Lean marketing uses agile principles of rapid iteration and frequent validation to provide marketing programs that are focused, competitive, and adaptable. Key aspects of lean marketing include using Scrum processes with sprints and daily standups, collaborative Kanban tools, testing ideas through small experiments rather than large campaigns, and basing budgets on acquisition and retention metrics rather than soft goals. The overall goal is to achieve more marketing results with less waste of time and money through an agile approach.

1. Lean Marketing:
Agile Techniques &
Collaboration Tools
Host: Lynn McLeod
Market Architects

2. Why lean?
“Too many traditional marketers plan
big campaigns, spending big
bucks, only to search at the end for
favorable data to justify all that money
spent. ”
Jim Ewel, agilemarketing.net

3. What’s agile marketing?
A high-communication,
low documentation,
rapid iteration process,
designed to provide frequent,
relevant and measurable
marketing programs.
IDC, Agile Principles and Practices, 2010

4. Why agile?
• Focus
• Competitive advantage
• Capital-efficiency - achieve more with
less waste of time and money
• Predictability
• Adaptability - media and technology
evolving rapidly
• & marketing becoming similar to s/w dev

5. Key takeaway
Results > Process

6. Start with an Agile Manifesto
• Your marketing team’s values and principles –
how do you work together?
• Example, SprintZero, June 2012 SF
We are discovering better ways of creating value for our
customers 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

7. Experiment w/ team structure
Thanks to:

8. Use agile process [what is “Scrum”?]
• 3 Roles
– Product Owner speaks for the
customer & company
– ScrumMaster manages the process
– Team is self-organizing, cross-
functional
• Team works on short sprints based on
a backlog of prioritized, point-
weighted user stories
• 15 min. standup meeting every
morning:
Scrum = an agile project – What I did yesterday
– What I’m going to do today
management process – What is blocking my progress, if
anything
• Burn down chart tracks velocity
• After each sprint, review and apply
what you learned

9. Use agile tools [what is Kanban?]
Cheap and easy: Cloud tools:
whiteboard and stickies esp. for virtual teams, ex:
Trello, Asana, Kanban Tool, Pivotal
Tracker, +hundreds to choose from

10. Do you have a collaborative
environment?
• Co-location when possible [Yahoo! joke here ]
– Google hangouts for virtual teams
• Kill the cubes
– “Kitchen table” style
– Workgroup areas, booths
• Provide noise-canceling headphones
• Examples -
http://pinterest.com/centraldesktop/collab
orative-spaces/

11. Share marketing dashboards
“..at-a-glance
view…how marketing
initiatives increase
customer acquisition,
retention and share of
wallet.”
- Laura Patterson, VisionEdge
[random sample from
Google search ]

12. Agile budgets [this is tough]
• Base budgets on results
• Revenue = $ new + $ existing customers
– A = your average acquisition cost
– R = your avg retention &up/cross sell costs
– Mktng budget = A(#new cust) + R(# curr cust)
• You need to learn A & R, monitor mix
• Flexible model, adaptable
• Focus on hard results, not soft goals

13. Quick wireframe tools
Balsamiq.com

14. Landing page testing tools

15. Resources
• Blogs:
– www.agilemarketing.net
• Kit:
– www.hubspot.com/modern-marketing-team-kit/
• Meetup:
– http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Agile-Marketing/

16. Final thought
Don’t start with a task list.
Do start with the end in mind.

17. Thanks for your interest!
Lynn McLeod
Market Architects
@mktarchitects
linkedin.com/in/lynnmcleod/