Lean Marketing: Agile Techniques & Collaboration Tools

Host: Lynn McLeod

Market Architects

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

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

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

Key takeaway

Results > Process

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

Experiment w/ team structure

Thanks to:

Use agile process [what is “Scrum”?]

Scrum = an agile project management process

•  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: –  What I did yesterday

–  What I’m going to do today

–  What is blocking my progress, if anything

•  Burn down chart tracks velocity

•  After each sprint, review and apply what you learned

 

Use agile tools [what is Kanban?] Cheap and easy: whiteboard and stickies

Cloud tools: esp. for virtual teams, ex: Trello, Asana, Kanban Tool, Pivotal Tracker, +hundreds to choose from

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/collaborative-spaces/

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 ]

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

Quick wireframe tools Balsamiq.com

Landing page testing tools

Resources

•  Blogs:

–  www.agilemarketing.net

•  Kit:

–  www.hubspot.com/modern-marketing-team-kit/

•  Meetup:

–  http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Agile-Marketing/

Final thought

Don’t start with a task list.

Do start with the end in mind.

Thanks for your interest!

Lynn McLeod Market Architects @mktarchitects

linkedin.com/in/lynnmcleod/