Is Agile right for your marketing team?
If you work with developers or engineers you know all about Agile where work is broken down into smaller sections and completed in sprints.
Lately, other professions have started adopting the principles of Agile to guide their work and marketing is no exception.
In 2012, the Agile Manifesto was created and for marketers the values include:
- 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 vs. Rigid planning
- Responding to change over following a plan
- Many small experiments over a few large bets
The Agile approach to marketing means we have to shift from yearly or long-term planning to focusing on smaller wins and smaller campaigns that we can pivot on should we need to.
While I don’t necessarily agree that Agile is the end all be all of ways to run things, I think there are ways to apply Agile principles to marketing’s operations to drive up new results or breathe fresh life into our approach.
Applying Agile to marketing departments
Small releases
Most marketing departments I’ve worked in develop long-term strategies and marketing plans whereas Agile focuses on small cycles with frequent releases. I’ve tried to adopt the idea of smaller, but more frequent releases with blogs, smaller guides, or quick videos to keep a constant pipeline of new content out there without devoting too much time to bigger pieces.
Adapting to change
Since we do spend so much time lovingly creating our yearly strategies, the idea of having to adapt to change quickly can be hard for most marketers to accept. I think one way marketers can think about adapting to change is by focusing on what would deliver the most value to our customers? If we have to change tactics to provide something better, we should be willing to accept that change.
Agile is really about improvement and constantly learning about our work, customers, and what we produce.
Experimentation and sprints
Experimenting and learning from those tests is an important part of Agile, which I think marketing teams can adopt.
I do like the idea of sprints as I tend to be more productive when I focus on similar tasks at once instead of having to switch tracks all the time and I know that this time is devoted to finishing these specific tasks.
Scrum
I know, I know, no one needs another meeting added to their calendars. But, this meeting is not designed to go more than 15 minutes! In a daily stand up, team members say what they did yesterday, what’s on the agenda for today, and call attention to any problems or obstacles that could prevent them from completing their work.
I do like that new ideas or projects are not to be added to a team member’s plate, but if there are things that need to be addressed, work will be redistributed whereas in the past I feel marketers still need to stick to the original deadlines and then we face the problem of burnout.
It’s important to be able to move projects around based on priority and the value they provide.
Post-sprint meetings
I also like the idea of the post-sprint review and retrospective. Not only can we highlight the great work we did during the sprint, but we can also discuss lessons learned and things we can do better next time.
I think most marketing departments tend to do a review and retrospective at the end of the year and we all know we’ve forgotten about some projects or what problems we faced when working on them.
By having more frequent reviews, we can stop common problems from recurring and find better and faster ways to complete our work.
Success, not metrics
I do like that in Agile, managers lead differently by giving their team what they need to be successful instead of focusing on meeting numbers or metrics.
Agile teams give motivated employees the tools and resources they need to be successful and trust them to get the work done. I’ve worked in marketing departments where everything is micromanaged or there are too many cooks in the kitchen, so projects get stuck in the edit round or worse, are never completed.
By focusing on getting the work done to the best of the individual’s ability, we have these people on the team for a reason, we can find success instead of focusing solely on how we can measure it when it’s done.
Data-driven decisions
I think marketing has been good at this for a while now, but can always improve. Before each sprint, we should look at the data and lessons learned to make informed decisions on what should be a priority and what the best way to accomplish this project is.
Look at past performance of marketing projects to decide what’s right for the next sprint or what you need to refine before moving forward.
Alignment across teams
Agile focuses on collaboration and the overall team’s success instead of just individual success. Marketing needs to communicate with and trust the sales team, design, leadership, and dev for a successful sprint.
We all need to know what the priorities are, why they’re the priorities, how the work is getting done, and when the projects will be delivered. Like the scrum, other teams shouldn’t be able to add new work or ideas to the sprint unless it’s crucial for the organization.
Kanban boards
I will admit, I love Kanban boards and use them in my job and for my blogs. I have mine broken out into:
- Backburner – items that aren’t urgent but need to be on my radar
- To do – items that are coming up
- Doing – items I’m currently working on
- In review – items that others need to contribute to or approve (these projects will often jump back and forth between doing and in review until they move to done)
- Done – items that are complete
Within each project or card, I can add checklists or steps to accurately track where I’m at with each project. For example, an ebook card might have the following things on its checklist:
- Outline
- Chapter introductions
- Body copy
- Design
- Proof
- Edits
- Landing page copy and campaign
- Publish
- Promote
I like Kanban boards as I can quickly look at it and see where my projects are at, how they move through the process, and where potential slow ups happen.
I do like certain aspects of Agile and think elements can be applied to marketing to keep us on our toes and constantly improving. I also think there are elements that don’t translate as well and each team will have to find out what works best for them.
What do you think? Do you feel Agile is a good approach for marketers?
