If you’re new to Agile marketing and confused about how to implement Agile marketing, then this article is for you! My name is Femi Olajiga, and I have been doing Agile marketing since 2013. I am also the author of the book Lean Agile Marketing. My experience of Agile marketing is strictly marketing-focused and is somewhat contrary to the application of Agile principles in IT software development. So, if you’re IT-focused, this article is not for you, but if you’re looking to implement Agile within marketing, then this article will help you understand Agile in the context of marketing teams.

The article is structured as follows:

• Brief overview of Agile marketing
• Benefits and goal of Agile marketing
• Agile Marketing Team Roles
• Creating an Agile Marketing Backlog
• Running Agile Marketing Sprints
• Agile Marketing Meetings

Brief Overview of Agile marketing

 There are two fundamental approaches to how people implement Agile marketing:

Prescriptive Agile Marketing Implementation

This approach is primarily focused on getting the marketing function to work in a Scrum way. The focus is very much on making sure that the team understands Scrum and Kanban, and there is less emphasis on marketing strategy and revenue contribution. The whole approach to Agile marketing from a prescriptive perspective is entirely based on the mindset of delivering existing framework-focused training and certifications (e.g. Scrum, Kanban, etc.) which does not necessarily guarantee successful implementation of Agile in marketing. I often see marketing teams approach Agile marketing with the mindset of “Let’s just do Scrum. Once we do Scrum and Kanban, we’ve done Agile marketing.” This approach is popular with marketing teams that are just starting out in Agile marketing. Most people who approach Agile marketing by focusing on setting up a pilot Scrum team often realise at a later stage that they should have focused on problem identification first before adapting Scrum and Kanban to marketing. This is why I prefer the non-prescriptive approach to Agile marketing which embraces a more pragmatic, Lean-thinking mindset.

Non- Prescriptive Agile Marketing Implementation

More advanced teams approach Agile marketing in a non-prescriptive, open-minded way. This approach is focused more on creating an Agile operating model that kind of looks at existing marketing problems and then tries to figure out a solution using Lean thinking, Waterfall, Agile, and whatever methodology might be appropriate for solving existing marketing problems. This non-prescriptive approach is framework agnostic, and it’s not framework specific. I like this approach because it focuses specifically on performance marketing and revenue attribution. It’s focuses more on getting marketing to deliver business results as expected and less on the specific, prescribed application of Scrum, Kanban or other Agile frameworks. Marketing teams start by:

• • Observing the current state of their marketing strategy and team skills and capabilities;
  • Identifying existing marketing problems;
  • Creating counter-measures to solve identified problems;
  • Creating iterative marketing strategies.

The primary goal of Agile marketing, in a nutshell, is to identify the problems within your marketing strategy, planning, execution and their impact of business objectives. You can only do this by constantly observing the current state of your marketing through continuous situation analysis, looking at important KPIs and avoiding focusing on vanity metrics. You must always adjust your marketing, planning and execution in an iterative and continuous way to stay relevant and in tune with changes in customer expectations and behaviours. Another thing that Agile marketing will bring to your marketing efforts is that it will help you improve accountability from a KPI perspective.

One of the major problems with marketing teams is often prioritization. What should we work on and what would get us the best results? When you start working in an Agile marketing way, it helps you reduce and eliminate prioritization issues because everybody has clear visibility to what is important and what the goals is, what tasks are really aligned to the target KPIs. And another thing that Agile marketing is very good at is helping you reduce people issues.

Agile helps improve collaboration between teams irrespective of which specific people work in which specific team. It can help with visibility and collaboration because the whole team starts working in such a way that success is attributed to the whole team, not to specific individuals on the team and this helps to shift the team mindset away from individual contributions to team-level successes. This also helps improve team and individual productivity as well and creates a consistency whereby people working on the team have an understanding of their workflow and how it contributes to the overall team goals. Team members are then able to develop an understanding of their capacity as individuals, as well as what task they can complete and within which timeframe. This helps nurture time efficiencies. Agile also effectively supports collaboration with external stakeholders, because external stakeholders now also have visibility to what the marketing team is working on, which helps build mutual trust. They’re just not like, oh, the marketing team are just running around in the corner, we don’t know what they’re doing. The visibility that Agile marketing brings to senior stakeholders increases trust in the team and collaboration, both within the team and externally.

Bringing Agile into marketing also helps with the planning and gives it more flexibility. As external stakeholders see what you’re working on, they see the KPIs that you’re working towards, so when it comes time to be flexible from a budget allocation perspective, the stakeholders, like the CFO and people in accounts and technology departments, are more receptive to your requests and the collaboration is more natural from that perspective.

Defining Agile Marketing Team Roles

Traditionally, marketing is structured in two ways. You have the leaders within the marketing team, and then you have the marketing team itself. In the context of IT, especially Scrum, you have the Scrum Master, you have the Product Owner, you have the Development Team. The team is always structured in a way where it’s cross-functional and everybody is together and the Product Owner and the Scrum Master kind of shelves the team, reinforcing it. However, in marketing it’s different, because marketing embraces hierarchy and you can’t just change that because with hierarchy, from the leadership perspective, comes experience. You also need to understand when you’re implementing Agile marketing that your marketing team, in most instances, will have different levels and types of experience. So approaching Agile marketing the way it’s being implemented in IT and trying to do the same thing, e.g. trying to do Scrum in marketing in its pure form, is a recipe for disaster.

I have worked in Scrum teams and I have witnessed first-hand Scrum being too rigid for marketing teams. I’ve also interviewed people across the world since as far back as 2016, that have shared their experience of the difficulty of implementing Scrum. So my recommendation is when you’re looking to implement Agile marketing, make sure that you just focus on these two hierarchies: focus on the leaders and then the team, that is all you need. You don’t need to start structuring your team to Product Owner, Scrum Master, etc., that’s overkill, because marketing has a goal and that goal is different to IT. And like I said earlier on, when it comes to marketing, authority is not distributed to the team. The leaders within the team make the decisions when it comes to budget allocation, when it comes to recruitment, all important decisions are kind of motivated and initiated by the leader. Going down the hierarchy then determines the level of accountability and authority within the team. So, for you to be successful in Agile marketing you need to look at your leader, a high-performing Agile marketing team will require a very, very good leader. So if you look at yourself as a marketing leader and your team is not functioning as an Agile unit, you need to review your leadership style and your approach to Agile marketing.

Your Agile marketing team size and roles will depend on your skill distribution, dependencies, and authority. What I mean by this is when you look at a marketing team in different organizations and even across different sectors, the size always varies. You have marketing teams of one, marketing teams of two, marketing teams of 50, 70,… So applying Agile and Scrum methodologies to a team structure that is not consistent is difficult in itself, which is why there is no one-size-fits-all approach. And again, the dependencies are also different. This dependency management is something that has been done well in the IT space, but when it comes to marketing, the dependencies are complex because you’re working with contractors, you’re working with internal and external stakeholders. And the workflow goes within the team, outside the team, and a lot of stakeholders are involved at various levels. So for you to be really, really Agile, you’d need to embrace that hierarchy that just focuses on the leader and on the team. So what I mean by this is the strategy planning is done from a leadership perspective and the execution is done from the team perspective.

So unlearn and forget everything you know about Scrum and Kanban when you’re coming into Agile marketing. You need to approach Agile marketing with a new set of eyes. With a fresh, open mind and an ability to embrace the fact that you don’t know everything, and you’re going to experiment from a process perspective to get what really works best for your team and your organisation as a whole.

Creating the Marketing Backlog

The very first task in your Agile marketing journey is creating your marketing backlog. A backlog in most instances is just your marketing strategy broken down into tasks. So within the marketing strategy you have different marketing channels. You have expectations, in terms of KPIs from different channels. And then breaking those channels down, most channels have a defined workflow. It’s not like IT where you start looking at, okay, what do we need, what tasks needs to be completed? In most marketing teams you know, what search engine optimization is about; you know what tasks are involved; you know it’s paid search, you know it’s social media marketing. Those tasks are defined, and in most instances, they don’t change.

In search engine optimization and PPC you know that you’re going to do keyword research. And you know that that task is broken down into specific workflows. This means that creating your marketing backlog starts with breaking down those workflows into specific tasks: that is what you then populate into your marketing backlog. That marketing backlog can then be further divided into sprints, which I’m going to talk about later on. You group those tasks into two, 1- or 2-week sprints, and that’s how you start your execution.

However, before you get into the marketing backlog, you need to have created your marketing strategy. A lot of Agile marketing training, qualifications, and even literature never mentions marketing strategy. That sits outside of Agile marketing in most instances. And that is why I said a non-prescriptive approach to Agile marketing focuses more on strategy rather than processes.

Running Marketing Sprints

The idea is you create your strategy and you break it down into batches of tasks that need to be executed. Make sure that when you’re breaking your tasks down into one to two-week cycles (sprints), make sure that every task has a direct link to a top level KPI. Whatever you’re working on, you need to make sure that it’s either linked to a short-term or long-term KPI. And you also need to embrace the fact that not all your tasks that you complete at the end of your sprints will deliver something tangible. What I mean by this is that, if the task is supporting at a long-term strategy and the impact is not going to be immediate, the goal is to complete that task and then use analytics ongoing to review its performance.

It is worth highlighting that you might not get the result at the end of each sprint, unlike the IT folks where that end of each sprint, you have a specific deliverable that you can see and you can show. In marketing, some deliverables are not tangible. You need to embrace the fact that the goal is to complete those tasks and then review analytics and other ongoing insights to see the impact of those tasks that are completed. Another thing that you need to also focus on when you’re running marketing sprints, is that you need to allow the flexibility for each person on the team to allocate themselves what they’re going to complete. What this means is the SEO person will break down their workflow into tasks, and they will populate those backlogs and break it down into sprints.

You need to give people that ownership and flexibility to decide what tasks they can complete. And when people are deciding the number of tasks that they’re going to complete within each sprint, they need to have that flexibility to also leave capacity space. What I mean by this is they need to leave gaps. They should not be working at a 100% capacity all of the time. So most marketing teams that I’ve worked in will have like 75% capacity when you’re working, that 25% will leave space for you to kind of allow new tasks coming to the sprint or take even tax out. And that’s where Agile marketing is different to IT. In IT, you have that rigid approach that once you commit to a set of tasks for a sprint, you have to honor that to the end. In marketing it doesn’t (and will never) work that way. In marketing there has to be more flexibility. When you commit to a task to complete, you try as much as you can to complete that task. But if external factors, things that happen external to the sprint, dictate that you need to pivot within the sprint and change what you’re working on, and re-prioritize what you’re working on, maybe because of budget cuts or whatever, whatever situation it is, you need to embrace the fact that: okay, this task can be removed and then added back in a future sprint.

So the main backlog is where you need to continuously prioritize and there’s flexibility for each sprint. Then another thing you want to focus on is when you’re running a sprint, each member of your team should be able to work together. What this means is you should be able to help each other when you’re completing tasks. And for you to be able to help each other as marketing leaders, you need to encourage the members of your team to have T-shaped skills: they should not just be focused on their own silos and not be effective when it comes to managing another marketing channel.

The idea of T-shaped skill-set tries to make sure that your team have that flexibility to move people around, from one responsibility to the next. That’s the essence of Agile marketing: having T-shaped marketing skills, where the role of the marketing leader is to help ‘mix’ those skills within the team in the optimal way, depending on the goals that need to be achieved. As a marketing leader, you are a combination of the Scrum Master and the Product Owner: these roles are combined within the marketing leader role. This means you should be the one that is looking at the external dependencies and managing those dependencies: you don’t have to (and, indeed, shouldn’t) wait for dependencies or bottlenecks to happen. You need to be proactive in sorting them out and understand because marketing has a defined workflow. A content marketer, depending on the level of experience, knows the tasks that they need to do from start to finish. Depending on the level of experience, they are able to allocate what number of hours or days they need to complete those tasks. And they also have clear visibility of the dependencies related to those tasks. You don’t need a Kanban board to tell you about dependencies and bottlenecks, if you can define your workflow well.

So from a marketing perspective, if you’re looking to implement Agile marketing within your team, my recommendation is to start by first defining your workflows, identifying the tasks that sit within these workflows, and then breaking those tasks down into sprints. That’s what you populate into the sprints and then the backlog as well. The purpose of Agile marketing meetings is to help with the planning in terms of strategy planning, as well as execution.

So let’s start by talking about the daily meetings. I’m talking about the meetings in no particular order. With IT there’s a rigid approach that you start with backlog grooming meeting, however, marketing has more flexibility. Whatever works for your team is what you need to focus on. I’m going to start with the daily meeting, not because it’s the number one meeting you should start with, but just to help marketing teams realize that there is flexibility when you implement an Agile. Just chill and relax, and don’t be so rigid that ‘you have to do this, if you don’t do this, it’s a crime’. Agile marketing doesn’t work that way.

So with the daily meetings, the idea is to initiate a conversation with internal teams, as well as external stakeholders. If required, you’re encouraged to invite the agencies, consultants, even external stakeholders to your daily meeting, if the topic of the conversation or the discussion is important and requires their involvement.

The goal is to educate and inform people about the tasks that you’ve done and kind of highlight what KPIs those tasks are linked to. You then talk through which tasks you plan to work on currently, and then the goal is to identify potential issues or bottlenecks that might be stopping you from completing those tasks.

At the end of each sprint, the team should come together to a sort of ‘show and tell’, to tell people within the organization or within the team that, okay, these are the tasks that I work on, and this is the long-term and the short-term KPIs that those task are going to impact. That way everybody has an understanding and a clear visibility of what task you’re working on and how they might potentially impact their own work and the overall departmental or organisational goals.

This is a short article that kind of tells you the top level of how to implement Agile marketing. Click on this link to download a detailed Agile marketing template. This template contains Agile marketing backlog, Meeting templates and more.

Before we discuss the benefits of Agile marketing, it’s important to understand that Agile was introduced to IT because of the increasing cost of project delivery. What this means is IT organizations realized that they were wasting a lot of money and the output and outcome of the project they were delivering were in meeting customer expectations.

Benefits of Agile Marketing Explained

So when we’re analyzing the benefits of Agile marketing, it is important to highlight that, waste is one of the main problems of marketing. You have situations where marketers will spend a hundred percent of their budget, and when asked, what is the effectiveness of those budgets?

We can only ascertain that half of it was effective, and half of it was a waste. This is a strange thing to say, but the reality is customer behavior is very, very complicated, and there are certain things in marketing that analytics and all those measurements cannot really, really measure accurately. But Agile marketing offers some benefits to reduce waste from a time perspective.

What do I mean by this? Agile marketing helps marketing teams defined tasks and aligns them with expected goals. This reduces waste of time within campaign planning and execution. Agile marketing also helps improve the flow of task by removing blockers, frameworks like Kanban’s and Scrum, helps the team visualize their workflow, helps them identify blockers within campaign execution, and removing them.

Agile marketing also helps the marketing team to map out the execution steps and highlights independencies with internal and external stakeholders. All these combined help to reduce the waste of time. When you eliminate time waste within marketing campaign planning execution, you have speed, speed to market speed, speed to strategy, speed to reacting to insight from the customer, from competitors, and things like that. And that invariably also help reduce budget waste. Another benefit of Agile marketing is from a budget perspective. 

Transcript

This case study is about how Agile marketing was implemented in a digital marketing agency. I was part of this project and I’ll be sharing how and what we did to make the project successful. I was hired by the agency as a subcontractor and the agency in this context. I will refer as an agency, and when I say client, I mean the in-house team from the organization. Due to NDA, nondisclosure agreements, I cannot mention or highlight any names, and everything will be kept confidential, but I’ll do my best to share how Scrum with a flavour of Kanban was applied in this digital marketing agency. And at the end, if you have any question that needs clarifying, drop me an email or contact me directly for further clarification.

Agile Marketing Case Study: Implementing Scrum and Kanban

So, on the agency side, we had a Scrum Master. The Scrum Master worked on the team. And then we had a client director. This client director was responsible for managing the in-house team on the client’s perspective, as well as managing the delivery team, the people working in collaboration with the Scrum Master. So, this client director also from the agency perspective, was reporting straight into the CEO of the agency, so he was more like the main person managing dependencies and issues, but wasn’t heavily involved, but had visibility of the project. So, the Scrum Master reported into the client director on the agency perspective.

And above that, we had the marketing director. The marketing director was based in the UK and he reported into the VP marketing based in America. So, this is the client-side of Agile marketing. And then we had external stakeholders as well, which were on the same level of the VP of marketing. This were the sales director and the head of IT. In the beginning, I highlighted that this was about a website redesign project, and we had a specific deliverable. And we created a cross-functional team. This team understood what we wanted to deliver.

So this team comprises of the UX, this UX person was responsible for looking at the existing websites and creating and doing research and doing everything that has to do with usability testing, user research, customer personas, and stuff like that. And the UX person worked closely with the SEO and PPC person who was in charge of reviewing audits on the website to make sure that we didn’t break any rules or create any problems for the redesign project. And also we had the front-end developer, back-end developer, a web analytics person. And then we had a project manager. The project manager was on-site three days a week because all those teams were co-located. And the project manager reported directly into the marketing director and the VP marketing from the client perspective,
from the client’s side, sorry.

We also had the CRO person that was looking at the customer journey, looking at the conversion path and making recommendations and gathering insight as well. We had a graphic designer, and then we had the IT team. The IT team was reachable through the marketing director on the client-side. That was the part where the head of IT came into play because we needed to make sure that the functional requirements for the redesign were accurate and everything on the backend side of things was working.

The IT team worked closely with the backend to make sure that all those functionalities were aligned and accurate. And then we had legal because this was a regulated, this organization worked in a regulated industry, so there was compliance, and everything that we were doing needed to go through legal for approval, and then we had a tester. So, after everything was created on a stage by stage basis, the landing page, the home page, the tester kind of run tests to make sure that everything was working very very well. So, this is what the structure looks like. What I like to highlight is that, when we worked in an Agile way, we were co-located.

Everyone on the team was in the same office. And we had, the seating arrangement was, the SEO person sat beside the UX, the web analytics, and then the project manager sat on the other side. It was a table that had four on each side, there was no division between both of them, so, it was a truly cross-functional team. So, the graphic designer was also on the table, the content person was there, and then we had another table behind where the other members of staff were. And then close to the table, we had a board, a physical board. So that board, I’ll talk more about the board later on, but that board was what we used as a Kanban board.

And we also had a virtual board as well, because the VP marketing was based in the States, the sales director. So they needed to have visibility. So we replicated the physical Kanban board into a virtual Kanban board to communicate and to give visibility to the people in America. For this project, the North Star was the statement of work. The statement of work was agreed with the agency and was created in a collaborative way. So we had, it was a living document. The deliverables were clear, but the requirements within the documents were continuously updated.

And the VP marketing who was the sponsor on the client-side, owned the statement of work. And the statement of work also contained financials and expenses, everything that was, that needed to be known. So, it wasn’t like there was information that the VP marketing knew, that people on the team didn’t know. So that was one of the good things that I saw in this project. Like everybody had visibility of the final goal. What was the expectation, even the finances. And even the rates that, the payments that were made to the contractors and everything had visibility, nothing was hidden.

The marketing director, who was also the product-owner reported into VP marketing. He kind of ran the execution side of things, he was responsible for making sure that everything was going, there was progress, while the VP marketing kind of took a backseat and just kind of allowed and empowered the marketing director to take reign of the project. The Scrum Master was onsite with a team and all the Scrum, he was responsible for managing the Scrum team, doing all the meetings and everything like that. So, the statement of work was what created the backlog.

So basically, all the items that were relevant to SEO, PPC, social media, content, was now broken down and each person and I like to highlight that each person, each subject matter expert on the team created a backlog. Because we had visibility of the goal, the expectation from the VP marketing. So, because everyone was up to an expert level, so we created and broke down the task into this backlog. And we kind of, although we created everything because it was a long defined four months project, we created each sprint backlog from the product backlog.

So basically, for the UX person, he broke down, he knew clearly what needs to be done for the whole project, so, he broke it down into bits. So we had a total of 16 sprints, if I remember correctly, yeah, about 16 sprints. So it was two-week cycles, and at the start of each iteration, we created a list of items that we needed to get finished at the end of each two weeks and presented to, we had a meeting. So, the meeting was the daily meeting, the planning meeting, and then the show and tell.

The daily meeting involved, was, include the marketing director, the Scrum Master, and the Scrum team. It was onsite, but the marketing director wasn’t always present physically, so, he dialed in through a phone and we just basically went through progress reports and things that were happening towards the end dates, which was 16 weeks. So, there was clear visibility of how the work was progressing because we had a defined end goal. And then the planning meeting was at the beginning of every two weeks, so, at the end of the first sprint, we make sure that we did a show and tell onsite where the people in America dialed in, they were updated on what work was completed for the week, the marketing director, because he was based in the UK, came onsite to the agency and everybody just sat around the table, prepared each person, the SEO, the PPC, each person on the team prepared a very short presentation, not more than 10 minutes at most if you can do it under five minutes, perfect. Two, three slides, top-level, stood in front of the room and just did a show and tell. It wasn’t like to create any anxiety or anything, but just so that the stakeholders were aware of what you did that week and the potential issues that you’re having.

Which we also flag during the daily meeting with the marketing director. So, the show and tell was a way to kind of create documents as well. So, there were deliverables. So, the UX person with creators were doing show and tell, and will present the mockups of the home page and that was the final deliverable that would then be passed on to the marketing director and the VP. So the show and tell wasn’t just about showing things, it was about actually delivering the act, tangible stuff at the end of each iteration, leading up to the final design that we delivered at the end of the 16 weeks.

So, as I said, these meetings were attended by the sales director as well, and the head of IT to make sure that everything was aligned. And one thing I like to highlight about this is, we use a blend of Kanban and Scrum to implement this project. At the beginning of the project, the sales director, the head of IT, VP marketing, and the marketing director had two-day training. This two-day training wasn’t about Scrum or Kanban, it was just about everything, a blend of both of them, for them to understand the process in which the team will work and then to teach them how to manage expectation, to teach them how to delegate, and to help them understand that working in an Agile way meant they had to be very very fast in responding when a request is sent to them.

Because this project was 16 sprints and it had a defined timeline. So, this was just a top-level example of how Agile marketing is applied in the agency, this does not apply to all agencies, because this was a specific project, I will share a different case study about how Agile marketing was implemented across an agency that had close to 40 clients, and I helped them kind of move away from using Scrum because they found out that Scrum was too rigid for them and move them more towards a Kanban-style of Agile marketing. But that’s more advanced.

This is just a top-level overview of how Agile markets was implemented in an agency. And the key points I want you to understand is, the Scrum Master wasn’t fixed, it’s rotated across the team, and the marketing director was the product owner, and that was on the client-side, and in between that, we had a client director that was managing the internal activities and he was responsible for removing blockers. For example, there was a time where we had issues crawling the existing website, and we had to get through to the head of IT. Your normal Scrum would dictate that you should go through the Scrum Master or through the line of authority to get to the sales director.

But we worked in a very different way, the subject matter expert on the team contacted the sales director directly, and got, the line of communication was very very open. And the visibility was just amazing. And the project was a success. So, I’ve seen Agile marketing work in an agency perspective, but one thing that I would like to highlight is, every member of the Scrum team was an expert. So, most of us were contractors. So, if you’re working, if you’re trying to apply this within a team of an existing agency employee, you might want to look at the experience level of those people on the team. If their experience level is not accurate, or it’s not up to scratch, then you might struggle on that part.

And that’s why Agile was very very successful in IT because all the Scrum teams in the context of IT were very skilled people, so, they didn’t really need, from a skills perspective, they didn’t have any dependency on external stakeholders. In the context of marketing, that’s where it becomes tricky. You need to know if you have a resource that is shared across multiple teams, and how would that impact on you deliver at pace? How would that impact on the velocity and the throughput of your task execution. And one thing I also like to highlight is, we didn’t use user stories, we used the word, task, instead.

So, the product backlog had the task, big-level epic tasks, so, tasks that would say, for example, create a mockup of the homepage that will be like a deliverable at the end of the sprint. But leading to that, there’ll be subtasks, smaller tasks that you need to use to create that final goal. So, what we did was we made sure that each task was not more than two days, and you, we kind of didn’t work at 100% capacity, there was flexibility, so the idea was you started on a Monday, but the work doesn’t really gather pace until the Tuesday, and by the end of the two weeks, towards the Friday, you should have at least a day flexibility, so, it’s not like you have to just ramp up all the tasks into the two weeks and you’re not able to finish it.

So, capacity management is also very very important to give way for things that will fly into the team, unexpected tasks coming into the team. So, that’s one thing that we learned as well. We didn’t work at 100% capacity to give room for people to take on important tasks. So, if something comes in from the VP of marketing that was urgent or needed to be added into the backlog or during the sprint, we had the flexibility of taking stuff away from the sprints back into the backlog and then into the sprint. So, we were always reprioritizing and that’s where the daily meeting was very very important. So, things that were top priority, the marketing director with information on the client-side would tell us that, okay, they’ve deprioritized that, this is now the parity.

So, there was that flexibility. We were not very very rigid. Although we worked in sprint, there was no hard and fast rule that if a task didn’t finish in this sprint, you couldn’t move it into the second sprint. So that’s where the difference between Agile in marketing and IT is different. And everyone on the team, as I said, was very very knowledgeable and experienced about Agile marketing. So, that helped. So that’s why we moved the Scrum Master role across the team. One week someone will be the Scrum Master, the other, the other person will be. So, it was basic admin maintenance. And at a time we use a software called Rally, I think it was acquired by LeanKit, and then acquired, I don’t know the story, but we used that Rally software, which is similar to Trello, and we also use JIRA, it’s an Atlassian tool, confluence to manage file sharing and stuff like that.

So, if you’re, we use Slack as well to communicate with the team, everyone can communicate at easily through that. So, that’s another thing that I like to highlight. With you looking to implement Agile marketing, you need a different type of communication method, different from email, that will allow easy access and file sharing and also security as well. Because it wasn’t heavily regulated industry. So we were very very careful with what we shared. So we didn’t really use Google Suite and stuff like that to share documents. This is a top-level overview of a case study of Agile marketing. Have you read my book Lean Agile Marketing?

If you have any questions or need clarification on how to apply Agile marketing in a digital marketing agency, contact me or connect with my via LinkedIn.

Thank you very much and stay agile.

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

Most CMOs and their senior management teams should be worried about startups and change in customer purchase behaviour!  Although household brands, such as Apple, Google and Spotify or the aspirational Tesla, have the financial muscle and brand equity required to compete in the modern fast-paced and ever changing world, the smart ones are petrified of startups taking over their market share and are thinking hard about how to still be relevant tomorrow.

This book presents a new approach to marketing that focuses on how marketing teams can adopt and adapt an agile mindset in order to improve the overall customer experience and, ultimately, increase business revenue. I define Agile marketing as a shift in the mindset of marketing teams which emphasises on strategy, people and process. The importance of combining customer experience (qualitative) and Analytics (quantitative) insights as a  feedback loop to inform strategic planning and execution. This approach helps marketing teams align their campaign planning and execution to the agile methodology that has been so successful in IT software development teams. Inspired by lessons from the application of frameworks like Scrum and Kanban, it helps teams improve collaboration, communication and transparency across the entire marketing function. Rather than wasting time on office politics and bureaucratic red tape that hinders innovation, marketing teams can exert a focused effort to increase task completion while reducing both financial and time wastage normally associated with marketing campaigns.

The book explains how companies can gather the all-important ‘why’ insights that are not always available in web analytics tools, because these tools cannot register or explain customer emotions. The failure of an entire nation to predict the outcome of the 2016 US elections is a perfect example of the failure of big data analytics in measuring outcomes that have a strong emotional undertone. From elaborating on the effort needed to improve team emotional intelligence, through alternatives for gathering relevant insights to using these insights to add value to your company’s customers, the book explores all of these issues through the lens of case studies which uncover practical step-by-step of how to adopt agile in marketing teams. With case studies from multinational companies with collocated teams and teams spread across different regions, you will learn how to start your Agile marketing tranformation journey in a seamless way that reduces stress normally associated with change initiatives. I made sure the book is not prescriptive but offer marketing teams a number of options to take. The book is suitable for a range of audiences, including Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), Marketing Directors and Executive, Agile coaches and IT Scrum Masters who want to branch out into marketing.

About the author of Lean Agile Marketing

Femi Olajiga is an ICF certified coach, Co-Active and systemic team coach. He is also a subject matter expert in marketing with an Msc in marketing from Heriot-Watt University. He is a T-shaped digital marketing strategy consultant with hands-on experience in SEO, conversion rate optimisation and Web analytics.

The marketing function is often considered a cost-centre, rather than value-adding function due to a general lack of understanding of how marketing contributes to business results by executives outside of the marketing function. This is further complicated by a lack of transparency in how marketing activities actually contribute to revenue growth. 

The wrong decision about which digital marketing agency you should hire can result in the loss of revenue, shrinking of your customer base and tangible damage to your brand reputation. As an in-house CMO, Performance Marketing Director, Head of Search, Marketing Manager, small business owner or entrepreneur, there comes a time when you have to look to engage with a digital marketing agency or review existing agencies on your books. If you often ask yourself the question: ‘What do I do now?’ with regards to your digital marketing activities, read on for some myth-busting clarifications you can start implementing immediately to make a difference to your bottom line.

Broadly speaking, the agency hiring process will flow along the following stages:

1. Research & review: Create a shortlist of agencies and freelance digital marketing consultants who might be able to offer the services you need.
2. Initial introductory phone interview: Reach out via phone or email to introduce your company to the agency and request a virtual demo to help you understand their service offerings. You can also invite them to your office for a presentation tailored to your requirements.
3. Presentation: Request that the presentation be delivered by the agency staff that will be working on your campaigns as opposed to a sales presentation. 
4. Decision: Review the profile of the agency staff with your in-house HR team to confirm the skill levels across the agency. Making the wrong decision about which agency to hire will have a direct negative impact on your bottom line.

Questions to consider:

What services do we need from a digital marketing agency?  

Start by evaluating the cost of hiring a full-time employee with agency experience to build your own internal capability. If you are lucky, you will find candidates with agency backgrounds that are highly skilled and motivated with a salary that will cost you a fraction of what you would pay for hiring an agency. The recruitment and development process of agency staff is more sophisticated and cost effective than in-house teams while some will argue that the motivation level is equally higher. If truth be told, agencies hire inexperienced, young and experience-hungry interns and onboard them via intensive training and mentorship programs to develop the skills required to execute a wide range of client campaign tasks. The absence of in-house subject matter experts in SEO, CRO, web analytics is one of the reasons companies hire digital marketing agencies.

The perception that agency staff have more experience than in-house team is a misconception. The question then arises whether or not you should outsource all the services needed to a digital agency as opposed to building an internal team of your own and keeping everything in-house. Before you hire an agency you might want to explore hiring a freelance digital marketing consultant on a one-off or a rolling contract to support your in-house team. Before deciding to hire an agency its important to clarify the gap in your team that an agency can fulfill.

Waste of marketing budget happens when the agency service is duplicating existing skills within your team as opposed to filling in a gap. There is also the option of a hybrid model that integrates in-house teams and agency staff or freelance digital marketing consultant working as a cross-functional Agile marketing team. 

What services can the digital marketing agency provide?  

You have two options, “Full Service” or “Single Service” digital marketing agency. Agencies provide broad industry experience, innovation, flexibility, highly motivated T-shaped skills due to planned staff development and systematic peer review of campaign performance. The other side of the coin is the fact that agency staff are always multitasking across multiple client work which makes prioritization difficult. This, in turn, reduces the quality of output and outcome. An in-house marketing person focuses on a single client and develops industry-specific expertise to become effective which is not always on offer with agency staff. Furthermore, the siloed structure of internal agency teams can often reduce cross-functional collaboration and further complicate situations that require this kind of collaboration.

Some agency services are too focused on a single stage of the customer journey, like acquisition, and these agencies provide channel-specific services around SEO, PPC, CRO, Web Analytics and Social Media marketing. Some agencies provide PPC or SEO services alone, so if you hire these agencies you will need to hire yet another agency to complement their services if and when the need arises.

Under a single roof, full-service agencies provide consultancy services across a combination of multiple marketing channels like SEO, PPC, UX, CRO, Analytics, Neuromarketing, Content, Web Design, Online reputation management and PR. You need to identify which agency or mix of agencies will help you increase your business revenue, depending on your specific needs.

Are there any alternative providers? Should we consider hiring a digital marketing consultant instead?

You have the option of hiring a freelance digital marketing consultant instead of an agency, as this would be a more cost-effective option. Freelance consultants often have more practical, hands-on experience than the interns agencies widely use to execute client tasks. For example, big agencies can charge in excess of £1000 per day for their SEO services, while a freelance consultant’s fee is much less than this.

Agencies also often subcontract actual campaign work to freelance digital marketing consultants, if and when they dont have the resources required to fully meet all clients expectations, so it’s more than likely a freelancer will be working on your campaign even if you do, in the end, decide to hire an agency.

Who will I communicate with within the agency? 

To understand who you communicate with it is important to understand how agencies are structured. From an agency perspective, the client director manages communications with clients while the SEO/PPC executive is responsible for actual work being carried out. Sometimes a client director manages around 10 to 20 clients while an SEO/PPC executive works on a minimum of 4 clients.  Communications sometimes goes through the SEO executive who reports into a manager who reports into an SEO director before the information gets channelled through the client director to the client. From a cost perspective, would you rather work with an agency with multiple communication loops or hire a single freelance digital marketing consultant? 

What should I monitor?  

The location of an agency or freelance digital marketing consultant should not impact on how you manage and monitor expected deliverables. Some agencies provide the option of agency staff or the freelancer hot-desking on-site with the client a few days per month, while some invite clients for regular visits to their office locations. Depending on your budget, you also have the option of requesting to have someone from the agency onsite with your in-house teams for the duration of the campaign.

Request clarification on the collaboration software tools the agency use for existing clients and confirm how this fits with your in-house team’s process and structure. You can explore the option of hiring a freelance digital marketing consultant, which could be a good alternative if you cannot find an agency that will fulfill your requirement for on-site staff to work with your in-house teams.

These freelance digital marketing consultants can provide important cover to fill vacancies when senior members of your in-house team leave. The next step is to clarify whether or not the agency fully understands your business: you would be surprised about the template approach some agencies adopt with their clients.

Clarify how the agency plans to measure performance from a revenue and brand equity perspective: do they have web analytics capabilities which combine both qualitative and qualitative insights? How you monitor the performance of your agency will depend on your in-house team and the mix of subject matter experts available to you. Some agencies prioritise the work of the client that shouts the loudest, which results in reduced time allocations towards less vocal or less demanding clients. 

How long should a contract be? 

Start the conversation by clarifying how long the agency needs before their services start impacting your bottom line. Some organisations make the mistake of signing up to fixed-term agency contracts lasting multiple years, while others engage in 12 months rolling contract with a 3-month termination clause. Freelance digital marketing consultants often offer greater flexibility by working on 1-, 2-, or 3-month rolling contracts, with much shorter termination periods (usually 1 or 2 weeks). The option you choose should depend on your internal team structure and the percentage of employee turnover, as well as how much flexibility you need. 

How will I know they are doing what they are supposed to? 

If you fail to establish clearly defined deliverables and KPIs, there is always the risk that your digital marketing agency will focus on less value-adding activities that make them look dedicated, busy and successful. Metrics that align with increasing revenue are the only way to know your agency are doing what they are supposed to be doing. Ensure your agency provides you with a detailed clarification on how they intend to report on tasks executed and the impact of these on your revenue growth.

How do I protect my investment (time and money)?

In order to protect the time and money you have invested, clarify or re-negotiate the terms with the agency every time there is a change in the team, for example if an A-players working on your account leave the agency, or new members join the team. Understanding how some agencies waste money and time is the first step towards protecting your marketing function from being portrayed as a cost centre by your CFO or accounts department. Agencies sometimes hire fresh graduates and train them up before assigning them to client accounts which is cost-effective from the agency perspective, but might not necessarily in the best interest of the client. Ensuring that the person working on your website or campaign has the relevant experience level.

What industry-relevant certifications and accreditations do people on their team have?

Don’t be afraid to ask how the agency’s internal teams collaborate. Do they have specialists in each marketing channel, or are their skill-sets broader? Fluffy awards like “Best Agency of the Year” sound good, but this does not confirm capabilities and skills required for a specific campaign from the client perspective. Industry recognised training certifications in SEO, PPC and other channels are one way of measuring the level of experience of individuals on the agency team.

Evaluate the experience levels of the agency team responsible for the actual work on your website or marketing campaign. Some agencies allocate majority of the tasks to interns or executives with less than 6-12 months experience, while others offer a stronger supervision and direction to their junior staff. Considering the size of the investment involved with hiring an agency, so it’s always good to be aware of exactly who is working on your account and what experience they have. 

What kind of campaigns has the agency done already focused on B2B, Ecommerce or publication websites? 

The bulk of digital marketing agencies are focussed on top-of-the-funnel activities, as opposed to optimising the entire customer journey. This is evident because of the limited availability of agencies that focus on website conversion optimisation as part of their offering. Some agencies are B2C focused which limits their experience of B2B marketing which has a long purchase decision process and requires alignment with sales teams.

What mix of clients does the agency currently have on their books? 

Not all experiences are applicable to every client. For instance, an SEO agency with a reputable clientele in Ecommerce will not necessarily have the experience needed for a B2B complex sales client. It is also possible for an agency to already be working for your direct and indirect competitors. If this is not the case already, then what is the guarantee that they won’t work with you, gather valuable insights into your business and then use these insights to compete with you in future. The scenario also applies to people working for you in-house which is totally out of your control. 

What budget range do they currently manage? 

Big agencies will only work with multinational clients with huge budgets, while small- to medium-sized agencies work with mid-tier clients and SMEs. The budget size does not necessarily reflect the quality of services or value delivered by the agency and bigger agencies will normally require larger budgets, so even for multinational companies they might not be the most cost-effective option, both in terms of their cost structure and in terms of the level of bureaucracy in the decision-making process, which can delay the implementation of campaigns. Small agencies or freelance digital marketing consultants can provide speed, flexibility and agility required to get fast results from your digital marketing activities. 

What is the composition of their Martech stack? 

Some agencies whitelabel existing generic digital marketing tools with their own branding and charge clients extortionate prices for using these in their campaigns. Beta access to new features and functionalities is another scheme agencies often use to discourage clients for subscribing to these tools directly. The cost-effective solution to clients is to understand the right mix of marketing technology tools they need with a clear appreciation that a ‘a fool with a tool is still a fool’.

You cannot replace people with tools, so you will still need expert marketing technologists on your team to help you harness the full potential of all the tools you choose to have in your martech stack. It is, therefore, useful to understand the skill set of the team, in addition to the martech stack they are proposing to use. 

Does the agency’s fee structure link to results? 

The short answer is – shockingly – not usually! Agencies can charge fees of up to 15-20% of a client’s overall ad spend for Google ads, regardless of results and this is not always in the best interest of the clients. In other words, whether or not you see any return from your digital advertising spend, the agency will still collect their fee at the end of each month. To protect your investment, you must negotiate with your agency a requirement (contractual or otherwise) to provide a clear link between the ad spend and your revenue growth in order to ensure fiscal responsibility, accountability and avoid wastage. 

Wrong questions to ask a digital marketing agency:

1. Do you have an official partnership with top search engines?
2. Do you work with freelance contractors?
3. Have you won any awards?
4. Have you got any case studies we can review?
5. Can we have a long-term contract? Make sure your contractual break clause is a maximum of 30-90 days. 

Pros and cons of hiring a digital marketing agency or a freelance digital marketing consultant:

• Hiring a marketing agency can help save costs – but not necessarily…

Agency pricing model is structured on an hourly, daily, monthly, project or retainer basis. It is sometimes cost-effective to hire and pay agencies on a project-by-project basis to support in-house team’s workload or to bring in specialist skills that you do not otherwise need in your marketing activities. The skill requirements for agency and in-house teams are exactly the same, despite the long-held misconception that agency staff have broader experience across industries. The downside is that agency staff are often over-worked, with frequent switching between different clients’ campaigns, which can reduce the quality of work delivered to clients. 

• Outside help means an outside perspective 

Agencies and freelance digital marketing consultants with T-shaped skills across multiple marketing channels can help your business grow because they can provide an outside-in perspective. Your in-house teams have the tendency of developing blind spots from a strategy planning and execution perspective and a fresh look on the existing situation – however short- or long-term it might be – will always add value. 

• Marketing agencies know the latest technology: 

Marketing technology tools are easily available to both agencies and in-house teams.

• Agency provides you a dedicated team, but… 

Agencies create dedicated teams to work across multiple clients, which means it’s not cost-effective for agency staff to work on a single dedicated client. This means less time spent on your campaigns than you might expect or feel appropriate.

• Skill Diversification

Agencies are often considered experts across the board, eliminating your need for internal training and upskilling. However, although full-service agencies foster diversified skill sets across marketing channels, internal agency teams are often siloed with limited interactions. Eliminates the need for training.

• You can keep up with the latest marketing trends 

Latest marketing trends are often published on industry websites and are accessible to both agency staff and your in-house teams. You don’t need to have a formalised relationship with an agency in order to keep on top of what is going on in the industry. 

So what should you do? 

Hiring a digital marketing agency doesn’t have to be expensive or lead to wasted marketing budget if the selection and review process are detailed and well-structured. Hiring a T-shaped freelance digital marketing consultant with skills and experience across digital marketing channels is often a more cost-effective and flexible option. By doing so you avoid indirectly paying for agency overheads because freelance consultants can work on-site with your in-house team.

If you do decide to work with an agency, I recommend also working with a digital marketing consultant as a neutral third party on an ad hoc basis to get their expert advice during the agency selection process. This will give you access to an unbiased opinion of how suitable the agency you are considering to hire is likely to fit with your organisational structure, culture and direction. 

You always also have the option of developing your in-house skills and capabilities to eliminate reliance on an agency, which is a sensible long-term strategy. This, however, requires more time and some strategic marketing expertise in order to identify the skill sets you should recruit for. This is again something an  Agile Marketing Coach can advise on for a fraction of the standard agency fee. Another option is adopting a hybrid model where agency staff are merely an extension of your in-house team in a complementary capacity, supplementing the skills of your staff with specialisms needed for a specific campaign.

Whatever your digital marketing needs, there is more than one choice out there and there are people who can help you decide which direction is most suited for your business needs.

To learn more about Agile marketing, contact me., If you need assistance developing a hybrid model, or ad hoc consultancy to support your specialist digital marketing agency selection efforts, kindly contact me via email on femi@cxconversion.com or phone on  +447568091722.

This guide aims to assist you in your Agile implementation across marketing teams. Its content is not a sales pitch, lead generation magnet or a prescriptive framework. Instead, it will stimulate your thought process on how to apply Agile marketing. This, in turn, will help boost the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, people and processes.

You would be hard pressed today to find an Agile framework that is perfect for marketing teams. Finding trained team coaches with practical experience of marketing is also challenging. This guide aims to educate, inform and encourage senior marketing leaders. To help with the process, we will briefly examine the history of Agile, explore its benefits and ways of applying it in the context of marketing.

What does Agile Marketing Mean for CMOs and Marketing Leaders?

There are many different definitions of Agile Marketing. If you ask 4 marketers to define Agile, you will probably get 7 different definitions. So what is Agile Marketing? We define Agile marketing as an iterative approach to marketing strategy, people and processes. This includes a shift in mindset towards embracing a culture of continuous improvement.  Agile marketing should be the default way of working for any and all organisations that want to survive long-term. Of course, not every CMO or marketing leader will necessarily understand how to be Agile. This is why it is important to accept that the current approach to marketing needs to change. This increases the odds of transforming your entire marketing team to ‘being Agile’ as opposed to ‘doing Agile’.

Many so called ‘thought leaders’ place too great an emphasis on frameworks like Scrum, and Kanban when talking about Agile. However, Agile marketing is not defined by these frameworks and focusing on these usually does more harm than good. For Femi Olajiga, the right definition of Agile marketing is framework agnostic. Instead it focuses on the strategic speed, flexibility, and adaptability of the marketing function within an organisation.

History of Agile

The term Agile became popular after the creation of the 2001 Agile Manifesto (click here to read more). As a CMO, it is important to understand that the original Manifesto was not created for Marketing teams, but it aimed to improve the process of software development. Although, these two contexts are very different, some of the key principles apply to marketing teams just as much as IT teams. In my definition of Agile marketing, offered earlier on in this guide, I highlighted Strategy, Processes and People as its key ingredients. Agile frameworks like Scrum and Kanban are the processes that help with strategy implementation.

Benefits of Agile Marketing

As CMOs, it is important to get the best out of your direct reports and their teams. How you achieve this will depend on the culture, structure and skill distribution within your teams. Agile marketing, when implemented in the right way, provides the following benefits:

1. Team Effectiveness: Agile frameworks provide structured rituals that trigger high performance in teams. Lean framework advocates for continuous improvement mindset through PDCA (Plan, DO, Check, Act). Having worked in a number of Agile teams, I realise how its application promotes teamwork. Improved communication through transparency and visibility is a core theme within Agile. Agile encourages prioritising individuals and interactions over process and tools. What this means is that team members are encouraged to be present and more human at work. Agile teams should also have built-in flexibility to respond to change, rather than following rigid plans.  
2. Subtle Control: The default command and control leadership style is frustrating to employees. People on your team want to feel empowered, whilst leaders don’t wish to relinquish control. So where can we find some middle ground? Processes within Agile frameworks like Scrum and Kanban enable subtle control. The transparency, visibility and goal clarity afforded by Agile provides a smarter type of control. CMOs and Marketing directors are, therefore, able to control and manage their teams without the usual ‘carrot and stick’ style.
3. Focus on Outcome: Marketing teams focus on output by default due to their inherent silos. Agile frameworks like Scrum, if implemented in the right way, invite people to focus on outcomes. It’s a much more fruitful way to help teams improve the value generated from tasks. CMOs are then able to communicate via subtle control their expectations from their team(s). In my experience, individuals and teams that employ Agile have a much clearer focus based on Objectives and Key Results (OKR).
4. Stakeholder Engagement: Depending on the blend of Agile frameworks adopted for your marketing, as a CMO you can improve collaboration with both internal and external stakeholders, which can help your organisation improve its customer experience strategy. Forward thinking organisations like ING bank have championed Agile across their IT and HR functions. If you look into your IT function, there is a chance they have implemented Agile. What better way to sync and align marketing with IT and other functions than to adopt an Agile way of working and align it with the rest of your business.

Common mistakes in Agile marketing implementation

Before addressing how to apply Agile in the context of marketing, let’s first examine some of the common mistakes CMOs make. Avoiding these common mistakes will help your chances of successfully implementing Agile marketing.

There is always an ongoing debate about which Agile framework is ideal for marketing teams. Asking this (wrong) question is one of the major mistakes CMOs make when adopting Agile. Instead, what you should be asking is ‘What set of practices across Agile frameworks will improve your teams effectiveness?’.  

The first mistake most CMO and marketing leaders make is that they adopt Scrum by the book. What this means is that they fail to understand that Scrum was primarily developed for software and not marketing teams. So why Scum for marketing teams, you might ask. Scrum started outside IT before its reinvention into a framework for software teams. To read more about the true and less well-known creators of Scrum, I recommend reading the original article – ‘The New Product Development Game’ by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, published in the Harvard Business Review in January 1986.

Agile frameworks like Scrum offer a template approach to teamwork in software development. It assumes a team size of 5-9 individuals. You can read more about the Scrum framework by downloading the Scrum Guide online. Having worked as part of Scrum teams in the past and having coached website redesign projects using Scrum, I’ve come to recognise that marketers must learn to avoid following the prescriptive and dogmatic recommendations of Scrum. Instead, you must apply some of the Scrum rituals to the context of your marketing team. How you do that will depend on the leadership style of the CMO, as well as your specific team structure and culture. Agile is not a goal for marketing, but a process that will help with the implementation of your strategy and the achievement of your strategic and tactical goals. More than once I have seen absolute chaos after the application of Agile across multiple marketing teams because:

1. The senior leadership team were micro-managers and lacked true leadership skills.
2. Senior marketing managers have failed to make the top-level marketing budget flexible. Attempting to adopt Agile marketing without a defined digital strategy is common, but dangerous. If you don’t have a defined strategic plan, how will you know what success looks like? More importantly, how will you know which tactics to employ to achieve your strategic goals? So do yourself a favour and take the time it takes to craft a well-defined Agile marketing strategy to improve your overall customer experience. Then, revisit the strategy at regular intervals to iterate it for your changing environment, increasing the speed and flexibility of implementing tactics as opposed to having a rigid strategic plan. Marketing is far more effective at a strategic level as opposed to the ‘spray and pray’ ineffectiveness of purely tactical focus.
3. Culture: Leaders often claim to hire for cultural fit, when in fact they are just hiring people like themselves. Take a good look at your organisation: do you have homogenous teams across your entire marketing function? Research shows that hiring people that think the same way we do reduces innovation and team productivity. Hiring is not a problem unique to Agile marketing, but it is one of the mistakes CMOs make often in their Agile marketing adoption process. Scrum team structure is often sold as a prerequisite for high performance teams. Although there is some element of truth to this assumption in the context of project teams as opposed to stable teams, CMOs must understand that Scrum gained its popularity due to the smart marketing done by the creators of Scrum, whose 2-day certification training has largely become a money spinning scheme. As a certified Scrum Master (Scrum Alliance), I do not recommend sending your marketing on a pure Scrum Master training.

How to Implement Agile Marketing

Agile is here to stay – even the big consultancy firms are beginning to offer Agile transformation services in large numbers. At what cost and risk to clients, you might ask? CMOs and marketing leaders must understand that one single approach to Agile marketing implementation does not exist. Large-scale Agile frameworks aimed at increasing the adoption of Agile across the IT enterprise are often sold to marketing teams, but can be very ineffective if not appropriately contextualised for marketing.

Imagine a CMO forcing teams to adopt a way of working created by software developers for IT teams. How Agile is that approach? Yet this is happening across large marketing teams because of the lack of qualified Agile Marketing Coaches. I interviewed a number of CMOs that have applied Agile in their marketing teams and this, combined with my experience, highlighted the following points that should be taken into consideration when looking to take the leap into Agile marketing:

1. Start with self-study: read Agile marketing books and other available materials. This approach is counterintuitive because it requires your own due diligence, however this can be very beneficial in the long run. Avoid the urge to pay for a 2-day training course even if you can afford to send your entire team on such courses. The rationale behind this recommendation is due to the fact that no individual or team can learn Agile in a 2-day class. Working in an Agile way requires a behavioural change within the team that takes months of work. The need for a specialised Agile marketing trainer is less important than hiring a qualified coach to help you and your team unpick how Agile can work in the specific context of your team. Whatever you choose to do, make sure you approach Agile from a framework agnotic mindset because one size does not fit all when it comes to Agile marketing.
2. Is your marketing strategy iterative? With the decline in the ability to differentiate between products and services, customer experience as emerged as the bedrock of any effective marketing strategy. The success of your Agile marketing initiative will depend on how you adapt its rituals as a strategy execution machine. I explained the interpretation of the Agile Manifesto in the context of marketing in my book, Lean Agile Marketing. This applies to the process of executing marketing strategy.
3. The phrase ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ is not new. I have experienced Agile fail more than once in toxic work environments. Whichever framework or methodology you adopt, it will not reap the expected benefits if the team or company culture is toxic. CMOs must first figure out how to improve the culture within marketing teams in order for Agile to work.

Key Metrics For Success

Time to market: Metrics can be deceiving so it is critical you are confident about what you measure. Having experienced Agile across different teams within a large departments, it’s hard to define success in a generic way. The success criteria for Scrum teams in software development are focused on outputs as opposed to outcomes. As long as the team delivers working software on time and within budget, then it is considered successful. The fact that customers hardly use some of the functionality offered is often ignored. This is not something that would work in marketing.

From the perspective of marketing, success metrics are best measured in the context of waste (otherwise known in marketing as opportunity cost). Increased speed of campaign planning and execution is a good measure of success… but you still need to know its cost. How does speed influence an increase (or decrease) in the cost of executing marketing campaigns? Improved visibility of work and more effective collaboration are some of the key benefits of Agile marketing, but you should always try and calculate the money spent and saved via these initiatives.

Employee Turnover: Employee engagement is an important metric in Agile marketing, which is, unfortunately, also the polar opposite of increased turnover. It is common knowledge that employees tend to leave companies because of bad managers. There is a misguided default assumption that the Agile way of working automatically improves team morale, however this takes concerted and sustained effort on behalf of both the leaders and their teams. One success metric of Agile marketing can be measuring turnover. You can look at team, departmental and company-wide turnover, depending on the level of Agile transformation you are embarking on. The introduction of Agile often results in some turnover, which should be expected. It only becomes an issue if employee attrition rates continues to increase after a reasonable amount of time, so keep a close eye on this.

I have seen instances where a command and control leadership style resulted in huge turnover in Agile marketing teams. Although the team was able to deliver its expected output, this was done at much higher cost and a considerable amount of delays. The HR team chose to ignore ample feedback from team members about the toxic nature of the team lead and this resulted in some team members resigning due to stress-related issues. This negative take on Agile is often not published online, but it exists in reality and few professionals really talk about it.

Decision Making: The main bottleneck to campaign execution is a slow decision making process. Agile makes it easy for CMOs to empower their teams. The key performance indicator to measure your Agility is the speed of your decision making. Delays caused by approval processes trying to overcome the lack of trust from leadership teams is anti-Agile. An environment that empowers people to make decisions without fear or retribution – now that is a metric that shows a successful adoption of Agile in the context of marketing.  

Conclusion

Agile implementation is not difficult if applied in the context of marketing. The leadership style and team culture will determine the success of the transition to an Agile way of working. To achieve the desired behavioural change, CMOs must solicit the help of a qualified Agile coach with practical hands on experience of marketing.

You can post your question below if you need further clarification on how to implement Agile across your marketing function.

]]> https://www.cxconversion.com/agile-marketing-manifesto/ Wed, 11 Apr 2018 17:45:21 +0000 https://www.cxconversion.com/?p=479 Agile Marketing Manifesto

Netflix initiated the extinction of an established brand like Blockbuster, who’s next? This is the question that CMOs in non-Agile marketing teams should be asking themselves. It’s not about “if” but when new startups will take over your market share. In the UK, companies like Maplin and Toys R Us have both gone bankrupt, partly due to their reliance on doing the same old, same old and their lack of agility. The top 5 gas and energy companies in the UK keep losing market share to startups on a daily basis. As a result, every industry is prime for disruption. Although it is hard to imagine marketing teams adopting an approach born in the IT industry, this will have to be given serious consideration by CMOs and other top-level marketing professionals. Agile marketing aims to help established brands speed up their responsiveness to change.

The Agile Manifesto initiated the birth of the Agile movement in the IT Industry. In February 2001, the Agile Manifesto was created and signed by:

1. Kent Beck
2. Mike Beedle (RIP)
3. Arie van Bennekum
4. Alistair Cockburn
5. Ward Cunningham
6. Martin Fowler
7. Robert C. Martin
8. Steve Mellor
9. Dave Thomas
10. James Grenning
11. Jim Highsmith
12. Andrew Hunt
13. Ron Jeffries
14. Jon Kern
15. Brian Marick
16. Ken Schwaber
17. Jeff Sutherland

In this piece, I plan to discuss the interpretation of the 2001 Agile manifesto in the context of marketing. I will also discuss the limitations and criticism of the original Manifesto, as well as the 2012 Agile Marketing Manifesto which is a subtle copy of the original 2001 Agile Manifesto. It looks generic and must be further developed to align with marketing. Over the years, there has been some criticism of the Agile manifesto which I will discuss as part of the four sections listed below. To avoid buzzwords and technical jargon, I will summarise the key points from both Manifestos under four key themes:

1. Communication and Interaction
2. Processes and Tools
3. Customer Collaboration
4. Working in Iterations

Communication and Interactions

The core of Agile focuses on effective communication between individuals. According to the manifesto, face to face communication is a very important prerequisite for effective teamwork. Why do people in the same office communicate via email only? As a manager, is your face-to-face communication with your direct reports limited to the weekly 1-2-1’s? This is one extreme and the other extreme is the assumption that remote working is bad. Does your company allow you to work from home sometimes?

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information is face-to-face conversation.

What creates the difference between face-to-face and virtual communication is the absence of nonverbal cues. Used in the right context, teleconferencing tools can provide a platform for effective communication between individuals working remotely. One of my criticisms of the Agile manifesto is its lack of emphasis on culture and team structure. The Agile Manifesto was written by 17 white men which points to the lack of diversity and appreciation of ways in which people with different backgrounds operate. The emphasis on face-to-face communication and collocated teams was based on the societal and business context in 2001, a time when very few teleconferencing tools existed. It’s easy to recommend face-to-face communication over virtual, but how does it impact employee behaviour, exactly? In my experience of working in B2B, B2C, collocated and virtual teams, team culture takes precedence over structure. While I agree with the importance of communication, the mix of diverse behaviours and personalities within the team will determine the effectiveness of different ways of communication that the team adopts.

“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”

This is the first value in the Agile Manifesto and the most important one to the context of marketing. The question that should be asked is “How does a distributed team embrace face-to-face interaction over processes and tools?”. A few years ago, I was part of a global Agile marketing team with members in Germany, UK, Asia and North America. It was impossible to communicate face-to-face due to the difference in time zones so we relied heavily of teleconferencing tools. We understood that video conferencing (compared to emails) was a better means of communication. In essence, we embraced processes and tools over individuals and interactions.

How are you adapting your communication methods m to the structure of your team? I don’t believe having every member of a team collocated in the same office necessarily guarantees better communication and interactions. Individuals on the team will connect based on shared objectives and values, not just the quality and quantity of the interactions. Clarity of purpose and leadership style is also an important factor that contributes to team communication. Leaders that encourage backbiting and gossip within their team are basically using communication to create a toxic work environment. Leaders that foster open communication and transparency within their teams reap the business rewards.

As marketers, how do we build on the concepts and recommendations of the 2001 Agile manifesto? I ask this because Agile teams in the software industry are project teams by default, which is different to how marketing operates. Scrum teams are assembled to comprise skilled individuals in order to deliver working software in iterations. This is the reason why the Agile manifesto places so much emphasis on face-to-face communication. For IT teams, face to face communication is important to create rapport with new team members, who come and go based on the requirements of the project. How does this apply to marketing? The natural structure of marketing teams creates communication gaps and silos between individuals in these teams. What we need is more than just face-to-face communication, it is alignment and defined communication processes that clarify role dependencies. For example, if you ask anyone within a digital marketing team about their interaction or communication with the folks responsible for offline marketing, chances are they wouldn’t have had many – in reality (and as counterintuitive as it sounds) these two strands of marketing don’t usually ‘talk’ to each other.

The organizational chart above is an example of the structure of a typical in-house marketing team. For the SEO Executive to communicate with someone in PPC from the agency side, he/she normally has to go through the line manager. In most instances, the communication path goes upwards, then sideways and then downwards. As the image above indicates, bureaucracy is a major hindrance to Agile marketing. How can marketing improve team communication? Some experts recommend moving away from the hierarchical to the flat organizational structure. For me, changing the structure alone will not guarantee improved communication and team collaboration, because you cannot force people to change unless they buy into your initiative. Therefore, you need a compelling team (or organizational) idea.

Processes and Tools

You can start the analysis of your processes and tools by deliberating on the questions below:

1. What collection of tools do your teams use to communicate?
2. Do your communication tools encourage individual and team conflicts?
3. How do leaders and managers communicate to the broader group?

Team structures can create silos which are further exacerbated by siloed communication tools. The tools used for 1-2-1 communication are different from those used for inter- and intra-team communication. Although the primary aim of using these tools is to promote collaboration, more often than not they start creating unnecessary distractions and disruptions to the team flow. A typical marketing team will use most of the tools listed below:

1. Email
2. Company intranet
3. Skype for business (Private and group chat)
4. Discussion Forum (Slack or Yammer)
5. Internal blogs and wikis
6. Workplace by Facebook
7. Microsoft Teams
8. Atlassian
9. Online Task Management Tools (Kanban boards)
10. Internal file sharing applications

How does your team task align with your marketing strategy? The default mode is (usually) as follows: you go to work, log into your computer and wait for a random task to be thrown your way – you often don’t have the overview of how that task fits within the ‘bigger picture’. Having defined task execution processes is better than adopting a firefighting approach. This is one of the most important benefits of applying Agile frameworks in marketing.

To deal with bureaucracy, some experts will recommend switching from a hierarchical to a flat structure, as if that is some sort of magic solution that will solve all your problems. What they fail to understand is that, although this can be quite helpful in some situations, it does not solve everything: pure changing of structures will not magically improve processes. Redesigning all of the organizational processes is about tackling behaviours that stop people from collaborating. There is no silver bullet to how you improve the internal processes of your marketing team, rather, you should be thinking about how you can structure your team to create accountability and collective decision making, as well as how your internal tools influence your team’s processes and ways of working?

Customer Collaboration

Research shows that over 60% of software produced by IT Agile teams is not used by the end customers. Why is it that Agile teams in software keep producing irrelevant features? The Waterfall vs Agile argumental ways hinges on customer feedback. Agile experts accuse waterfall of being rigid and non-responsive to changes in customer requirements. While this is true to some extent, there is a lot of change that happens after product launch. Customer expectations are always changing and it can be difficult to maintain customer satisfaction.

As a marketer, how does collaboration with customers inform your strategy? We can all agree that profiling customers through analytics tools alone does not help, because if it did Maplin and Toys R Us would still be around. The key questions for any marketer are:

• How are we adjusting our activities to the feedback we get from customers?
• Do we even gather feedback? If not – why not, and how can we start to do this to inform our broader marketing strategy?

Working in Iterations

The concept of iterations aims to encourage continuous updating of the marketing strategy. What I have found is that a lot of content about Agile marketing advocates for working in sprints. In my experience, sprints work as a product development approach, but it is too rigid for marketing teams. What is interesting about feedback from analytics is that it is often ignored, until the very end of the process. As you think about working in iterations, start prompting for how your analytics insights can trigger specific action. A big UK brand recently announced a merger with one of its competitors in a bid to increase its market share, however, the issue of losing existing customers to new startups will not be resolved by the merger alone.

Conclusion

One of the things I like to highlight when talking about Agile marketing is that the original Agile manifesto was created to solve problems facing software developers.  Therefore, for me, the primary goal of the Agile marketing manifesto must be addressing the following :

1. Creating a safe space for people to work
2. A focus on satisfying the customers
3. Eliminating unnecessary meetings
4. Creating a customer feedback loop to inform strategy.

In future post, I will be discussing:

1. Agile marketing plan
2. Agile Marketing Examples and Casestudies

Are you a team player? This question makes the theme of every interview process and is the no.1 determining factor behind every new hire. Imagine going into an interview and asking the hiring manager the reverse of the same question in the following series:

1. Do you have defined team goals and objectives?
2. How does your team embrace diversity of thought, gender, race and sexuality?
3. Will I have authority to make decisions based on my experience and expertise?

Asking an interviewer these types of questions will most likely reduce your chances of getting an offer. So what is it that makes it impossible to ask these types of questions in an interview and why might a hiring manager take offence if an interviewee asked such question? There is currently a lack of clarity regarding the definition of a team and how it differs from a group, department or even a project team. If the definition of a team is not clear, then what do people visualise when they ask/are asked the question: “Are you a team player?”

Depending on whom you ask, you will probably get a different definition of a team. IT software companies using the Scrum framework will expect a team to have the following characteristics by default:

1. Not less than 3, and not more than 9 people in total.
2. Co-located in the same office for effective face to face communication, as recommended by the 2001 Agile manifesto for software development.
3. Defined team roles of Product Owner, Scrum Master and Development team.
4. Limited interference from external stakeholders – the Scrum master is responsible for protecting the team.

You can research more about Scrum teams in the IT software industry if you would like to know more, the list above is a brief summary and one of the reasons why I do not recommend applying Scrum to marketing without major revisions: marketing is already siloed and adding a framework that was developed for product development will do more harm than good. Now let’s focus on Agile marketing teams.

Agile Marketing Team Structure

When I think of a marketing team, I am not interested in the number of individuals or functional silos involved. All I care about is customer acquisition, conversion, retention, and customer lifetime value, as well as how all this links to excellent customer experience. I use the word team to identify a group of individuals responsible for end-to-end customer experience. The end-to-end customer journey is beyond marketing alone which is why marketing is now the responsibility of everyone in your organisation. Although some senior managers do not really like to hear this, the earlier this message is transmitted from the CEO to the entire organisation, the better results the organisation will achieve. So what does an Agile marketing team structure look like and what does it all mean for you?

An Agile marketing team structure can be defined as a group of individuals with complementary skills required to plan and execute marketing campaigns, using lean and Agile processes to increase the speed and efficiency of task completion. Research shows that the optimum number for a high-performance team is 5 people, however, this does not mean you are restricted to that number. As mentioned earlier, not less than 3 people and not more than 9 is the recommended team size for Agile – so play around with it as it suits your organisation.

It is important for marketing teams to understand that there can be different types of teams, as defined by their purpose:

Project teams: I mentioned Scrum teams earlier because they are what I consider to be project teams due to the fact that they have a fixed start and end date, which means a group of people is assembled for the primary purpose of delivering a piece of software or a product as its main objective. This team is stable by default until the end of the project and this structure describes well product development teams. A good example of a project team is when a CMO assembles a group of people to redesign the company website or organise a B2B event.   Members of such teams are project focused even if they are together for only 6 months or for 2 years.

Stable Teams: I use this term in the context of marketing to describe an in-house marketing team which is made up of company employees and which excludes contractors and temporary workers. If you have been working with an external agency that you have a stable relationship with, then this would fall into the same category of team. Now let’s review real-life examples of team types and structures which pose challenges to marketing effectiveness.

Some marketing teams choose not to outsource any of their campaign planning or execution to external agencies due to bad experiences, lack of adequate budget or because they simply prefer increasing their internal capabilities. All members of this type of teams are usually collocated in the same building, which fosters face to face communication – a vital ingredient of effective Agile marketing team structure. Depending on the leadership style and the culture of your team, small teams (up to 5 members) could be considered the perfect size for implementing Agile marketing. It is important to acknowledge that there are advantages and disadvantages of not to working with external agencies.

Those of you working with external agencies might want to review a slightly different team structure below.

Some external agencies are now starting to adopt Agile ways of working in order to deliver value to their clients which is a very positive development in my opinion. Stability is an important factor in becoming an Agile marketing team. Having a high turnover rate reduces a team’s ability to become high-performing and effective. If your internal team is stable, can you say the same about the staff turnover in the external agency you are collaborating with? The arrival and departure of individuals impact team dynamics positively if the person leaving is toxic and negatively if you are losing a highly skilled individual due to office politics and power plays. Some questions to consider would be:

1. How do we increase access to strategic level information?
2. How do we manage task dependencies within the team and with external stakeholders?

Next, let’s examine larger teams.

I sometimes wonder why large marketing teams are often structured in a way that negatively impacts collaboration, interactions, and Agility. The organisational chart above is not theoretical in any way, it reflects what happens in real life where teams are structured based on political muscle to the detriment of customer experience. Now imagine UX, Analytics, Content, Paid Search and Social media all hiring different external agencies reporting directly to the managers, with each agency executing a different type of marketing campaigns without any knowledge of how this will impact the activities of others. Then they all rely on web analytics and other software tools to provide attribution modeling in order to facilitate decision making. On top of that, you also have the CRM system that is owned by another part of the organisation that does not even talk to other functions. Let’s look at the structure of a global marketing team before I share my thoughts about how to structure a large Agile marketing team.

The structure of global teams with head offices in North America is difficult because of the difference in time zone, culture and language. How do you structure a global marketing team to adopt an Agile way of working? How do you improve collaboration and interactions between team members that are co-located in your regional office with others working virtually 100% of the time? This is easier to manage if you have a single product, but gets more complicated if you have multiple product lines targeting different regions of the world. With increasing threat of small startups, large marketing teams will have no choice but to become Agile and how they structure their teams will determine how they are able to compete to survive. The same principles related to smaller teams (discussed above) also apply to large teams.

Agile marketing Team Structure: Recommendations

As a CMO, Director or Manager, the first question to ask yourself is “How do I structure my team to become Agile?”. Depending on where you search for answers or whom you ask, you are likely to get framework-related suggestions which can be dangerous in the long term. Large banks in the UK have paid out millions of pounds in a bid to become Agile without experiencing any discernible changes. They hire Agile coaches for a few months and everything seems to be working well while the coaches are present on-site, but as soon as they are out the door people revert back to their old ways of working. The first step to creating an Agile team is to understand that frameworks and processes alone will not help you.

There is no silver bullet or playbook to creating an Agile marketing team structure. Almost everyone in the marketing department has the motivation to climb the corporate ladder and become a CMO at some point. The individualistic format of performance reviews based on someone’s subjective interpretation of what you were able to achieve over the designated 12-month period creates an unhealthy competition within marketing teams and drains trust. You have to be brutal and politically savvy to get to the top of the tree and this contradicts with what is needed to lead Agile marketing teams. No matter how many people you had to throw under the proverbial bus to get to the top, you can still embrace Agile marketing team structure to get the most of out of your team. My recommendation is that you hire a team coach to assist you to create a culture of high performance and focus on finding someone who is passionate about upskilling you, as a team manager, to be able to seamlessly take over after they leave.

Also, bear in mind that people work in different ways due to differences in their background and personality types. Therefore, it would be counter-productive to impose a particular framework top-down on everyone in a bid to create an Agile marketing team. The leading approach emphasises a slow and careful improvement of your people, processes, and strategy. There are 5 important questions to consider when creating an Agile marketing team:

1. As a leader, how do I create an environment of trust and respect within my team?
2. How do I create a culture of continuous improvement?
3. What problems are we currently facing due to the structure of our team and what needs to change?
4. How should we manage task dependencies within the team?
5. How do we eliminate Silos?

You have probably heard that Agile is a mindset that is required by everyone if you want to become an Agile marketing team. So what does ‘Agile mindset’ really mean? How do you get a group of individuals with different backgrounds, values and belief systems to change their mindset? The assumption that the mindset of a team will change if they adopt an Agile process or framework is not realistic. So the question you should be asking is “How does a team develop an Agile mindset?”. Creating a shared vision and clear definition of a ‘customer experience mindset’, is what marketing teams require. How do you create a customer experience mindset when most marketing teams don’t have a clear profile of their customers apart from the flawed customer insight from web analytics tools? If analytics tools were as great as we all think, would companies like Maplin and Toys R Us go bust? Surely they had the financial means to install enterprise software tools but these tools alone don’t provide insights about actual customer experience and what influences their purchasing behavior.

I am not suggesting eliminating hierarchies or redesigning your organisational structure completely, because I personally don’t believe that will change anything. The head of the team or marketing department is expected to be the smartest person and responsible for making strategic level decisions for the entire marketing function. Such approach was effective in the 1950’s before the internet era because C-Level people had the best education and skills for success and all they needed to do was command-and-control everyone working under them to execute strategies passed down the hierarchy.

Currently, the most valuable people in any organisation are the customer-facing employees because they have access to customer experience insights needed by the CMO and other senior stakeholders in order to make strategic decisions. As a team leader, how do you plan to tap into the knowledge of your team? It’s ok not to know everything and ask for help, but most leaders do not want to feel vulnerable by asking for help because they hold on to the assumption that they are expected to be the smartest person in the room. The good news is that you can use some Agile rituals to tap into the wisdom of your team if they are implemented properly.

Can marketing teams be structured like teams at Spotify?A lot has been spoken and written about how teams are structured in Spotify, but it is important to understand that these teams started by using the Scrum framework and realised its limitation before creating a structure that works in the context of their organisation. Spotify teams, also known as “squads”, are structured to minimize handoffs and waiting time between teams, which is the exact opposite of what we are trying to achieve in marketing teams. Also, the idea behind the Spotify team model centres around autonomous teams which are able to make decisions internally because they have all the skills required to execute any plan within the team. Marketing teams, in comparison, rely heavily on external stakeholders and agencies to execute campaigns and we don’t always have all the skills we need internally within the team, so there are obvious limitations here.

Finally, I’d like to end with a few questions to CMOs and other marketing team leads looking to embrace Agile:

1. How do you plan to structure your team (or teams) to focus on outcomes and not outputs?
2. How will you improve alignment between your functional teams?
3. How will you improve the marketing department’s collaboration with external stakeholders in order to improve your overall customer experience?

Agile marketing Team Structure – Skill Requirement

Depending on your industry and location, there are a few important skills that you need when designing your Agile marketing team structure. I recommend having a conversion rate optimisation and web analytics consultant as the key skill that manages your end to end customer purchase journey while other channels work around these individual or sub teams.

Answer these questions for yourself and to will be well on your way to implementing Agile within your team!