Agile Marketing Frameworks

Published by Femi Olajiga in Agile Marketing

Agile Marketing Frameworks: Actionable Tips That Work

Transcripts

In this article, we’re going to look at the steps to implementing agile marketing frameworks. I’m going to be discussing agile marketing frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and other frameworks. And I’m going to be talking about how to implement Scrum, how to implement Kanban, as well as how to develop your agile marketing skills. And finally, I’m going to be talking about examples of companies that have implemented agile marketing.

How to Implement Agile Marketing Frameworks

Now, let’s start with steps to implement agile marketing frameworks. The first step to implement agile marketing is to do a situation analysis. Look at your marketing team, look at your structure, look at your process, look at your marketing plan, look at everything within your organization, from culture to leadership, everything literally to understand, are you ready to become agile? Do you have the right mindset within your team? Do you have the right skill set? And then you go to the number two steps, and then you look at how do you adopt agile frameworks to the context of your team.

You need to be sure about the framework that works for your team before you can become agile. You can not just go and start implementing agile without understanding how you’re going to adapt that to your team. And the number three-step is continuous improvement. After you have created a framework that works for your team, after you’ve looked at different agile frameworks and decided what works best, you need to have that culture that you need to always continuously improve in terms of what is working, and look at all the frameworks and other practices that you can integrate into your marketing team to improve continuously.

Agile is a journey, it’s not a sprint. It’s something that you must continuously evolve and add new things. That is what Spotify did. They started implementation of agile with Scrum, and then they evolved. Over the years, they’ve added and tweaked their agile practices because the main reason behind that success is because of the continuous improvement mindset that they have.

Types of Agile Marketing Frameworks

The number one framework and the most popular framework of agile is Scrum. It’s like Scrum is so popular that if you make a wrong statement about Scrum, you will get crucified on LinkedIn. So Scrum is a very, very popular framework with a lot of followers and a lot of members. The next popular framework from the context of marketing is the Kanban framework that is very, very popular as well, and I’m a big fan of Kanban.

In fact, I have a strong affinity towards Kanban, as well as Scrum is good but Kanban for me, because marketing teams the way they work, things work in a flow type of manner. Things flows in from different departments. It’s very, very hard to just keep everything siloed in sprints like Scrum recommends, but you need to try what works for your team. You cannot just take my word for it. Try Scrum, try Kanban, and then the third one is the Spotify model which I will discuss briefly later on. Now, what is the Scrum Process in the context of marketing?

The first thing to understand is the CMO, the most popular person in the marketing team. And then you have the team lead, depending on the size of your team. I’m just looking at a big multinational organization here.  So they normally have a CMO, then they have a manager that leads the marketing team. And then the CMO is the one responsible for creating the strategic marketing plan. That plan is then created in collaboration with the manager, as well as the rest of the team.

Everyone within the organisation works together. The marketing plan is then broken down into tasks. That task is then executed by the whole team, and after they’re executed, during that execution phase, they do their daily meetings which is one of the rituals of Scrum.  The daily meeting helps the marketing team to adjust and make modifications to the plan and the tasks that they’re working on on the fly. So they don’t have to wait until the end of the quarter or the end of the year to make adjustments to things that they feel are important that can impact on the campaign.

And then you have the review. At the end of each execution, say at the end of every two weeks, three weeks, you have a review meeting. You can be doing Scrum, you can be doing Kanban, but at the end of two to three weeks or four weeks or one week, however long you do your review, you sit down, you look at the campaign, you make presentation to everyone on the team, like the SEO person makes a presentation of what he was working on over the week, the PPC person and everyone makes a presentation and everybody collaborates. 

And then next is the retrospective. You look at, okay, in terms of an interpersonal conflict resolution and general team morale, what have we done? What can we improve on? What are the issues that came up when we were executing that campaign? That’s the retrospective. And then you have the re-plan. After you’ve done everything, you look at the marketing plan and then you work with the CMO to do the re-plan.

This is just a brief summary of the Scrum Process. It’s not as detailed as I would want, because this is just a quick guide to implementing Scrum in marketing. Again, this is Scrum in the context of marketing, I’m not talking about IT people, this is created based on my experience and all the people that I’ve interviewed when I was writing my book, Lean Agile Marketing.
This is how Scrum works for marketing teams.It’s not 100% complete here because this is just a crash course. If you’re interested to learn more, there are books online that you can read that shows you examples and case studies of how marketing teams are applying Scrum.

And if you have any question that you want to ask, please contact me with your question via email or on LinkedIn, and I will answer. Now, let’s go to Kanban. The first thing you need to do when you want to implement Kanban is to list all the tasks that you normally work on, then you group similar tasks together. And then number three, you prioritize your task.
And number four, you align the task to meet a strategic goal. What I’m trying to say here is, whatever you’re working on a Kanban board, you need to set a strategic goal that you’re looking to achieve as a team, as individual, and then you work on that.Also with Kanban, the principles are, number one, you need to limit the number of work, you have in progress.What I’m trying to say here is, you need to make sure that, for example, if you look at the Doing column, you have that number three in brackets, you need to make sure that you set a limit to number of work you’re doing at any particular time.

You cannot just start working nonstop and just multitasking and stuff like that. It doesn’t work that way. Multitasking kind of reduces productivity. And also you need to manage the flow of work. You need to make sure that you complete what you’re doing before you move on to another task. And then you need to have your daily meeting in front of the Kanban board to look at dependencies between tasks and you look at the blockers and what is blocking you guys from doing work. So this is one of the principles of Kanban.

And then you need to identify and remove waste. Again, this is a principle of Kanban in the context of marketing. It’s not in the context of IT. If you want to learn more about Kanban, then you can register for my Agile marketing framework course on website . It’s a six-hour course, and that will teach you in more detail. This one is just a crash course to just briefly breeze through what Kanban is in the context of marketing. And if you’re looking to develop your agile marketing skills, the first thing you need to do is to practice agile in the context of your own marketing team.

There is a lot of documentation and a lot of best practises all over the internet, but they’re not in the context of your team. You know your team, you know your marketing campaign better than anyone else, you know what will work for you and what will not work for you?So the first thing to do is make sure you have that mindset that agile needs to be applied in the context of your team, not in the context of IT. And the number two thing is, you need to be aware that there is a training available with the Scrum Alliance. And one thing you need to make sure you understand is, Scrum Alliance is a certification organisation for IT software. There are very few agile marketing framework training available.

The first thing you need to understand when you’re going for agile training is to ask the question, “The person that is training me, does the person have a background in marketing? Does the person understand marketing planning? Marketing strategy? Does the person have that understanding of marketing to be able to apply agile in the context of marketing?”. If the answer is no, you’re better of reading books about agile and then applying it in the context of your team. And also agile marketing frameworks training are available. There are some agile professionals in the United States, the United Kingdom, and they’re like six or seven agile marketing books on Amazon. So you can always pick up training from all these marketing professionals that are training agile marketers.

And again, you have agile marketing books that can help you develop your agile marketing skills as well. So what are the companies that are applying agile? While I was writing my book, I interviewed a few people that are implementing agile, and one of the most popular one as I’ve mentioned earlier on is the Spotify company. Spotify applies agile across the organization. This is a very good example of companies that are applying agile. Another company is HubSpot. It’s a very, very popular company. This company is also adopting agile in the context of marketing as well. There are a few case studies online that you can research agile marketing case studies on Spotify.

And then I interviewed Avaya. Avaya is a very, very big multinational company that is implementing agile across marketing teams that are globally distributed. Autodesk is another company that has implemented agile marketing frameworks. And there’s a case study about how Autodesk implemented agile within their marketing team in my book, “Lean Agile Marketing”. So if you’re interested in case studies about how these companies have applied agile in marketing, there are case studies online as well. You can get free case studies on the internet if you search for it. And there’s also case studies in my book, “Lean Agile Marketing”. Vistaprint also, I interviewed Vistaprint.

They are implementing agile across the whole organisation, marketing, HR and literally every part of the organisation. Again, there’s a case study about agile marketing in Vista print in my book, “Lean Agile Marketing”. If you’re looking for more case studies, then you might want to enroll in the other course, Agile marketing framework training, then you have access to more case studies. This one is just a brief course to introduce beginners to agile marketing frameworks. If you’re interested to know more about case studies, then move over to the Agile Marketing Training course on Udemy and you will get a a load of case studies there. And finally, please post your questions in the question section and I will answer within 24 hours.

Agile Marketing Framework

I am interested to see how many of you are keen to implement agile in your marketing.If you’re interested and you want to implement agile and you have questions, feel free to reach out to me and I will answer all your questions.