Having been successful in IT software development over the past

couple of decades, Agile (Scrum) principles are slowly entering the

marketing domain. Because agile marketing is still in its infancy, it is

important to understand the underlying principles that made agile

(scrum) so successful in IT and how marketing teams can adapt some

of these principles for their own purposes, although it is also worth

mentioning that not all agile principles will be applicable to marketing

due the difference in mind-set, goals and team size(s).

Marketing teams have traditionally been structured to mirror the

waterfall project management approach because, for a long time,

marketing represented a one-way communication from brands to

customers. However, the fairly recent explosion of the internet

changed the predictable nature of marketing, as it gave more power to

the consumers to voice their opinions and, thus, influence the

perceptions of the brand by other consumers. The key problem

marketers face today is that customer behavior is anything but

predictable because of the increased number of marketing channels

and the influence exerted via social media on how customers make

their buying decisions.

While the traditional process of creating marketing plans at the start

of a fiscal year gives the impression of an orderly, accountable and

measurable approach to strategic marketing, this approach creates a

very rigid mind-set for marketing teams, as it does not allow them the

flexibility to respond to changing and uncertain customer expectations

and their subsequent buying decisions. Adopting agile

marketing based on some of the principles that have been so

successful for software development teams will allow marketing

teams to adapt their marketing tactics to meet these changes in

customer behaviours based on good quality insights from web

analytics, CX and UX data.

For many marketing teams, creating rigid marketing plans makes

sense in terms of allocating budget funds to online and offline

marketing channels and then waiting for the next financial year before

a new plan is created. The non-agile (waterfall) mind-set will believe

that marketing plans must be followed without any change and if the

marketing plan does not work, the assumption is that the marketing

plan did not work as opposed to questioning the execution of a plan

that does not allow for response to change in customer behaviour.

Furthermore, budgets are usually signed off by senior management,

even though the required insights needed to adapt the marketing plan

to the changing market conditions are mostly generated by lower level

marketing and customer-facing employees.

Agile marketing is based on a growth mind-set across the marketing

team – one that allows for open communication across the team

without fear of making mistakes. For a marketing team to truly

become agile and growth-oriented, it needs to adopt the same agile

ground rules from IT software development. The proposed agile

marketing principles can be found online on

www.agilemarketingmanifesto.org/principles and they align

completely with the same principles adopted by software

development teams. Although developed a few years ago, the

principles listed in the agile marketing manifesto still remain at

“proposed” stage at the time of this writing. Therefore, in this article

we will discuss agile marketing through the prism of insights offered

by some of the original software development literature: the original

“Agile Manifesto”, “Lean Product Development”, “The Scrum

Guide” and Kanban. Marketers can leverage marketing optimisation

through employing three key principles of transparency, inspection

and adaptation. We discuss each of these in greater detail below.

Transparency (Visibility)

Agile marketing encourages transparency of all customer information

that are important towards meeting the overall objectives set out in

the integrated marketing plan. The social media, offline marketing

and web analytics teams must make all information at their disposal

available to all the people involved in marketing, whatever their role.

Agile project management teams use collaboration tools like JIRA as

a central repository for all project information which makes

transparency easier because every member has unrestricted access to

all the information available all of the time. Marketing teams can

adopt the same approach by using tools like JIRA to store both

strategic-level and tactical-level marketing plans.

Openly sharing the integrated marketing plan with all members of the

team is crucial, although, arguably, some organisations do this better

than others. Creating an environment of information transparency will

promote an easy flow of information throughout the marketing team

which will also help create an open and collaborative work culture

among the existing marketing team silos. One could also argue that

making information easily accessible will reduce meaningless

meetings and interruptions between team members and generally

improve team members’ individual productivity and efficiency.

Agile teams within the IT industry also conduct daily meetings called

“stand ups” where teams members share information about what they

were doing the previous day, what they plan to do on the day and

whether there are any issues and problems that are affecting their

work. These meetings allow team members to be aware of what the

rest of the team is doing and to pitch in with suggestions and help

each other troubleshoot any issues. This, again, helps in boosting

team morale and individual team members’ positive attitude towards

their work and one another. Having unrestricted access to the team’s

strategic and tactical KPIs, as well as being aware of their team

members’ individual KPIs encourages teams to have a collaborative

mind-set. Marketing teams everywhere could benefit greatly from the

adoption of the agile approach in their day to day activities. It is not

about creating a finger pointing atmosphere, but about understanding

that the team is only as strong as its weakest link: if any one person

on the team fails in completing their tasks the whole team will be

negatively affected. The collaborative and supportive atmosphere

agile helps to promote ultimately supports increased productivity and

effectiveness of each individual team member.

Inspection

Supporting transparency (discussed above), inspection is very much

about the daily meetings and sprint reviews, which are critical

activities that help the team identify hindrances and problems that

could be slowing down the team’s efforts towards completing the

project output.

Agile marketing teams can adopt the same mind-set by scheduling

daily meetings that should not last more than 15 minutes. In these

meetings every member of the team is able to highlight issues they

need help with, while the most senior member of the team or anyone

else can help resolve the issue with their suggestion. For example,

what issues is the SEO team having and how does that impact paid

search advertising? Is there anyone in social media that can help offer

a solution? This is the type of scene where a daily meeting and input

from other members of the team can help individuals resolve issues

and prevent minor niggles turning into insurmountable, complex

problems.

Adaptation

Agile project management teams have four events that help these

teams inspect and adapt their activities to ensure that team members

do not deviate from the expected output of the project. These include

events such as daily meetings, sprint planning, sprint reviews and

retrospectives.

Developing a marketing strategy that guarantees customer acquisition,

conversion and retention is very difficult with changing customer

perceptions and the multitude of purchase touchpoints customers have

at their disposal. An important aspect of a successful marketing

strategy is reducing all forms of customer journey drop off points,

however, identifying these becomes increasingly complicated with the

over reliance on quantitative data. This begs the question, then: how

do we as marketers develop a feedback loop which will inform digital

strategy about customer experience and expectations?

Shop Direct UK is a perfect example of how to reduce customer pain-

point uncertainty on the website, mobile apps and other marketing

channels. Shop Direct UK has a department within its head office

called the ‘UX lab’, the main purpose of which is to identify the key

positive and negative aspects of its digital properties and how these

can be exploited or minimized (respectively) in order to make their

products more easily accessible. This user-centred design process

enables Shop Direct’s team members to collaborate and innovate in

order to improve their business results through meeting their

customers’ needs in a better way (https://www.shopdirect.com/shop-

direct-accelerates-testing-programme-in-house-ux-lab/). Like Shop

Direct, agile marketing teams in all industries can address multiple

types of customer pain point uncertainty in an iterative and

incremental ‘test and learn’ environment. Ongoing customer

experience research through frontline customer-facing touchpoints

and improvements will also help reduce customer pain-point

uncertainty.

Keep the Integrated Digital Marketing Plans Open

Digital marketing budgets are allocated per marketing channel and

tactics which is further broken down into quarters, lines of business

and regions (in multinational marketing teams). Important decisions

and a review of the marketing channel performance must be made

before the transition to the next quarter or financial year, even if

current analytics, UX and CX insights demand an immediate review

of the marketing strategy.

Agile marketing favours an option that keeps the marketing plan open

to changes in response to insights gathered from CX, web analytics

and UX feedback from customer segments on an ongoing basis.

Accept That You Can’t Get It Right Up Front with Regards to

Marketing Plans

It is normal to assume that we can “get it right” up front with initial

digital marketing budget and resource allocation across channels and

tactics. The reality, however, is that we are oftentimes guilty of

creating marketing plans based on assumptions about what our target

customers want and ignoring important qualitative analytics data.

Agile marketing acknowledges that’s we cannot get all the required

customer insights or plan the perfect acquisition, retention and

conversion strategies upfront. With Agile marketing, we create

marketing plans with the assumption that we will update the tactics,

budgets and channels as we learn more about the performance of each

tactic from a revenue driven conversion optimization perspective.I’d

love to hear what you think about this topic

About The Author

Femi Olajiga is an independent consultant: Agile Digital Marketing

Consultant (Web Analytics, Customer Experience and User

Experience). You can connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter or visit

my website CXconversion.com

Share and find out more about Agile Marketing in my next post

- Agile Marketing Mindset: Explained

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Reference: Rubin, Kenneth S. (2013) Essential Scrum: A Practical

Guide to The Most Popular Agile Process, Upper Saddle River, NJ:

Addison-Wesley.