• MarTech Today
  • Sections
    • Ads
    • Marketing
    • Content
    • Sales
    • Analytics
    • Management
    • Resources
    • More
    • Home
  • Follow Us
    • Follow
  • MarTech Today
  • Ads
  • Marketing
  • Content
  • Sales
  • Analytics
  • Mgmt
  • Resources
  • More
  • Events
    • Follow
  • SUBSCRIBE

MarTech Today

MarTech Today
  • Ads
  • Marketing
  • Content
  • Sales
  • Analytics
  • Management
  • Resources
  • More
  • Events
  • Newsletters
  • Home
Martech: Management

Implementing agile marketing experiments lead to leadership buy-in

Start grassroots experiments with the team as a way to demonstrate agile practices while also educating leaders and middle management about how their roles can evolve to support this new way of working.

Stacey Ackerman on November 4, 2019 at 2:31 pm
  • More

Too often companies approach agile marketing as a new process for the team, but in reality, there are often substantial organizational changes that need to be made. The companies that do well implementing agile marketing have both elements in play: real agile experimentation on the ground with teams and leadership buy-in.

Learning from the ground up

Agile marketing is all about learning from experimentation, so what better way to experiment than with the team actually doing the marketing execution work.

The best way to prove a new method of working is to test it and learn from on-the-ground success stories, as well as failures. This grassroots approach can work really well, especially in smaller companies that may already be agile-minded.

Here are a few small experiments that you can try with minimal disruption:

1. Start a daily standup meeting with the entire team

This is a really low-cost, high-yield way to improve communication and collaboration. It’s a minimal time investment with a lot of benefits such as improving communication as a team rather than one-off conversations, reducing the need for additional meetings and a way to instantly solve problems together.

To get further buy-in from leaders on implementing agile marketing, document time saved from other meetings as well as how quickly problems are resolved this way versus how your team worked before the experiment.

2. Visualize your work 

A lot of marketers are plagued by too much work with little transparency into what they’ve already committed to doing. 

By visualizing the work of everyone on your team and making it transparent and visible to everyone, the team can begin having trade-off conversations when new requests come in. This can be done with a simple board on the wall or a simple online tool such as Trello or Monday.

Rather than blindly just filling up their plates, it can become a negotiation-type of conversation. “I can add that request, but here’s the impact it will have on the other thing we’re working on right now for you.”

With this experiment, track how many requests you were able to negotiate – to start at a later time or not at all – with these new shared insights. You can also measure the results to determine if this new approach has helped the team complete more work with fewer interruptions.

Leaders who are willing to change 

The grassroots to agile marketing approach is definitely a good starting point, but in conjunction with those efforts, there needs to be leadership buy-in to radically change a stodgy culture with outdated management processes.

An agile marketing team becomes successful when it has the ability to work from one prioritized marketing backlog. This allows the people doing the work to spend time actually working, not fielding ad-hoc requests.

In order to do this successfully, leaders need to understand their role isn’t to assign work or to interrupt the team with emergency requests. This slows the team down and makes deadlines for completion unreliable.

An agile marketing leader needs to work at a higher level to provide strategic direction while allowing the team the freedom to figure out how to best accomplish those goals.

It helps to have one person on the team, often called a product owner or marketing owner, that is accountable for prioritizing the team’s work.

Creating value for the frozen middle

Middle managers feel the most threatened by the organizational changes that come with agile marketing so it’s important to clearly communicate their value and how they contribute to an agile company.

These managers work well as practice leads in agile marketing. The manager may lead the content team, for example, and as a practice lead would make sure that the content writers have standards for quality, learning opportunities and feel supported in their craft.

To succeed in agile marketing, look to start grassroots experiments with the team while educating leaders and middle management on how their roles can evolve to support this new way of working. Agile marketing isn’t just for one team – it’s for the entire organization to become more flexible, adaptable and customer-centric.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech Today. Staff authors are listed here.



About The Author

Stacey Ackerman
Stacey knows what it’s like to be a marketer, after all, she’s one of the few agile coaches and trainers that got her start there. After graduating from journalism school, she worked as a content writer, strategist, director and adjunct marketing professor. She became passionate about agile as a better way to work in 2012 when she experimented with it for an ad agency client. Since then she has been a scrum master, agile coach and has helped with numerous agile transformations with teams across the globe. Stacey speaks at several agile conferences, has more certs to her name than she can remember and loves to practice agile at home with her family. As a lifelong Minnesotan, she recently relocated to North Carolina where she’s busy learning how to cook grits and say “y’all."

Related Topics

Channel: Martech: ManagementMarketing Strategies Column

Subscribe to receive daily martech news and expert insights. See terms.


We're listening.

Have something to say about this article? Share it with us on Facebook and Twitter.

Get the daily newsletter digital marketers rely on.
See terms.

ATTEND OUR EVENTS

MarTech 2021: March 16-17

MarTech 2021: Sept. 14-15

MarTech 2020: Watch On-Demand

×

Attend MarTech - Click Here


Learn More About Our MarTech Events

White Papers

  • A Beginner’s Guide to Omnichannel Marketing using Marketing Automation
  • The Top Five Objections That Hold Companies Back From Doing SEO
  • How To Optimize SEO With UGC
  • Email Tune-Up: A 5-Point Inspection to Get Your Program in Gear
  • Digital Marketing Report Q4 2020: Benchmarks and Insights for 2021
See More Whitepapers

Webinars

  • The Secret Behind SEO Success: Predict Rank with the Power of Data Science
  • How to Avoid the Digital Transformation Trap
  • How to Build a Marketing System of Record
See More Webinars

Research Reports

  • Local Marketing Solutions for Multi-Location Businesses
  • Enterprise Digital Asset Management Platforms
  • Identity Resolution Platforms
  • Customer Data Platforms
  • B2B Marketing Automation Platforms
  • Call Analytics Platforms
See More Research

Receive daily martech news and analysis.
Martech Today
Download the Martech Today app on iTunes
Download the Martech Today App on Google Play

Channels

  • Advertising
  • Marketing
  • Content
  • Social
  • Commerce
  • Sales
  • Analytics
  • Management
  • Home

Our Events

  • MarTech
  • SMX

Resources

  • White Papers
  • Research
  • Webinars
  • MarTech Conference

About

  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Privacy
  • Marketing Opportunities
  • Staff
  • Connect With Us

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Newsletters
  • Instagram
  • RSS
  • iOS App
  • Google Play

© 2021 Third Door Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

Your privacy means the world to us. We share your personal information only when you give us explicit permission to do so, and confirm we have your permission each time. Learn more by viewing our privacy policy.Ok