt.” Peter G. Vajda(2)

These meetings are ways to correct any issues from the last sprint. They are positive and end with action points for the next iteration.

CULTURE

These strategies are great in theory but need the right team for them to work as planned. Peter Drucker famously said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Culture is especially important in an autonomous environment.

Back at SEMRush, Andrienko, emphasizes the biggest challenge of this system is hiring the right people. If someone isn’t pulling their weight, it pays a hearty toll on the team.

SCALING

SEMRush is a flat organization which means they have very few management levels. The teams are almost fully autonomous. The leadership positions have very specific roles to support this structure. Teams are small, up to 9 people but they are scalable with systems. I found SAFe 4.0 (Scaled Agile Framework) helpful despite being written for software development. You can watch a video on that here.

The sprints are carefully planned to get the work done but if not, tasks get moved into a list for the next sprint. Feedback is key on a scrum team and that’s the beauty of the system. Smaller teams work on parsed out projects and complete them with excellence as they get customer feedback and other data to improve for a future sprint. They talk about what’s next and have the authority to change plans.

CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP

The customer feedback helps future iterations and improves implementation. Having analytics alone isn’t enough. Building a customer journey map creates a full picture that analytics alone can’t. Journey maps are discussed in the book, Lean Agile Marketing by Femi Olajiga.

Femi stresses, “For companies that want to have a full view about their customers from a qualitative and quantitative perspective, their marketing teams should rely on the combination of customer journey mapping and web analytics data as complementary insights.”

The results of SEMRush are impressive. They netted 500,000 users in 8 months using agile marketing. They also cite that workers are happy and as are the stakeholders, but most importantly, revenue continues to grow year over year.

IS AGILE A GOOD FIT?

Switching to agile is no easy task. Agile is a mindset and methodology adapted for marketing. But it can be done effectively and efficiently. It’s recommended to hire a strong coach that specializes in agile marketing. Most training involves a few days with your c-suite executives and the rest is creating the structure and coaching team members. It’s a culture change for sure.

Is agile marketing for every company? No. A lot of consideration needs to be put in before changing company structure. Find a good coach and schedule a discovery meeting to see what kind of ideas she has for you. But the whole team needs to be in 100% or it’s not agile. I’ve read about hybrid models where they use some of the principles and operate without changing the structure. There may be some value in a partial adoption because many of the principles stand on their own. Going agile is a new way of operating and holding the team accountable for the results. It’s a collaboration and if done right, your customer sees the corporation is in sync. That is where people and companies are winning with this framework.