Making the most of agile in marketing: The experts weigh in - A panoply of insight, experience, and advice from leading thinkers and practitioners in agile marketing

Introduction

Agile is a natural evolution for marketing – but how should marketing teams implement it?

With markets moving quickly, conditions constantly changing, and new threats and opportunities emerging at every turn, today’s organizations need to be agile. So it’s no surprise that the concept of agile – first popularized in the world of software development and testing – is gaining ground in just about every area of the modern business.

The benefits are clear – faster processes, greater ability to react to changing conditions, increased efficiency – and everyone wants to get involved. But agile lends itself far more clearly to some functions than others.

For marketing, a major question looms: how well can the concept of agile be applied to a function characterized by myriad projects all happening at the same time, often in teams dispersed around the globe, and often stretched over multiple quarters?

Short answer: it depends. Long answer: it depends how well it’s managed and integrated with existing best practices.

It’s a little ironic but creating a flexible, agile environment, platform, and framework requires a well-constructed plan. With that in mind, we’ve brought together some of the greatest minds in marketing to discuss what agile really means for marketing and share their insights, experiences and advice for applying agile processes in this complex department.

Julian Archer - Research Director at Sirius Decisions

Julian has headed up a multitude of major research projects with Sirius Decisions. He’s had a front-row seat for the growth of agile in marketing and has a unique perspective on the underlying structures needed.

Marketers want to embrace agile, but the function is still governed by rigid frameworks. Frameworks between sales, marketing and product functions, frameworks for how demand is created, and frameworks built upon decades of best practice.

The issue blocking agile’s uptake in marketing is that most marketers value validated ideas over emerging viewpoints and opinions. This isn’t necessarily the wrong stance to take, but the perceived shake-up that agile will bring probably isn’t as transformational as most traditional marketers expect. It represents change in the way marketers work, not what they do exactly – that’s going to remain the same.

What agile does give marketing is an added edge of creativity. Being more flexible and receptive to new ideas helps create great marketing efforts and establish new trends. But, it’s still essential to have a structured plan at the core of all agile marketing efforts – that plan may involve a different blend of flexibility and control, but it needs to remain in place all the same.

Marketers are spinning a lot of plates at the same time. With multiple customers and competing products to manage – often across multiple borders – traditional hierarchical structures are important, but they can often lead to inefficiency and duplication of work.

Now, we need to build a more agile marketing ecosystem. We have multiple people with different skills, spread widely across multiple locations and frameworks that are currently too rigid to get the most from them. Agile, when implemented correctly, can give marketing that flexibility – while retaining the core structure required to keep marketing on track and not deviate too far from established best practices.

When embracing agile and breaking away from processes purely focused on best practice, I think marketers really need to watch out for a similar effect: “brand debt”. Sloppy work can break your brand – and you have to work even harder down the road to recover from that deficit in the eyes of customers and clients who were exposed to it.

Dr Dave Chaffey - CEO at Smart Insights

As well as being CEO and co-founder of Smart Insights – a consultancy and publisher of guides, ebooks and training to help businesses succeed online – Dave Chaffey is an accomplished author with a passion for educating marketers. If it’s a trend influencing marketers, Dave knows it back to front.

The trick with getting better results from digital marketing is asking the right questions from the outset. In digital, there is a tendency for these questions to be “down in the weeds” about boosting the efficiency of digital channels, like which keywords are we targeting or how can we get more leads from our landing page. They’re certainly important, but many marketers are still missing the big picture if they don’t have an integrated digital strategy.

Marketers need to start thinking more strategically, to develop their online value proposition through creating targeted, personalized experiences. Agile can optimize these, but you need to get the fundamentals of your digital strategy right first, so we can’t turn our backs on best practice altogether. Best practices are the ‘hygiene factors’ that must be in place to give your communications and marketing efforts a fighting chance at success.

Agile thinking comes into play once you’re following best practices and want to take performance to the next level. Then you need to set up tests and experiments and be responsive to feedback you get from your audience or real-time changes in the market.

The camps of best practice and agile aren’t exclusive, they can coexist peacefully. The risk of only relying on best practice is that it instils a “tickbox” mentality where many simply end up following others in the industry. It can stifle creativity, limit differentiation, and remove all shreds of uniqueness and personalization from the content you produce.

Agile enables marketers to try different approaches to engage audiences and then, if they don’t work, “fail-fast” and use another approach. Given the way we all multi-task, agile approaches fit the cultures and working patterns of many modern businesses. However, agile processes for marketing still require regular checkpoints and review.

I think agile is a great fit for digital marketing since it encourages constant tests and improvements as part of “always-on marketing” rather than the more traditional, linear, long-term marketing or campaign planning approach.

Scott Brinker - Co-Founder & CTO at Ion Interactive

Scott Brinker is one of the biggest names in the world of new marketing processes and technology. His Chief Marketing Technologist blog is a hugely popular source of insight into the biggest trends shaping and transforming marketing strategy, management and culture. A bona fide agile expert, Scott shares his thoughts on agile marketing – with specific reference to managing multiple projects.

Agile is a very broad set of principles, and marketers can adapt agile methodologies to best suit their needs. Because the very philosophy of agile is about continuously adapting to what works, if you’re truly embracing that, then you shouldn’t be overlooking other methods.

Agile methodologies and best practices don’t have to be an either/or proposition. At its core, agile is about providing transparency and adaptability. You can use best practices within an agile framework — if it works and if it’s worth the prioritized time it’s allocated, by all means, use it. And if you have a set of processes that don’t require agile management at all, then they can live outside that framework. You don’t need sprint planning to make a pot of coffee.

Even though agile can bring a huge range of benefits to the marketing department, certain aspects of traditional marketing operations need to remain in place – the most prominent of which is clear, open, and frequent communication.

Having everyone on an agile team meet face-toface for stand-ups is ideal — but, alas, not practical in our world of physically distributed teams. Video conference calls like Skype, Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, etc., are the next best thing. It really helps to be able to see people’s facial expressions and body language. And if at least several people on the team are in the same physical location, they should definitely do the stand-up together.

Unfortunately, working fast doesn’t always mean working well. In software development – the area that agile was first adopted in – there is a concept of “technical debt”, where sloppy code ends up costing you more time down the line than it would have done to write it well in the first place.

When embracing agile and breaking away from processes purely focused on best practice, I think marketers really need to watch out for a similar effect: “brand debt”. Sloppy work can break your brand – and you have to work even harder down the road to recover from that deficit in the eyes of customers and clients who were exposed to it.

Ellen Valentine - Strategic Marketing Evangelist, Silverpop

Ellen Valentine has more than 20 years’ experience as vice president of marketing/CMO for a number of technology companies. She has deep expertise in evaluating product and market positions, designing go-to-market strategy, and managing all digital marketing initiatives. This is her unique viewpoint on the tactical implications of agile through the view of marketing automation.

Unsurprisingly, the move toward agile thinking has come on the back of new tools and technologies. There’s always been an idea of agile, but progressive marketers have been handcuffed by limitations in the way they can gather and react to customers.

With the shackles off, marketers are moving away from traditional “batch-and-blast” style marketing and move towards a more agile and reactive realtime framework. By monitoring how customers and prospects interact with your content, you can start making more intelligent marketing decisions on the fly. With more flexible processes in place, marketers can give customers exactly what they want at every stage of their buying journey – even when they change their minds.

Just because a marketing campaign is automated doesn’t mean it’s rigid. Advanced marketing automation solutions are designed to support flexible processes. You can measure and test every part of your marketing process – from communication cadence to open rates – and set rules which enable the automated campaign to adjust accordingly.

Digital marketing today is all about data and achieving a single customer view. That means you need tools that help provide the insight you need to make informed decisions quickly.

That in turn means a greater need for integration. One great example is the single customer view from integrating marketing and CRM solutions.. It enables you to effectively monitor virtually every interaction a customer has with your company, and then react to those interactions with further communications that are based on near-perfect information.

Bringing together data points will improve your view of the customer. And that’s when you can start to think and act agile.

James Norwood - CMO at EPiServer

With over 25 years experience in enterprise software, James oversees all things marketing strategy related at EPiServer today. Using his wealth of expertise he helps our marketing efforts to stay as relevant and flexible as possible – so agile has been on his radar for a number of years.

Traditional marketing is being turned on its head at the moment. When you plan for a launch, your first instinct is to do it in the same way you always have. But then you think no, maybe what we need is a rough and ready “unplugged” style video on YouTube. You’ve got to be ready to take a few risks to get your message out sooner in a way that might get through to your customers.

Marketers need to think in real time – they need to think agile. Some people will relish the opportunity to shake things up and embrace agile, and need to be empowered to do it. Others are not necessarily able to make that leap. It needs a new type of individual and skillset – someone that can run fast and have fun. It’s not for everyone.

If you have the right people and the right capabilities, the payoff of using agile in marketing can be huge – but the journey there is by no means simple. Problems will arise when integrating agile processes into marketing operations, usually stemming from movement away from current best practices. The best results I’ve seen have been when marketers have taken on board the best aspects of agile and combined them with best practice.

I’m not a purist, I have seen agile go too far, but it’s better to be more agile than too rooted in best practice. We stuck to best practice at my last company, we were focused on a target all year long, but the data told us we were making no headway. The attitude was that these things take time, but sometimes you’re just never going to get there, and the data needs to tell you that.

On the other hand, with agile, if you’re constantly iterating, you run the risk of never actually getting your message across. The best way to manage this is to review data quarterly to see what’s getting results, eliminate what isn’t and course-correct based on current trends, threats and opportunities.

It’s all about picking your battles intelligently. By adopting agile principles and merging them with best practices you can capitalize on emerging opportunities while still working in predictable ways. You can keep your content relevant, while retaining a solid framework for its production and distribution.

Conclusion

Agile is a bold new frontier, but you don’t have to face it alone

Agile is still a brand-new discipline in marketing, and certain aspects of how it should be used – and how much it should be used – divide the opinions of our experts. But the one thing they all seem to agree on is that success depends on how well agile is integrated into existing marketing practices and used in conjunction with proven best practice. Whether you’re considering adopting a complete agile framework, or just shifting your mindset towards making your marketing more flexible and responsive, it’s not a journey to undertake alone. At EPiServer, we have the platform, the tools and the know-how to make agile marketing work for you. If you’ve got any questions, or if you’d like to learn more about how we can help.