Agile Marketing - 4imprint Learning...

4imprint.com

Agi le Market ing

© 2015 4imprint, Inc. All rights reserved

Agi le Market ing: Get ready to adapt

Nimble and flexible. Scrum and sprint. When did marketing begin to sound more

like a mashup of a ballet, a rugby match and a track meet?

With the advent of new channels, instantaneous sharing, ever-changing search

engine algorithms and constant market disruptions—that’s when. Where

marketers used to spend months crafting large campaigns that required high level

approval, they now have to be quick and decisive risk-takers. In one word, agile.

This Blue Paper® will look at the methodology and practice of agile marketing

and how it differs from more traditional approaches. We’ll highlight case studies

of agile marketing in action, describe the concept’s pros and cons, and outline an

approach for organizations that want to adopt an agile marketing culture.

What is agi le market ing?

Perhaps the most celebrated example of agile marketing is Oreo™ cookie’s “You

can still dunk in the dark” tweet during Super BowlSM XLVII’s power outage. How

did the company respond so deftly to an unpredictable event? The answer is agile

marketing. What appeared to be a single, pithy, perfectly timed tweet was the

result of an agile strategy.

The tweet didn’t magically materialize from the fingertips of a marketer who was

otherwise noshing on buffalo wings and pigs-in-a-blanket. Oreo had a 15-person

team—copywriters, artists and a strategist ready to respond to whatever

happened at the Super Bowl.1 In addition, the tweet was part of an iterative

campaign. Similar tweets from Oreo played off of cultural events from the Mars

Rover landing to the birth of Britain’s Prince George.2 In essence, the company

adopted practices that gave its marketing team the tools and flexibility to say the

right thing at the right time on the right channel. This practice “demands that

the company trusts its creative directors, be it agency or in-house,” says Rhian

Harris, digital marketing consultant at Consult&C Digital. “It requires monitoring

of pretty much every major event and of what people are tweeting and searching

for. It also asks for marketing resources and processes to accommodate for ‘no

planning’ and out-of-office hours.”3

1 Watercutter, Angela. “How Oreo Won the Marketing Super Bowl With a Timely Blackout Ad on Twitter | WIRED.” Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 04 Feb. 2013. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <http://www.wired.com/2013/02/oreo-twitter-super-bowl/>.

2 Harris, Rhian. “Eight Great Examples of Agile Marketing from Oreo.” Econsultancy. Econsultancy.com Ltd., 29 July 2013. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <https://econsultancy.com/blog/63140-eight-great-examples-of-agile-marketing-from-oreo/>.

3 Ibid.


Agile methodology has developed as marketers are pressured to produce more

relevant content quickly over a variety of devices. On the surface, it may seem to

be a reactive approach to market disruptions, or just a way to work faster. But

when it’s done right, the methodology lays the foundation for a marketing team

to be ready to respond to anything. Imagine a ballerina who makes a pirouette

look effortless. In reality, she has logged years of practice. Agile methodology

provides a foundation to make complex work more adaptable to change and

more relevant to the consumer.

“Most chief marketing officers think of agile in terms of being nimble, being able

to react quickly to the market,” says Barre Hardy, senior director of CMG Partners,

a strategic marketing firm. “They understand that to achieve agility requires

their organization to be data-driven, customer-focused, constantly prioritizing

and quick decision-makers. They also understand that this culture needs to be

supported with process. Where confusion or inconsistency sets in is around agile,

the methodology, and the use of it in marketing. Agile helps reinforce a culture

of agility by providing structure that drives marketers to be iterative, flexible,

customer-centered and focused on priorities of high-value.”4

To understand how we get from ballet and rugby to a sweet tweet, let’s look

at where the concept of agile marketing originated.

Agi le history

Before there was agile marketing, there was agile software development. And

before there was agile software development, there was the waterfall method

of software development.5 The waterfall method is a sequential process that

flows from one stage to the next—from requirement specification, to design, to

implementation, to verification, and finally, to maintenance. Like a waterfall, it

flows in one direction. And it is a predictive process—one that predicts what will

be needed down the line.6

There are at least two major pitfalls to the waterfall method: One, the waterfall

method tends to fail like a game of telephone—the handoffs from one stage

to the next can be fraught with miscommunication, resulting in a product that

doesn’t meet the requirements set forth in the beginning. Two, even in a case of

perfect hand-offs, the development process can take so long that by the time the

end stage is reached, user needs have changed.7

4 Rooney, Jennifer. “Applying Agile Methodology To Marketing Can Pay Dividends: Survey.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 14 Apr. 2014. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferrooney/2014/04/15/applying-agile-methodology-to-marketing-can-pay-dividends-survey/>.

5 Brinker, Scott. “Agile Marketing for a World of Constant Change - Chief Marketing Technologist.” Chief Marketing Technologist Blog. Chiefmartec.com, 19 Mar. 2013. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <http://chiefmartec.com/2013/03/agile-marketing-for-a-world-of-constant-change/>.

6 Ibid.7 Ibid.


Frustrated software developers recognized they needed a new method for

project management, one that engendered more communication among people

responsible for different tasks and one that was more adaptive as requirements

changed. In 2001, a group of developers announced what they termed a

“manifesto for agile software development”—an approach that, in their words,

valued individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software

over documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation and

response to change over following a plan.8

In practice, those goals were achieved through new management practices with

colorful descriptions such as scrums (This is where the rugby formation comes

in!), sprints and stand-ups. A scrum in rugby is the method of restarting play

with players packing closely together, heads down. Scrum in terms of project

management is the practice of breaking down a project into a backlog of tasks,

delivering on a few increments at a time, getting feedback and adjusting the

backlog accordingly. Rather than cascading stages à la the waterfall, developers

have an ever-evolving backlog, explains Scott Brinker, co-founder and CTO of

ion interactive. “Probably the most iconic artifact of scrum—and other agile

approaches—is the task board,” Brinker says. “Everyone can see the backlog

of items to be done, ordered according to their priority. Members of the team

take items off the backlog and move them into a work-in-progress column.

When items are completed, they’re triumphantly moved to the ‘done’ column.”9

(Despite the fact that scrum emerged from the software development world, the

scrum board or task board is often a physical board covered with sticky notes,

although digital boards such as TrelloSM are gaining in popularity.)

In scrum, the backlog of tasks is often expressed in terms of user stories. For

software development, these are stories told from a user perspective about a

desired capability. The typical template is:

As a [type of user], I want [some goal] so that [some reason].10

We’ll see later in the Blue Paper how this template adapts well to

marketing goals.

8 Beck, Kent, et al. “Manifesto for Agile Software Development.” Manifesto for Agile Software Development. N.p., 2001. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <http://agilemanifesto.org/>.


10 Cohn, Mike. “User Stories.” Succeeding With Agile RSS. Moutain Goat Software, n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/user-stories>.


Figure 1: A scrum board physically displays all of the tasks related to a project

and the status of each task. As tasks are completed, feedback from incremental

accomplishments results in adjustments to the backlog.

Short work cycles (1-4 weeks), where a team of developers takes on specific tasks

with the goal of delivering increments of the working software, are referred to

as sprints. One of the key activities within a sprint is the daily 15-minute stand-up,

where team members literally stand (to keep the meeting short) and answer

three questions:

1. What did I do yesterday?

2. What am I going to do today?

3. Are there any impediments in my way?11

“The goal is to always have complete transparency among the team,” Brinker

says. “Everyone always knows who’s doing what, it’s easy to stay coordinated,

and if an impediment comes up that’s preventing forward progress, it’s quickly

identified. Other stakeholders are welcome to listen in at these stand-ups, but

they don’t actively participate. In the daily stand-up, the team gets in, syncs

up, and gets on with their work—any impediments or questions from other

stakeholders are handled outside the meeting.”12


12 Ibid.


Figure 2: When applied to marketing, the sprint process allows for small

experiments, feedback and adjustments.

Scrum isn’t the only manifestation of agile methodology. Some adaptations

borrow from lean manufacturing principles. The Kanban method follows the

principles of visualizing workflow, limiting work-in-progress, and analyzing and

improving the process. It uses a board similar to the scrum board. Hybrids such as

“Scrumban” have emerged as well.13

Agi le market ing adopt ion

Given that marketers and software developers face some similar challenges—

particularly market disruptions—it’s not surprising that agile methodologies are

beginning to be applied to marketing.

If agile development delivers software, agile marketing delivers content, Brinker

says. But a better focus, he maintains, is to think about stories along the buyer’s

journey. “They’re analogous to user stories in agile development,” he says.

“Buyer stories might revolve around receiving a particular piece of content to

help with a certain stage of their decision process. But they also might require

more interactive experiences. As a (persona), I want (goal/desire) so that (benefit).

These are stories from the customer’s perspective, although they may be written

by people in marketing and sales on behalf of the customer.”14

13 Pahuja, Savita. “What Is Scrumban? - SolutionsIQ.” SolutionsIQ. Solutions IQ, 08 Apr. 2012. Web. 14 Apr. 2015. <http://www.solutionsiq.com/what-is-scrumban/>.

14 Ibid.


Like software developers, agile marketing proponents have issued their own

manifestos. The details vary, but the manifestos tend to emphasize transparency,

sustainability, interactivity, measurability, iterative possibilities and relevancy.15

A 2012 gathering of one group of agile marketers issued this manifesto: “We

are discovering better ways of creating value for our customers and for our

organizations through new approaches to marketing. Through this work, we

have come to value:

• Validated learning over opinions and conventions.

• Customer-focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy.

• Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns.

• The process of customer discovery over static prediction.

• Flexible versus rigid planning.

• Responding to change over following a plan.

• Many small experiments over a few large bets.”16

Becoming agi le

How does a manifesto of values translate into marketing practices? Hardy says

that rather than hastily implementing a host of new processes, companies need

to start by taking time to build an agile workplace culture.17 An agile culture

reflects the values of the manifesto—people are cross-functional and empowered

to make decisions; teams are trusted to take initiative and experiment; failure is

acceptable as long as learning is derived from it; work is done in short cycles of

prioritize, test and learn; and the customer is at the center of decision-making.18

Easier said than done. Changing a company culture is no small task. In fact, it may

be one of the hardest any leader takes on. Hardy offers these tips:

• Be clear about goals with those inside and outside of marketing.

• Expect and reward experimentation and creativity as a way of work.

• Put in place processes that support data-driven and customer-focused

decision-making.

• Break down silos and bring together teams that fit the goal, not the

organizational chart.

15 Arnold, Travis. “Roundup: Agile Marketing Manifestos | Travis Arnold.” Travis Arnold. Travis Arnold, 16 May 2012. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <http://travisarnold.com/agile-marketing-manifestos/>.

16 “Agile Marketing Manifesto.” Agile Marketing Manifesto. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <http://agilemarketingmanifesto.org/>.

17 Hardy, Barre. “Four Steps to Creating an Agile Marketing Culture.” MarketingProfs. MarketingProfs LLC, 23 Mar. 2015. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2015/27316/four-steps-to-creating-an-agile-marketing-culture#ixzz3WB19HRUr>.

18 Ibid.


• Be transparent about goals, progress and support for your agile

teams’ projects.

• Define governance for and empower decision-making to encourage

quick action.

• Use short planning cycles to quickly course-correct based on market or

customer feedback.

• Offer your organization real-time visibility into marketing performance.

• Share “show times” that celebrate and broadcast marketing milestones

and results.

• Identify valued behaviors and build a measurement system around them.

• Develop a system with built-in rewards that reinforce agility and a job

well done.

• Be an example by being curious, learning continually and sharing

new insights.19

Digital brand marketer and content strategist Adria Saracino had an advantage

when she first attempted to introduce an agile culture to a team she managed at

an agency. Rather than having to convince her managers that a culture shift was

needed, it was her supervisor who suggested she try the approach to deal with a

group of employees who tended to work independently.

In addition, Saracino’s agency had a long-time client that had been successfully

using agile methodology, so she used that experience to adapt a plan for her

team. She says that the job of breaking down a project into tasks was easier in

her situation than it would be for software development because, as a marketing

agency, the firm already charged by the hour and had a good sense about how

long particular tasks such as research, writing and editing required. “The key is to

separate the time into tasks that will take between 30 minutes and two hours to

complete, allowing your marketers to break up their day and move from task to

task among different projects or clients,” she says.20

The new agile processes resulted in working more cohesively, improved internal

and external communication, identified the team’s strengths and weaknesses, and

increased accountability.21

Casting those tasks as user stories is a critical component to agile methodology.

Agile marketing consultant Jim Ewel uses a template that includes a persona’s

basic demographics and attributes, a scenario that describes why the persona is

19 Ibid.20 Saracino, Adria. “How Agile Project Management Saved My Marketing Team.” MarketingProfs.

MarketingProfs LLC, 2 Oct. 2012. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2012/9048/how-agile-project-management-saved-my-marketing-team#ixzz3WkjyFoZN>.

21 Ibid.


interested in the product or service, the persona’s information sources, and the

persona’s goal or benefit related to the product or service. These should be based

on real conversations with customers and data, not experience or hunches.22

“The goal or benefit reminds us that all good marketing should answer a single

question for the customer: What’s In It For Me (WIIFM). Bad marketing focuses

on the vendor’s products and features, rather than the benefits that accrue to

the customer.”23

Where does that validated learning, as opposed to “hunches” come from? Ed

Hewett, senior manager on the Industry Strategy and Marketing team at Adobe®,

says that marketers should be looking for “tools that resemble boomerangs, not

bullets.”24 Tools that harness the power of agile marketing are those that:

• expose new market trends and customer behaviors

• inform preliminary conclusions

• provide a single view of the customer

• create robust customer profiles useful for predictive and

look-alike modeling

• anticipate the next action or need

• deliver a unified customer experience

• enable fast testing and real-time marketing25

Jayson DeMers, founder and CEO of AudienceBloomSM, a Seattle-based content

marketing and social media agency, outlined in the Harvard Business Review®

a hypothetical agile marketing strategy for the launch of a new clothing line.

He prefaced the strategy by emphasizing that this was a flexible outline, not an

unalterable campaign. “You still can, and should, draw on customer research,

but leave room for growth,” he writes. “Map out your starting point, in as

much detail as you wish, and then roughly outline your vision for the first few

milestones in your campaign, keeping your plans tenuous and easy to adjust.”26

22 Ewel, Jim. “A Foolproof Process for Identifying Your User Stories.” Web log post. Agile Marketing. Jim Ewel, 1 Dec. 2012. Web. <http://www.agilemarketing.net/foolproof-process-identifying-user-stories/#more-1319>.

23 Ewel, Jim. “User Stories in Agile Marketing.” Weblog post. Agile Marketing. Jim Ewel, 8 Nov. 2011. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <http://www.agilemarketing.net/user-stories-agile-marketing/>.

24 Hewett, Ed. “Get Off the Beaten Path with Agile Marketing.” Web log post. Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe. Adobe Systems Inc., 14 May 2014. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/get-beaten-path-agile-marketing/>.

25 Ibid.26 DeMers, Jayson. “How to Craft an Agile Marketing Campaign.” Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business

Publishing, 21 Jan. 2015. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <https://hbr.org/2015/01/how-to-craft-an-agile-marketing-campaign>.


DeMars’ hypothetical strategy27 uses the term phases in place of sprints.

It looks like this:

Phase I (Weeks 1-4): Announcements and initial advertising

• Submit press release detailing new clothing line and reinforce through

social media.

• Go live with new clothing products on the e-commerce platform, and

schedule the release of images and links on social profiles.

• Add banner to homepage, showcasing our new fleece-lined jacket, projected

to be our top seller.

• Initiate e-mail blasts to current customers, first announcing the new product

line, then introducing discounted offers in subsequent weeks.

• Introduce weekly articles, each highlighting a new product, and syndicate

through social media.

• Begin Google pay-per-click campaign for new products, highlighting the

fleece-lined jacket and seasonal keywords.

Phase II (Weeks 5-8): Ad reinforcement and consumer engagement

• Reach out through other advertising channels: magazines, direct mail, TV

Phase III (Weeks 9-12): Introduce and promote sale on new products

Phase IV (Week 13): Analyze and regroup

While Phase 1 includes a detailed plan of action—a backlog of tasks that could

be cast as user stories, the remaining phases are broad, allowing the company

to evaluate successes and failures and make minor tweaks or major adjustments

as necessary. DeMers also recommends starting small, particularly if you are

testing the waters of a new marketing channel, and taking breaks to evaluate

the effectiveness of the strategy, especially toward the end of each phase. To help

determine how the strategy may take shape or be tweaked through all phases,

DeMers recommends these measures:

• Regularly visit industry news sites to stay on top of developments and

consider how they could affect your marketing plans.

• Watch what your competitors are publishing and how well received their

ideas are.

• Keep in close touch with your target audiences. Conduct regular user surveys

and measure how existing and potential customers interact with your brand.

27 Ibid.


• Track behavior on your website, through social sharing, and in reviews and

comments. How are people’s priorities changing? What new tools are they

using to make their lives easier?

• Adopt new trends early, and drop them when they appear to decline

in relevance.28

Agi le chal lenges

According to the 9th annual State of Agile™ Survey from VersionOne® Inc., these

are the top five barriers to agile adoption (respondents were able to make

multiple selections):

• The inability to change organizational culture (44 percent)

• Not enough personnel with the necessary agile experience (35 percent)

• General organizational resistance to change (34 percent)

• Pre-existing rigid/waterfall framework (32 percent)

• Lack of manager support (29 percent)29

Respondents to this survey came from a variety of industries, with software

developers representing the largest group. But Hardy agrees that agile adoption

among marketing organizations faces similar challenges: complex organizational

structures, cultures that prohibit quick decision making, a lack of collaboration,

slow processes and a volume of work that causes teams to be always reacting

versus working on initiatives that will drive growth.30 “It’s hard to create a culture

of agility in your organization if employees are afraid to fail or take risks, if you

have cumbersome approval processes, or unclear goals and objectives,” she says.

“Chief marketing officers can control these within their organizations, but if the

wider business isn’t also focused on agility, these can be harder to control.”31

Beyond organizational culture, agile methodology requires employees to work

cross-functionally. “In agile, we often talk about ‘T-shaped’ people, who may have

deep specialization or talent in a particular area—say, user interface (UI) design—

but are also willing to pitch in on a wide variety of other tasks,” Brinker says. “In

an agile team, everybody pitches in on everything. No one says, ‘I’m just the UI

person, so don’t bother me until you have some UI for me to do.’”32

28 DeMers, Jayson. “How to Craft an Agile Marketing Campaign.” Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business Publishing, 21 Jan. 2015. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <https://hbr.org/2015/01/how-to-craft-an-agile-marketing-campaign>.

29 “9th Annual State of Agile™ Survey.” State of Agile Survey (2015): 10. VersionOne.com. VersionOne LLC, 2015. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <www.versionone.com/pdf/state-of-agile-development-survey-ninth.pdf>.


31 Ibid.32 Brinker, Scott. “Agile Marketing for a World of Constant Change - Chief Marketing Technologist.” Chief

Marketing Technologist Blog. Chiefmartec.com, 19 Mar. 2013. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <http://chiefmartec.com/2013/03/agile-marketing-for-a-world-of-constant-change/>.


Agi le benef i ts

Adopting agile methodology isn’t easy, especially if it requires a wholesale shift

in organizational culture. But as market forces experience their own wholesale

disruptions—again and again—agile methodology may be the solution to

staying ahead of those disruptions. The top three reasons cited in the State of

Agile Survey for adopting agile practices were to accelerate product delivery (59

percent), to enhance the ability to manage changing priorities (56 percent) and to

increase productivity (53 percent).33

Hardy identifies these upsides to the hard work of introducing Agile into the

marketing workflow:

1. Business performance. “Marketers who have adopted Agile are seeing

increased business performance due to faster delivery, enhanced focus

on the things that matter, and greater productivity from their teams,”

Hardy says.34

2. Employee satisfaction. “Perhaps the most unexpected benefit of marketing

agility is employees working in agile environments report a greater

overall sense of satisfaction and pride in their work due to feeling more

empowered, greater clarity in how their role impacts the business, and a

more collaborative work environment,” she says.35

3. Adaptability. “Marketers are better equipped to handle marketplace

challenges and opportunities having built flexibility into their business

operations,” she says. “This is positioning marketing leaders to deliver

sustainable growth for their companies.”36

One final benefit to agile methodology is failure—as long as it results in learning

that leads to big wins. Agile strategy is all about doing small experiments,

learning from those experiments and adapting. Corey Eridon of HubSpotSM Inc.

recalls that when PinterestSM started gaining traction, the agile marketing team at

HubSpot experimented with it, not knowing whether it would catch on. As we all

know, Pinterest became a social media phenomenon, and HubSpot was prepared

to offer helpful tips. “Wins happen for agile marketers all the time because they

are used to learning quickly and aren’t afraid of failure—because working on

33 “9th Annual State of Agile™ Survey.” State of Agile Survey (2015): 7. VersionOne.com. VersionOne LLC, 2015. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <www.versionone.com/pdf/state-of-agile-development-survey-ninth.pdf>.


35 Ibid.36 Ibid.


4imprint serves hundreds of thousands of customers with promotional items throughout the United States,

Canada, United Kingdom and Ireland. 4imprint offers corporate gifts, personalized gifts, custom T-shirts,

promotional pens, travel mugs, tote bags, water bottles, Post-it® Notes, custom calendars, custom shirts

and much more. For additional information, visit www.4imprint.com.

a day-to-day basis to achieve your larger goals helps you bounce back from your

flops in record time, with minimal resources squandered during the pursuit,”

Eridon says.37

Most companies today don’t have the time or resources to risk a big-bang style

campaign that could fail, either because the message or the medium or the

timing was off. On the other hand, small, quick—agile—experiments, initiated

in a culture that supports risk taking and collaboration, and keeps customer

desires and validated learning at the forefront, can offer high value even if the

result is more learning and adaption rather than a tweet that goes viral beyond

the imagination.

“It’s reached a point where we need to step back from chasing fixes for the latest

disruption du jour,” Brinker says. “Instead, we need to consider ways we can make

our organizations more adaptive to change in general. To change how we think

about change. So that when the next new thing explodes—maybe next week—

we’re better able to capitalize on it.”38

37 Levin, Lior. “Five Advantages of Agile Marketing.” MarketingProfs. MarketingProfs LLC, 21 Feb. 2013. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. <http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2013/10152/five-advantages-of-agile-marketing#ixzz3X8Qg6Uwb>.


Agile Marketing - 4imprint Learning...

Documents

Transcript of Agile Marketing - 4imprint Learning...