Mastering Marketing Agility

Transform Your Marketing Teams and Evolve Your Organization

Andrea Fryrear

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781523089178
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

The leading authority on Agile marketing shows how to build marketing operations that can pivot freely and yet remain committed to priorities. As a marketer, are you tired of chasing marketing fads and algorithm rumors that seem to change every couple of months? This guide to building the perfect marketing department will help you achieve the latest and greatest without having to rebuild your operations from scratch every time the wind changes. You see, Agile has been the accepted modus operandi for software development for two decades, and marketing is poised to follow in its footsteps. As the audiences we market to become ever more digital, Agile frameworks are emerging as the best and only way to manage marketing. This book is a signpost showing the way toward the Agile future of marketing operations, explaining how every role from social media intern to chief marketing officer can work in unison, responding to the market's demanding challenges without losing focus on the big picture.

PART 1
PRINCIPLES
The Fertile Soil of Marketing Agility

But a war, a strike for a principle is never a mistake, never odious, never unwise on the part of those who contend for the principle, for the right, for the truth.

ANONYMOUS, THE STATION AGENT, JANUARY 1894

I’LL BE THE FIRST to admit, the detailed processes and practices that form the latter part of this book are a little like the sleek exterior of a sports car. They’re what everybody sees, the things that elicit “oohs” and “aahs” from passersby.

But without a foundation, even the shiniest surface fades. A snazzy sports car with a crappy engine is a major disappointment. Likewise, without shared principles acting as a driving force, even the best-intentioned process stands little chance of lasting success. So with these principles, you’ll build the engine of your Rimarketing vehicle.

Rimarketing is based on the seven principles summarized below. They’re not lifted directly from the Agile Manifesto or the Scrum Guide, but if you know Agile, you’ll recognize some themes. Here, like everything in these pages, they’re tailored to marketing’s needs.

1. Customer Focus: All members of the marketing organization, from the CMO to the brand new intern, understand and value customers, defined as the external audience for marketing messages, the internal customers and stakeholders, and all who have bought (or will buy) something.
2. Radical Transparency: Put simply, information is shared. Teams know what’s going on with their members and with other teams. They know the long-term direction of the company, and they know whether the milestones to those objectives are being met. Information hoarding, at the executive or individual level, does not exist in Rimarketing.
3. Continuous Improvement: Things can always be better. Even if we’re far from where we want to be, we willingly take steps, short and long, to reach our goal. Rimarketing processes harness the power of forward momentum.
4. Adaptability: Planning is important; plans, less so. We acknowledge and embrace changing conditions, folding them, when appropriate, into planning and execution.
5. Trust: Teams must trust the direction of senior leaders, leaders must trust their teams to do great work, and team members must trust one another to support their shared goals. Outside the marketing organization, customers must trust in the ethics of the marketers who are communicating with them. Internal customers and stakeholders must also trust marketing to deliver on its commitments.
6. Bias toward Action: Do something, even if it might be wrong. Although we prefer to take action based on long experience and great data, we also prefer acting on incomplete information over waiting until we have an overwhelming body of evidence.
7. Courage: Rimarketing calls on its members to make hard choices regularly. Whether it’s advocating for the customer, pointing out a process flaw, or calling out colleagues on poor behavior, everyone needs the courage to do the right thing.

Principle 1: Customer Focus

As used here, “customer” includes many who have not bought and some who may never buy. A marketing team’s customers fall into three main categories, and some teams may serve more than one of them:

• ■ Internal customers: An organization has lots of people—those in sales, product development, customer service, user experience, and even other marketing functions—who need things from the marketing team. Although these internal groups probably aren’t a firm’s sole customers, a Rimarketing team must still serve them and balance their needs against those of paying customers.
• ■ Content marketing consumers: With the rise of content marketing since the early part of the twenty-first century, most marketing groups direct the bulk of their time and resources to cultivating a relationship with an audience. The team hopes these people will become customers, and they continuously create and give away valuable content for them to that end.
• ■ Traditional customers: A Rimarketing team, of course, attends also to those who buy what the organization sells.

Any team activity must clearly serve at least one of these customers. Only a request with a clear customer connection makes it into the workflow. (We’ll look more closely at the value of saying no from a process perspective later.) The Rimarketing team knows its customers intimately, and it pushes back hard against taking on work that doesn’t serve them.

Of course, one customer’s needs may conflict with another’s. A sales representative may want us to drop everything this week to create custom marketing materials for a high-dollar prospect call, and we’ve planned to spend the week creating new content resources for our pre-purchase audience. Sales is an internal customer, and email subscribers and social media followers who consume our content are also customers. What do we do?

Here, process kicks in, putting the team’s leadership in contact with the requesting sales rep so that leadership can evaluate the request against the team’s existing commitments. Since understanding each customer is central to the customer-focus principle, we—our team and its leaders—must prioritize based on what we know about each customer.

This level of understanding requires effort. Taking time to explore the needs of customers up front is vital, but we don’t want the Rimarketing process stalled by a need to learn the basics about our customers so that we can make a time-sensitive prioritization call.

Getting to Know Your Customers

Per the sixth Rimarketing principle, we have a bias toward action, even in our customer exploration. We don’t want to spend months on persona creation when we can use lightweight tools to get to know them. This approach enables us to move quickly from an informed position, while understanding that our knowledge is basic and incomplete. Finally, we balance all the Agile exploration tools that we’ll discuss here against the need to hold, whenever possible, conversations with real customers.

And by “conversations” I don’t mean looking at their lead score in your customer-relations management (CRM) software, or reviewing segment behavior in your website analytics. I mean talking with actual people who represent your customer segments. Some of the tools described below focus these conversations on actionable takeaways; others help you document an imaginary dialogue with a customer you already know well. But never assume that a canvas or a persona is a replacement for regular interaction with the people you want to reach.

Minimum Viable Persona

The first customer centricity tool we’ll explore is the Minimum Viable Persona. Based on the Minimum Viable Product concept popularized by Eric Ries’s Lean Startup, this approach to audience categorization aims to collect the minimum amount of information necessary to begin communicating effectively with a group.

Traditional marketing teams are prone to spending many months and thousands of dollars on crafting a perfect, data-centric persona. They conduct lengthy surveys, slice and dice the data dozens of ways, follow up with in-person interviews, and refine it all into a beautiful document like the one shown in Figure 3.

Don’t get me wrong; personas are valuable components of modern marketing. I do not advocate their elimination. What I’m arguing for is something more lightweight, more Agile.

FIGURE 3
Traditional Persona Diagram

Source: Author.

Like a Minimum Viable Product, a Minimum Viable Persona assumes that you can’t know everything up front, no matter how many surveys you distribute or how many customer interviews you conduct. Knowledge gaps remain.

Furthermore, you uncover the most actionable and important pieces of information about your audience in the earliest parts of your research. Later efforts serve as validation for early insights; they rarely reveal anything new. If we map the value we derive on persona creation against the time it takes us to obtain it, we see diminishing returns.

Chances are that the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, is at play here. This mathematical principle tells us that the relationship between most things follows an 80/20 split. Eighty percent of the value from our persona efforts, for instance, comes from just 20 percent of the work.

So we need to get that revelatory, actionable information quickly. We want to accomplish that super valuable 20 percent of the work first; then we can decide whether to pursue the remaining 80 percent. (Because it forms a foundational idea of Rimarketing, this principle recurs throughout the book: we identify and execute first those activities that provide a disproportionately large amount of value.) One way to do this is to tap into internal knowledge about our customer base(s), using an exercise called Four Objects.¹

To use this tool, have someone who’s intimately acquainted with your target audience collect four physical objects that provide insight into the customer’s ideas, behavior, and personality. For instance, if you’re a B2C marketer selling athletic shoes to people who are new to running, your four objects might be (1) a stack of books on basic running topics, (2) screen shots of podcasts on living a healthy lifestyle, (3) athletic-style headphones, and (4) medals and bibs from marathons. Bonus points if you can find a member of that audience segment to help collect these items. Preferably these components of the person’s personality will intersect with your own product, service, or marketing messaging, but you can work with what you have.

Next, gather a group who’ll be responsible for communicating with this audience member. Most likely you’ll have marketing, sales, and customer experience/success/service in the room; you may also want to bring in executives and other leaders, but be aware that their presence might decrease brainstorming potential.

Finally, have everyone take a look at the objects and fill out the Minimum Viable Persona Canvas depicted in Figure 4. (You can find a downloadable version at MasteringMarketingAgility.com.)

You’re looking for a way to tap into the knowledge of the group and get consensus around the following:

• ■ core traits of the audience that will form the foundation of your marketing messaging for them
• ■ several hypotheses that can be tested with marketing or sales efforts—that is, ideas that some people believe are true but that lack consensus from the internal focus group

FIGURE 4
Minimum Viable Persona Canvas

Adapted from a canvas by Centerline Digital.

You can also supplement your on-the-ground persona work with secondary data from the internet. Identify a representative from your audience segment about whom you already have insights through your existing tools. (Even a simple Google Analytics review works here, but it’s more effective to pull a record from your CRM and review real activity.) What pages do they visit on your site? How do they behave on social media? What words do they use when talking about their problems and solutions? What content do they share and respond to?

Use the answers to some of these questions to resolve discrepancies that emerge during your Persona Canvas creation. Again, you’re looking for just enough information to get started, so don’t burn a week on this investigation. This is, as discussed, a Minimum Viable Persona, not the final product. What do I mean by these terms?

• ■ It’s “Minimum” in that we’ve collected the smallest amount of information possible to enable future action.
• ■ It’s “Viable” because it’s a functional, stand-alone document—but by no means the end of the process.

As we learn more about this customer by communicating with them, we expand and update our canvas. Communication here may take place through conversations, email exchanges, or phone calls, or it may occur through marketing channels. The level of engagement this person displays with our marketing collateral tells us how accurately we’ve characterized them. We document the answers to our initial questions and hypotheses and use the new information to adjust how we communicate with this audience segment.

We expand on our Minimum Viable Persona, adding value and functionality until, ultimately, it resembles the beautifully crafted persona document shown in Figure 3. And rather than sit while we spent months creating a perfect piece of research, we connect with our audience and regularly learn about them.

Value Proposition Canvas

Once we know more about who we’re communicating with, we then make sure that we solve their problems with our marketing. We do this by conducting a handful of customer interviews, discussing with them their previous problems and current solutions. Our goal here is to align our work with what our customers want, rather than with what we imagine they want.

Take fifteen or twenty minutes to interview a few customers, and you’ll be amazed at what you learn. Use the following questions to guide the interview, letting the conversation flow easily. Do not press to have all your questions answered!

1. Triggering Event: What are the conditions that created a desire for change? What’s hard about ______?
2. Desired Outcome: How was success first defined? If you previously experienced success, what was it like?
3. Old Solution: What existing solution (if any) is already in place?
4. Consideration Set: What alternative solutions will be/have been considered?
5. New Solution: What new solution was selected last time you were in this situation?
6. Inertia: What habits/anxieties/behaviors hold you back from switching to the new solution?
7. Friction: What habits/anxieties/behaviors got in the way during the use of the new solution?
8. Actual Outcome: Was the job done? Was it done well? How could it be better?
9. Next Summit: What...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• PART 1 PRINCIPLES: The Fertile Soil of Marketing Agility
• PART 2 PEOPLE: The Peskiest (and Most Powerful) Part of Agile Systems
• PART 3 PROCESSES: Separating What We Do from How We Do It
• PART 4 PRACTICES: Daily Activities for Achieving Lasting Agility
• PART 5 TRANSFORMATION: The Path from Here to There
• CONCLUSION
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author