The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing

Proven Practices for More Effective Marketing and Better Business Results

Jim Ewel

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119712046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

Transform your organization using Agile principles with this proven framework

The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing provides a proven framework for applying Agile principles and processes to marketing. Written by celebrated consultant Jim Ewel, this book provides a concise, approachable, and adaptable strategy for the implementation of Agile in virtually any marketing organization.

The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing discusses six key areas of practical concern to the marketer who hopes to adopt Agile practices in their organization. They include:

• Aligning the team on common goals
• Structuring the team for greater efficiency
• Implementing processes like Scrum and Kanban in marketing
• Validated Learning
• Adapting to Change
• Creating Remarkable Customer Experiences

The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing also discusses four shifts in beliefs and behaviors necessary to achieving an Agile transformation in marketing organizations. They include:

• A shift from a focus on outputs to one based on outcomes
• A shift from a campaign mentality to one based on continuous improvement
• A shift from an internal focus to a customer focus
• A shift from top-down decisions to de-centralized decisions

Perfect for anyone in a leadership position at a marketing agency, The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing also belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in improving the efficacy and efficiency of their own marketing efforts. Full of practical advice and concrete strategies that have been successfully implemented at Fortune 500, Silicon Valley, and non-profit organizations alike, this book is an indispensable resource to help your organization make the leap to Agile.

Part I
Overview

Chapter 1 begins by outlining many of the challenges that face marketers today. It answers the question “Why should I change?” Change is hard, and most people are reluctant to change just for change's sake. Perhaps you feel that your existing marketing is pretty good or even great, and that may well be the case. However, most non-Agile organizations that produce good marketing do so through hero mode—talented people working long hours—and when good people leave or burn out, the quality of marketing suffers.

Chapter 2 defines the values and principles of Agile marketing. The values I outline differ slightly from those expressed in the Agile Marketing Manifesto. Those of us who attended Sprint Zero, where the Agile Marketing Manifesto was written, acknowledged that we produced only a first draft. I've taken the liberty of revising that draft, and I've been teaching the six values to organizations throughout the world for many years.

These values and principles are the core of Agile marketing. Before embarking on an adoption of Agile marketing, it is critical that marketers understand and embrace these values and principles.

Chapter 1
Challenges Facing Marketers Today

You should never view your challenges as a disadvantage. Instead, it's important for you to understand that your experience facing and overcoming adversity is actually one of your biggest advantages.

—Michelle Obama, former First Lady of the United States

It took 110 years for the telephone to be adopted by 1 billion users. It took 49 years for television to be adopted by 1 billion users, 22 years for mobile devices, 14 years for the Internet, and 8 years for Facebook.

It took one year for the Internet of Things (IOT) to reach 1 billion devices.¹

These new technologies and the accelerating rate of technological change present new opportunities to reach customers. Marketing must adapt.

According to the folks at Moz, an inbound marketing and search engine optimization firm,² Google releases between 5 and 35 major changes, and hundreds of minor ones, to its search algorithm each year. Its MozCast tool, shown in Figure 1.1, shows the turbulence in Google's ranking algorithm over time.

Figure 1.1 Moz's MozCast tool, image courtesy of Moz, Inc.

Source: Moz, Inc.

Google's own data (which Google stopped sharing in 2018) indicate that Google makes, in fact, more than 5,000 changes, major and minor, every year. That's 14 changes per day. No marketing plan can keep up with that pace of change.

In 2017 and 2018, marketers sprinkled artificial intelligence (AI) into their marketing copy, almost like fairy dust, and sometimes with nothing but dust behind the words. AI live chat, using tools like Intercom and Drift, was in every marketer's toolbox. Podcasts surged. Voice search, on Alexa and its competitors, became a way for consumers to find products and services, and hence became something else that marketing needed to address.

In 2019, marketers advertised on smart speakers like Amazon Echo or Google Home. Tools like YotPo and BazaarVoice helped marketers collect reviews and ratings for e-commerce sites and create referral programs. 360-degree videos offered more opportunities for interactivity and engagement.

How, in 2020, will marketers adapt to new uses of artificial intelligence? How will marketers adapt to newer social-media channels like TikTok, Caffeine.TV, Lasso, Vero, Kik, and Houseparty? And the largest question of 2020: How will marketers respond to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the changes to our lives as we respond to that crisis?

If you wrote a marketing plan at the beginning of any of these years, you could not have anticipated the impact of new channels and new technologies, and in 2020, the impact of Covid-19. The requirements put on marketing, constantly changing, emerged at their own pace.

The “write a plan, work the plan, declare victory” method of operations is dead! Modern marketing must keep up with the pace of change and learn to address emergent requirements as they happen.

The Shift to Digital

Digital advertising and digital channels present new challenges and new opportunities to modern marketers. As Scott Brinker discusses in his book Hacking Marketing, digital channels have new dynamics:

• Speed. Digital campaigns can be rolled out, changed, and adapted at a speed unimaginable to marketers in channels like television or print. Marketers with the right scale of user interaction can modify campaigns in minutes or hours; almost anyone can achieve a rhythm of weekly change and experimentation. This presents a tremendous opportunity and a challenge. How do we build and manage the marketing processes to take advantage of this speed? How do we organize our teams to move at this speed? What tools do we use?
• Adaptability. If a digital campaign works in one channel (display advertising, say), it's not that difficult to adapt the campaign to work in another channel (Facebook). Compare this to adapting a television campaign to print. Opportunity and challenge: When a prospect sees a message in multiple digital channels, how do we measure the impact of spending in each channel? With each channel having its own ways of grouping audiences, how do we think about audiences holistically, across channels?
• Adjacency. In the physical world, where competitors rarely share a parking lot, consumers tend to value convenience over price. Few drive across town to save a few pennies. On the Internet, your competition is one click away. Opportunity and challenge: It's easier than ever to compete, and, if you're the incumbent, you compete on more than price or you risk the consumer clicking away.
• Scale. If a campaign works for 10,000 digital prospects, then in most channels, given sufficient budget, campaigns can be scaled up overnight for millions of users. But scaling digital campaigns comes with hidden challenges. Often, when we begin a campaign, we focus our message on the most receptive audience possible. Sometimes, we get a very good conversion rate and then, when we scale up the campaign to a more diluted, more representative audience (in terms of receptivity to our product or message), we fail to dup...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I: Overview
• Part II: The Six Disciplines
• Part III: The Four Shifts
• Part IV: Succeeding with Agile Marketing
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement