The art of the problem Five principles for finding and fixing marketing problems in real-time

The problem with ‘best practice’

Remember your last big marketing conference? It was probably full of gurus sharing best-practice advice on how to tackle marketing problems.

But let’s think again about those sessions. The chart below shows the time between action and best practice is, in politics or marketing, a long, long time.

In a world of multiple screens, omni-channels and goldfish like attention spans, best practice is not fast enough to stay ahead of the game. You need to respond to customer demands to delight, appease and surprise them at every turn. And you need to do it as close to real-time as possible.

The best practice cop out

That’s why we hate ‘best practice’. It’s a comfort blanket for marketers who want to feel safe. It means doing what everyone else is doing. It means toeing the line and being six months behind the curve – and feeling comfortable there. (Think of the difference between Oreo’s agile ‘Dunk in the Dark’ tweet and the (in)famous ‘best-practice’, 45-day corporate tweet.)

Rant: Why ‘best practice’ is killing marketing If you’re itching to ditch the old ways and get stuck in with experimental, real-time marketing, you might enjoy our rant on why real-time thinking trumps boring best practice every time.

From best-practice marketer to agile marketer

This ebook is all about breaking free from relying on best practice solutions to old problems. It’s about uncovering the problems you’re having right now – and let’s be honest every business has them – and deciding, for yourself, how to prioritize, allocate and attack the issues that need solved.

There is a new kid on the block and it’s called ‘agile marketing’, it’s about using principles from the agile software development movement to find out for yourself – and fast – what’s working and what needs to be fixed.

Our five principles can’t give you answers. But it can give you a great framework to develop an agile marketing culture.

Meet Scott Brinker our agile marketing advocate, the man behind Chief Marketing Technologist blog and Ion Interactive co-founder. With over 20 years experience at the intersection of marketing, IT, and software product development Scott has a clever thing or two (or five) to say about how to really do marketing. You can find out more about this marketing guru here. Or better even follow him @chiefmartec

Creating an agile marketing framework

Here are some of the key principles used in agile software development – which marketers can adapt to create an agile marketing framework.

Agile development

• Understand what users really need, and continuously review those needs to make sure your product stays relevant
• Continuously test features and chunks of code to ensure they do what users need
• Iteratively test and modify code during development, rather than as a separate QA process ‘at the end’
• Continuous delivery of a continuously-refined product, rather than focusing on getting everything perfect first time
• Strong collaboration between everyone in the development, testing, and ongoing management process (a culture known as ‘DevOps’)

Agile marketing

• Understand what customers really want, and continuously review those needs to make sure your marketing stays relevant
• Continuously test small elements of the overall marketing campaign to discover what has the most positive impact on customers
• Iteratively test campaigns on the fly and incorporate the learning as you go, rather than measuring success at the end and using the results to do something different ‘next time’.
• Continuous campaign delivery, with campaign elements modified on the fly in response to performance
• Strong collaboration between marketing, operations and finance (a culture we could call ‘MarkOps’)

Five agile principles for finding and fixing marketing problems

Lots of marketers are scared to scratch below the surface of their marketing and see what’s buried there. You’re not. You use agile principles to unearth your problems, stare them in the face, and fix them.

Principle #1

Be experimental, but stay focused

Agile marketing is by definition experimental. It frees you to follow hunches and try out ideas.

It’s exhilarating stuff but you can’t lose sight of what you need to achieve for your organization. That’s why a set of tough but achievable KPIs, linked to defined operational goals, makes it easy to know you’ve gone off-piste. KPIs are hard to create. They’re a bit dull and straight laced. But they’re a marketer’s best friends because they stop you falling into a classic experimentation trap: working on false positives.

Principle #1

Scenario: Problem identification

You’re an online retailer and your environmentally friendly cosmetics range isn’t shifting. You now own the KPI to double sales in six months.

You hypothesise sales will rise with a growth in awareness of environmental ‘pros and cons’. You set up a social media group, a hash-tag #greencounts and a content hub. It takes off. Thousands join the conversation.

But, after a month, your analytics and CRM report an engaged traffic spike but only a small sales increase. Your problem isn’t solved and your next step is crucial. Do you treat the experiment as a:

1. Failure and abandon the campaign
2. Work in progress and restructure the campaign
3. Partial success and focus on site conversions

Think Outcome

We like the sound of three but the choice is yours. But one thing’s for sure: with KPIs you don’t get tricked into false positives or negatives. You are already in a better place to make the next step to the real measure of success: more sales. Which leads us on to…

Agile Tactics: Sprints

Experiment fast by using ‘sprints’: short bursts of activity in which you write down lots of small ideas, Prioritize them, and have your team take responsibility for carrying them out in priority order. Then review which worked and which didn’t.

Scott Says: “ Enable new teams to try new innovations quickly, frequently, and on a small scale. Create the flexibility to scale up the winners and drop the duds.”

Principle #2

Be adaptable

Experimenting is vital but will only get you so far. The agile marketer has to monitor, analyse and, crucially, adapt. Real-time marketing means real-time adapting – not ‘today’ or ‘this week’. Now. You can’t afford to be committed to solving a problem when more urgent and important factors emerge.

Principle #2

Scenario: Problem Adaption

Let’s move back to our #greencounts scenario. You’ve decided to mail a segment of your database and ask them to engage in your content.

Visitors arrive on your site but analytics immediately show they are bouncing away with limited engagement suggesting a poor experience. It’s a lost opportunity. You hypothesise the audience is missing “social context” to make the experience relevant.

With the next segment batch due to go out later in the day. You have options:

1. Carry on to see if the next segment delivers a different result
2. Stop the email flow until you can get make the changes
3. Change the email and landing page content to respond to first result

Act positively

Again, the choice is yours but three is the agile response. Being able to monitor customers’ changing needs is one thing – but adapting is a bigger thing. Lessons learned are only valuable if your marketing organization and technology can respond before the moment has passed.

Getting to this level of agility means empowering everyone in the team with tools to make decisions and implement them. There’s no ‘blaming the intern’ in an agile marketing culture: if it backfires; apologise, learn and move on…

Agile Tools

Wonder how “best of breed” tools may compared to your corporate-approved best practice suite? Check out our “warts and all” agile case study featuring:

• Basecamp
• Google Analytics
• Trello
• Griffly
• SilverPop
• EPiServer

Scott Says: “ Shift happens. When Plan A becomes Plan B you need to embrace and benefit from change instead of fighting it. Respond to feedback from real customers.”

Principle #3

Prioritize the problem

There’s no shortage of things to solve. There’s an environmental range that isn’t selling; a high bounce rate on the home page; a low conversion of newsletter sign ups; an early drop off in summer buying…

Someone can, and probably will, make a case for solving all of them. But it’s never a good idea.

The goal isn’t to tackle every problem with limited resources: it’s to throw maximum resources at your biggest problems. If your KPIs still say it’s the environment that matter most then stick to it.

Principle #3

Scenario: Task prioritization

So back to our #greencounts campaigns. You decide (good decision by the way) converting environmental visits into customers is the best foot forward.

You hypothesise there are five ways to make that happen:

• Put product sidebars beside the environmental content
• Offer text product discounts at the end of the content
• Personalize product based on entry point
• Encourage sign up for newsletter for future commercial e-shot
• Run video advert in top banner for products

You have options for getting these tasks done:

1. Split the team to work on all the options
2. Discard some options and do the most popular options
3. Prioritize the tasks and do them in order of importance

The meaningful problem

Yes, that’s right, we hope you chose number three. You can’t solve problems just because they exist. You need to solve the ones that deliver the biggest returns.

You need a framework that allows you to objectively prioritize problems and tasks. These are usually major organizational goals supported by individual KPIs across the board.

In 2012 Facebook needed to generate ad revenue from mobile users and started diverting budget, resources and effort to the problem. Within a year, from a standing start, Facebook generated 50% of ad revenue from mobile before moving to the next issue…

Scott Says: “ When everything is high priority, nothing is. Give a mechanism to agree on what is important.”

Principle #4

Build a great ‘MarkOps’ team

One of the hallmarks of an agile software team is a continuous, transparent feedback loop across development and operations – a culture known as DevOps.

A truly agile marketing team will have a similar collaborative culture – ‘MarkOps’, if you will – to identifying and solving problems:

• Operations people can choose tools and systems to identify problems
• Data scientists can analyse real-time data for issues and causes
• Strategists can analyse problems and see if its worth fixing
• Writers can develop and refine content in response
• Management can approve and release budget
• Execution people can deliver the refined content in real-time

The problem is making sure diverse teams are working towards clear goals in harmony.

Principle #4

Scenario: Culture transparency

So let’s explore the idea in our #greencounts campaigns. You’ve got team of marketing experts working on improving site conversions. But despite clearly shared goals the project seems to be moving slowly.

You hypothesise that the team is taking a siloed approach to the problem and not bringing their work together. You have options:

1. Hurry them up so you can bring their work together
2. Talk to them and try to think outside their own box
3. Bring the team together regularly to share and discuss tasks

Act together

No surprises if you guessed we’re going for three. MarkOps can only be effective if the team can work together to respond extremely quickly to opportunities and problems – and to reach rapid agreement on what actions should take priority. For an example, look at Coca-Cola’s new integrated marketing structure: it’s replacing silos and planning cycles with a new, agile way of operating that allows Coca Cola’s marketers to collaborate easily and come up with on-the-fly creative responses to changing external conditions.

Scott Says: “ One of the biggest problems for the agile marketer is management barriers, with levels needing approval and multiple steps of quality control. Months and weeks pass and the relevance of the idea may no longer be valid.”

Principle #5

Test, test and test again

One of the key principles of agile software development is the idea of ‘continuous delivery’. It’s a contrast to the old way of struggling for months or years to deliver a complete application that’s out of date by launch.

Iteration, not perfection, is a good watchword for the agile marketer. It means having lots of ideas, the means to test them quickly, monitor the results and and make relevant decisions to prevent future problems.

Principle #5

Scenario: Test relevance

So let’s take one final trip to our #greencounts campaign. You’ve got your team firing out solutions at the end of focused work sprint. And the good news is conversion rates are helping you in your drive to double sales. But you’re falling just short.

You hypothesise the changes have solved the problem but could be optimized by testing iterations. You have two choices.

1. Don’t test and move to the next project
2. Test and squeeze all remaining value from work

There’s no need for a third option this time. It’s often the difference between some and total success.

The value of relevance

This is where the principle of A/B, particularly when automated and prioritized for effect, or multivariate testing really comes into its own. Realtime testing of two or more different options is an unbeatable way to understand which option has the greatest impact in terms of meeting your KPIs.

At TNW 2013, Dan Siroker of Optimizely revealed how A/B testing of different combinations of home page image and button copy had affected email signups and donations – two vital KPIs – in Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

By uncovering the optimum combination (which, incidentally, turned out to be highly counter-intuitive), his tests enabled the campaign to attract 2.9m extra email subscribers and 288,000 more volunteers, who raised an additional $57m in campaign donations.

Stellar results like these are commonplace among organizations that routinely A/B test – and are undeniable evidence of the business value of testing.

Scott Says: “ Collect ideas for further iterations of completed tasks – as well as entirely new ideas inspired by what was produced.”

Conclusion

A problem shared…

Using the five principles outlined in this book to create a flexible, responsive marketing culture, you’re well placed to become an agile marketer who uncovers problems, looks them in the eye, and takes appropriate action – all in the time it takes a ‘best-practice’ marketer to read another out-of-date case study.

The exact problems you uncover will be unique to your organization, and so will be your approach to fixing them. But whatever approach you take, we have tools that can make the process easier and faster.

EPiServer’s digital marketing tools empower agile marketers to respond instantly to change and run quick iterations, with the data telling you what works for your customers – and for your organization. By constantly conducting and analysing numerous small experiments, you can gain true insight into what works and what doesn’t, allowing you to evolve your strategy as the landscape changes.