In this informative webinar, Director of Marketing Meagan French examines how the Redbooth marketing team uses agile to help the team be more productive and drive bottom line revenue. We’ll focus on practical steps that marketing leaders can take to implement a holistic, iterative approach to improve team productivity and focus on the projects that grow the business.
In this webinar, you will learn:
* How to adapt agile for more efficient, happy marketing teams.
* How to minimize time in meetings, and use meetings strategically to focus the team around common initiatives.
* How to prioritize the most important revenue-driving projects, while making sure that nothing falls through the cracks.
* How to experiment with minimum viable marketing before embarking on resource intensive projects.
3. #agilemarketing
A million different initiatives, the team is unsure of priorities
Spend a lot of money on marketing with little return
They don’t know what’s working and what’s not
It takes forever to get anything done
Way too much time in meetings
Jump through a lot of hoops to get projects approved
What a non-agile team looks like:
4. 4
What is Agile Marketing?
“Agile marketing is an approach in which teams identify and focus
their collective efforts on high value projects, complete those
projects cooperatively, measure their impact, and then continuously
and incrementally improve the results over time”
- MarketingGizmo.com
5. 5
“Teams are 50%–75% faster than they were before
Agile and incredible culture improvement”
- CMO Agenda “The Agile Advantage: Methodology”
6. 6
Why is agile so challenging?
Marketing is a highly collaborative profession
A ton of external deadlines and vendors
Marketing supports many different teams
We’re charged with impacting revenue
We’re perfectionists
11. 11
Develop a Hypothesis:
Why are we doing this?
What’s the hypothesis? What is the desired outcome?
Are we seeing traction?
How can we start small first?
• Minimum viable marketing
15. 15
Minimize the build stage
Run a small campaign before scaling up
A/b test it first
Use a landing page builder
Ask your vendors to work with you on the smallest possible
contract or an extended trial
19. #agilemarketing
Growth Meetings are where we learn:
Impact Revenue with Collaboration- Not Progress Reports
Report Iterate Collaborate Action
Use the success
metrics from the
beginning of the
experiment
The next iteration of
the experiment
Strategize scale
successful initiatives
Experiments to
launch for the next
growth meeting
20. 20
Translate Experiments into Revenue
What are the results of your experiment?
How do we iterate and scale up?
What are the key learnings or actions items?
Is this project impacting revenue?
Introductions:
Review of last conversation:
Summarize
“Has anything has changed?”
“Anything new I should know about?”
Confirm goal and agenda of this meeting
“Assuming this meeting goes well “based on the above” what will be our next steps?”
Ask for permission to proceed
I work with a lot of internal and external teams, so I get to see how agile plays out as an agency and as a member of an internal marketing team.
Lets start with what it’s not…
This is the qualitative and anecdotal evidence that I witnessed when working with non-agile teams.
These challenges inhibit teams and inhibit company growth.
What if you could implement a system that helped your team work on the right projects, increase the efficacy of your marketing programs, know what’s working, get stuff done faster, spend less time in meetings?
Agile is an idea that comes from the development world and is about 10 years old there, however marketing is just learning now how to leverage it.
Qualitatively
The nature of marketing is one of collaboration, teams are no longer siloed.
Software development happens in a relative vacuum, marketing does not.
We’ve got a ton of stuff that are beyond our control, like seasonality, market forces, and external deadlines
We have the added challenge of not just working efficiently, but also working on the right projects. We’re charged with predicting projects that will impact the most revenue.
A lot of us are perfectionist, we want to represent our brands well. Agile demands that we do minimum viable marketing and iterate
----- Meeting Notes (11/10/15 15:30) -----
There’s no one standard way to do agile.
The idea with agile is not to overwhelm you with framework, but just give you enough to more efficiently
Agile is a mindset, more than a strict methodology. Take an iterative, experimental approach, rather than setting marketing plans in stone
These days, marketing teams have to be highly adaptive and agile, or our competitors' are going to quickly take away our market share.
Sit down as a team and list projects out (This is your backlog or inbox)
Identify the meaningful and impactful projects, determine which are backlog and which are current
Every team has limited bandwidth, budget and manpower, this is true of every team I’ve ever worked with
No one can do it all right now
Necessary for leadership to help the team focus and think through priorities, necessary maximize the teams efforts.
What are mission critical projects that will drive revenue in the short term, and what are good ideas that can go in the backlog /inbox
How do we keep track of projects and owners and make sure that nothing gets lost in the either?
We use “inbox” for nice to have but not right now
We assign the person who has the action items and create due dates
We tag tasks with priorities
We keep track success and collaborate with less meetings
There’s no one standard way to do agile.
The idea with agile is not to overwhelm you with framework, but just give you enough to more efficiently
Agile is a mindset, more than a strict methodology. Take an iterative, experimental approach, rather than setting marketing plans in stone
These days, marketing teams have to be highly adaptive and agile, or our competitors' are going to quickly take away our market share.
1. Many marketing teams don’t actually ask themselves the why. There are marketing initiatives that don’t impact growth and revenue.
2. Have you seen some traction with this in the past?
3. If not, what’s the minimum viable marketing project (MVP Minimum Viable Product)
4. Minimize the build and create process. Can we implement something imperfectly, and it later?
You have to determine how you’re going to measure success before the experiment starts. What does success look like?
Is your marketing activity actually impacting revenue, and if so, how are you tracking it?
How will you determine if an experiment is working or not? Write this down.
Analytics tracks lead generation pretty well, Marketing automation tracks assets, but Salesforce tracks revenue
So many teams dive into resource intensive, big budget projects without any idea whether or not something is going to work.
Unless you’re a huge company with tons of historical data, you actually have no idea if most of your marketing will actually work.
How do we learn? What does the data mean?
Like 75% of the time, the data is inconclusive or your hypothesis is wrong. (I’m not even kidding)
Minimalize time in meetings to give more time for experiments and doing. Track success and collaboration in Redbooth.
Daily standups are what you accomplished, what’s in your way, and what you want to accomplish today. Not necessarily what is going to drive revenue,
We spend less time in meetings and more time doing, I already know what my team is doing because I have redbooth.
We don’t focus on progress reports, ie what was done and what we’re doing, we focus on the initiatives most likely to grow the business. Because we spend so much time in redbooth during the week, we don’t need to give progress reports, we focus on growth.
Open the meeting with reports from last week’s experiments: What has been successful, what needs more time, and what do we need to kill?
Iterate: What’s the next iteration of the experiment, where are we seeing traction? What’s working and what’s not?
Collaborate: How can we repurpose our efforts to maximize all channels? How can we repurpose SEO for social, or paid?
Action Items: What are the actions and experiments we need to run in the next week to report back?