Agile marketing

Putting Agile Marketing into Practice
November 2012
Michelle Accardi

A Little About Me & What Agile is All About
• I believe everyone has the ability to drive
excellence e in their areas of expertise
→ Passionate about everything I do
→ Happy to try and fail – just don’t make the
same mistake twice
→ Surround myself with like minded passion
but not necessarily agreeable
→ Evangelize what you believe in
→ Author of Agile Marketing available on
Amazon
• Strong belief in collaborative leadership
→ Have to get cross organizational “buy-in”
• Obvious Pragmatic Innovation
→ Common sense- uncommonly executed
→ Plan, fail, iterate, succeed

 Constant change is the new dynamic of the global economy
– * Only 74 of the original 500 companies in the S&P Index were still on
the list 40 years later – a mortality rate of more than 10 per year. The
average life span of an S&P 500 company has steadily decreased from
more than 50 years to fewer than 25. Projecting forward, it’s likely that
only about one-third of today’s major corporations will survive as
significant businesses for the next quarter century.
– Some notable examples:
 Circuit City
 Pontiac
 Borders
 If companies want to survive they need to be customer
focused and agile
Why do companies need agile marketing?
3 Copyright © 2012 CA. All rights reserved. FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY.
*The Speed of Business Today By Faisal Hoque 2009

Agile is about the customer experience
4
Source: Chiefmartec.com
Copyright © 2012 CA. All rights reserved. FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY.

 Agile is a management process not a technical process. It is
an iterative method of determining the priority of
requirements, executing against that priority in time fixed
sprints, continually measuring results and re-prioritizing in a
highly flexible and collaborative manner.
But what is agile scrum really?
5
*The Scrum project management method. Part of the image is based on public domain graphics from Open
Clip Art Library (openclipart.org). |Source=self-made |Date=January 9th 2008 |Author= Lakeworks
Valuable Increment of
marketing program
Marketing program
backlog

 We are discovering better ways of creating value for our
customers and for our organizations through new approaches
to marketing. Through this work, we have come to value:
 Validated learning over opinions and conventions
 Customer focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy
 Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns
 The process of customer discovery over static prediction
 Flexible vs. rigid planning
 Responding to change over following a plan
 Many small experiments over a few large bets
http://agilemarketingmanifesto.org/
The Agile Marketing Manifesto
6*** Derived these values from previously posted Agile Marketing manifestos, which were summarized in a
blog post by Travis Arnold, Roundup: Agile Marketing Manifestos.

 Scrum master- the coach for the values of the team/helps remove obstacles that
may come up- protects the team from over committing or complancency
 Sprint- a fixed set of time the team agrees to deliver some valuable output at the
end of
 User story- a marketing requirement written from the users perspective. As a ____
I want to be able to ______ so I can _______.
 Story points- a way of estimating both the complexity of the task and priority
 Program backlog- the overall marketing user story or requirements list
 Sprint backlog – the prioritized list of what the team has agreed to accomplish this
week.
 Burn down chart-Daily project chart that shows how you have done to delivering
value promised over the course of a sprint
 Definition of done- agreement of what is value for the sprint and how it will be
measured by program leadership and stakeholders
Agile Marketing terminology

 Pigs have come to describe all the program developers,
designers and testers who commit to the actual work.
 Chicken is applied to everyone else who make intellectual
contributions but do not commit to any work.
 We need both but chickens and stakeholders need to be silent
on scrum calls
Pigs , Chickens and others executives you need to deal
with in an agile marketing project

Agile: Principals on Practical ApplicationTEAM
VELOCITY
• Organize your cross functional team.
• Define roles for team
• Program Owner( product owner)
• This person helps maintain the backlog of
requirements by representing stakeholders
• Scrum master helps team overcome obstacles
• Development team/content creators/content distribution
• Internal and External Customer representatives should be
on your team
• Organize meeting cadence
• Daily 15 min scrum meeting
• What you are working on today, tomorrow, obstacles
or where you have dependencies
• Where multiple agile teams intersect have Scrum of
Scrum calls to coordinate
• Hold Sprint reviews every month to showcase value
created/discuss priorities for next sprint

Tackling the Marketing Organization
• Breakdown primary silos of marketing organization
with larger business and put them on cross
functional self managed teams
→ Sales
→ Product marketing
→ Brand
→ Field marketing
→ Corporate marketing
→ Operations
• Alignment of marketing objectives to business
objectives to help prioritize
→ Demand generation
→ Sales enablement
→ Customer education/support
→ Thought leadership/messaging
→ Improved customer interaction
→ Drive loyalty
QUALITY
VALUE

New Method for Marketing
• Traditional methods have to be transformed
→Speed of business faster than ever
→Technology advances drive fast real-time
customer interactions
→Significance of social media impact
→Educated Consumer
• Agile gives you the framework to meet these new
demands
• It’s a cultural change not just a marketing
process change
• Sometimes less is more – understand the needs of the
customer, think very hard about what your marketing should
really be all about. Could you take your program to market
with all the important features, or with features that are less
functionally rich, in a fraction of the time?

Transformation Framework for Agile Marketing

Functional Alignment of Marketing for Agile

Marketing in the Agile Garden of Eden Requires
Cultural Change
• Admitting you have the need to change
and become user centric
• Defining of user stories to help drive
requirement priorities
• Assignment of responsibility & priority
to implement change
• Measuring the result and iterating of
effectiveness of change
• Evaluate whether the issue is a real
issue for your company and priority
• Validate the information with your
program leadership governance
board—do others see the vision?
• Execute quickly and with key
performance indicators that you put in
place

1. Develop Persona’s based on your users
a) GET REAL CUSTOMER INPUT ON YOUR TEAMS OR THE CLOSEST THING
TO IT- SALES AND SUPPORT REPRESENTATION!
2. Develop user stories for what your users need or will want to
get out of your marketing programs
3. Think about how your users will traverse through
understanding they have a need to actually buying and map
that journey and what content they will need along the way
4. Audit and evaluate what you have to meet those needs- re
use is a great agile principle
5. Prioritize what you don’t have based on value to user across
that journey
Simple 5 point plan to start tp put agile marketing into
practice

Align Complimentary Organizations
• Sales
→ Enablement – collateral,
assets, education
o Just in time with
sales cycle
→ Messaging – internal
and external
→ Lead generation and
qualification
• Executive Management
→ Corporate objectives
→ Shareholder/owner/ser
vice accountability
→ Innovation and thought
leadership
→ Revenue growth
Align objectives for of external organizations

Align Complimentary Organizations
• Don’t ignore the internal IT
Department make sure
you gain alignment with
marketing
→ Challenges against
existing strongholds
→ Methodology evolution
→ Adapt, align, execute
→ Doing more with less
→ Increased demand
→ Avoid technology for
technology sake
IT and Marketing are coming closer together-
make them part of the team!

Path to Transformation – Create, Implement , Sustain

Agile Method Applied to Marketing
• Brand new UX , UI, and design
• Implementation of 5 new technologies
→ CMS
→ Community Technology
→ eCommerce
→ Search
→ SSO
• Comprehensive content strategy
• Social Media integration
• Departmental integration, leadership
and transformation
→ Internal IT
→ Education
→ Support
→ Services
→ Marketing
CA Technologies Applied Case Study –
Delivered fully integrated cross functional on-line
presence in 4 months

What Success Looks Like
- SiteIQ – Top 10 best enterprise tech site for social usability
- Winner – web marketing awards
- Highest lead to revenue marketing application
- Sales and Support collaboration

Steps for success
• Articulate objectives but don’t be
prescriptive on the how….
• Hire the best and trust them
• Agile is an ongoing journey not a
destination
• Right-size marketing goals,
budget, and resources to business
and sales strategy and prioritize
everything
• TEST EVERYTHING- A/B Testing,
eye tracking, qualitative feedback
• Negative reviews are gifts to help
you know where to improve

Steps for success
• Understand what your customers
need internally and externally
• Focus on fewer metrics that are
actionable
• Organize around one CRM strategy
for sales and marketing and support.
• Knows when to bring it in-house or
source it for the best quality and
cost.
• It’s ok if you don’t know how to
do everything yourself- focus on
what is your focus and outsource
for other

Steps for success
• Ensure the Marketing objectives for each sprint are clearly
defined from start to finish on delivering to objective
• Budget and resource empowerment to get the job done—
include procurement/sourcing on your agile team to ensure
• Remove “roadblocks” and disruptions that may distract the
execution team from the day-to-day work effort (e.g., resolve
issues, communicate those issues and resolve – EVE)
• Trust but verify-review key deliverables and milestones daily
and weekly using the burn down
• Hold team members accountable and make them hold
each other accountable
• Monitor and manage the delivery of business results assigned-
are you meeting business objectives if not change

Steps for success
• Hold daily stand up scrum calls where
only the accountable give updates
• Empower a scrum master to remove
obstacles
• Communicate cross-project view to
during a weekly Project leadership
team (PLT) meeting where all program
owners come together.
• Monitor, milestones for projects
within fixed time sprints.
• 2-5 week sprints
recommended

Steps for success
• Identify and track cross-project
dependencies
• Limit in sprint scope changes (e.g.,
changes that may affect the release
budget, timeline, or performance
outcomes.
• Balance the need to minimize risk
to release schedule, cost, and
benefit with the need to
accommodate changing customer
needs.

Steps for success
• Facilitate the resolution of
project team and cross-project
team issues.
• Identify issues and risks that
may affect the program and
budget, timeline, or
performance outcomes and be
transparent with business
about them.
• Identify risks, develop
mitigation plans (i.e., potential
future issues), and report them
to scrum master to help
mitigate and remove obstacles.

Don’t re- invent the wheel
• Leverage what you already have
• Content re use is a good thing
• Provide program leads with applicable
standards, tools, policies/procedures, and
time frames. There are a ton of resources
use them:
Resources
Agile Marketing- Michelle Accardi-Petersen
Jim Ewel's Agile Marketing Blog
Agile Marketing Topic on Quora
Agile Marketing Tools on Quora
Travis Arnold's Posts on Agile Marketing
IDC Report on Agile Marketing
Scott Brinker's Posts on Agile Marketing

 THE BUSINESS ANALYST I have twelve meetings today, I don’t have time to get
into the whole user story. But I can tell you it involves a rooster on a distributed
team.
 SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER So the chicken can check in and oust the Mayor of the
Other Side of the Road.
 THE AGILE PROJECT MANAGER The chicken is just not going to be able to cross
the road this month. Crossing requirements were due last Friday. She will have to
take her place on the backlog. Maybe the chicken can cross the road in Sprint 9.
 WEB ANALYTICS We’ll need to get some tags on that chicken to be able to tell you
that.
 THE BUSINESS OWNER Because I have three other business initiatives riding on
the chicken being on the other side of the road that were supposed to start six
weeks ago. You’re killing me.
 UX The question isn’t why the chicken crossed the road. The question is why the
chicken felt she had to cross the road. If a coop’s usability issues won’t allow
chickens to complete their egg-laying tasks, they’ll bail that coop and find another
one that will.
 THE DEVELOPER Because the requirements said so. The trebuchet was the most
efficient method. Oh, she had to get to the other side alive? Where was that in
the requirements?
 SCRUM MANAGER Let’s iterate, people. Let’s get the chicken to the center line
today, and we’ll talk about the rest of the way tomorrow.
 Agile Humor – Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? Posted on January 12, 2011 by
cathy
Why did the chicken cross the road? Understanding the
agile team
28

Thank you

Agile marketing

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