December 2022

What is marketing agility?

Over the course of countless blogs, we’ve talked about agile marketing, why it’s important and how its helping teams improve engagement, marketing performance and driving efficiencies in their ways of working.

As we head into 2023 marketing agility and agile marketing are again key trends and capabilities needed in your marketing to respond to internal and external pressures.

When I talk to marketers about agility, I typically get the response ‘our teams are constantly adapting to market forces’ and that is certainly an element of marketing agility. But I would argue that it is so much more than that. So, in this blog post we’re going to go back to basics and discuss what we mean by marketing agility.

Defining marketing agility

When googling marketing agility, a few definitions appear. The one I like is from the American Marketing Association:

the extent to which an entity rapidly iterates between making sense of the market and executing marketing decisions to adapt to the market.

A couple of reasons why I like this definition:

It incorporates the internal and external – something that marketers are constantly balancing
It uses the term iterate – which is key, because marketing agility is a continual process, something we must look at again and again

Some of you are probably thinking that definition also lines up nicely with the typical response I get from marketers, and it does, to a certain extent. The final reason I like this definition is It includes making sense of the market and executing decisions – two very simple phrases that mask what can be very complex processes. Processes that make or break a team’s ability to be agile.

So, let’s drill down into the key elements of marketing agility.

What is marketing agility made up of?

There are 5 key things to think about when looking at marketing agility as outlined in the diagram.

The top half is what we describe when running our training courses as doing agile, and the bottom half is focused more on being agile.

You can’t have agility without elements of all 5 – but some are more important than others.

Doing agile

This is the remit of tools, processes, and practices. The martech, data analytics and project management tools you use to capture, analyse, manage, and execute marketing activity with as well as your ways of working.

With the technology landscape growing and only increasing in its complexity (Scott Brinker’s martech map puts it at 9,932 solutions) tools deserves its own post and we’ll write one soon.

Processes and practices are interesting because you will see benefits from doing agile in terms of efficiencies and ability to respond more effectively to internal and external forces. Whether adopting pure Kanban, Scrum, SAFE or a combination of methodologies based on your business context there are key elements of the processes and practices that support marketing agility:

Practices	Value
Sprints	Allow teams to tackle smaller amounts of work within a specific timeframe and deliver activity iteratively and adjust plans accordingly based on performance and customer feedback.
Planning	Ensure teams are aligned on what trying to achieve and what the team need to do to deliver these outcomes.
Retrospectives	A chance to reflect on successes, learnings and how they need to inform activity moving forward.
Workflows (e.g., Kanban boards)	Giving teams visibility on all activity and help leads reprioritise and manage tasks accordingly.

However, the real value of marketing agility is in the ‘what’ and being agile.

Being agile

Being agile is about the principles, values, and mindsets your team embody to respond to changing customer preferences and market conditions.

To understand more about the principles and values of agile I recommend reading the agile marketing manifesto. These form the foundation of marketing agility and the standards to work by.

The ones that stand out when thinking about marketing agility are:

Focus on customer value and outcomes rather than outputs
Delivering value early and often
Learning through experiments and data (read our blog post on experimentation to understand more)
Respond to change over following a static plan

In short – the most effective way to inject agility is to focus on what your customers need, and experiment with propositions, messaging, channels etc to understand how prospects and customer engage, using this data to optimise on-going activity.

Incorporating these elements into your marketing can help you stay ahead of the game and ensure your efforts are always relevant, effective, and on target. With a bit of effort, you’ll be able to capitalize on emerging trends, create compelling campaigns and respond quickly to customer feedback – all key components of marketing agility.

December 22, 2022 Sian Heaphy Agile Training and Transformation

The complexity of marketing transformation

…AND THE SIX KEY ELEMENTS YOU NEED TO BE ON TOP OF FOR SUCCESSFUL MARKETING TRANSFORMATION

“Change is constant”

We’ve all heard this or a variation of this expression. And whilst that may be the case, what’s also true is our innate resistance to it.

We tend to underestimate the level of change required in marketing transformation programmes and often aren’t prepared or willing to accept the likely drops in productivity, performance and potentially revenue. Leaders try to maintain current levels of performance whilst also asking their marketing teams to adopt the new/target state. Or worse, don’t actively manage the change and hope it will happen organically over time.

As time goes on, the transformation loses traction and momentum, marketing teams don’t see the results and eventually the programme stalls, leaving you back where you started or worse – with a confused and disenchanted team.

When it comes to marketing transformation there are two things to consider:

What you are looking to transform and why
How you will actively manage the transformation (the execution)

Poor execution is typically highlighted as the culprit when transformation goes wrong, but an interesting study by the Harvard Business Review suggested that not getting the ‘what to change’ part right is equally to blame.

Let’s take a look at both.

What are you looking to change

With any marketing transformation you’re ultimately looking to generate more value – whether that’s through improving marketing effectiveness, creating operational efficiencies or driving growth through better customer experiences

To start to understand what needs to change, you first need to listen – to your team(s), customers, and any other key stakeholders to identify the good (the things you want to keep or build on), the bad, and more importantly the underlying root causes across both.

This will give you insights and clarity on what underlying issues need to be addressed in your marketing – whether that’s process, capabilities, or technology and how you might start to address them.

Actively managing the transformation (the execution)

When it comes to managing and implementing change within your marketing teams there are a few key things to think about:

Shared Vision

Simon Sinek does a great job highlighting the importance of why everything should start with a purpose, including your transformation. Why are we changing, what are we looking to achieve?

If your teams don’t understand the outcomes you’re now looking for, this will lead to confusion, lack of buy-in for the transformation and discord within the team.

Skills

The next factor is skills. What skills or capabilities are needed to drive the transformation? For example agile marketing, data literacy, understanding of new technologies etc. Does your team have these, or do they have the training to enable them to execute on what they are being asked to do?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, and there are no plans to upskill or bring in the right skill sets, then you risk your team feeling anxious about how they are going to drive the change.

This is a great opportunity in the marketing transformation journey to review the skills you need now and in the future for a successful marketing team. Map your team skills and identify the gaps – note this isn’t about job titles, this is about the skills to plan and execute on your marketing activity.

Resources

I see a lot of businesses try to maintain current levels of performance whilst asking their marketing teams to adopt the new/target state or to do more with less, particularly during times of uncertainty and a poorer economic climate like the one we’re in now. This can lead to frustration.

What resources are available? Are they sufficient to drive the transformation? What additional resource is needed? And if it’s not possible to bring in additional resources, what can be deprioritised to ensure existing teams have the capacity to take on the new requirements?

These are all things that you need to consider and guide your teams on – so they can maintain focus on key business priorities and delivering value for the marketing function.

Incentives

When it comes to change, we must remember that we are dealing with people and that means thinking about how we make the change relevant to them, so they see the value and benefits.

Get this right and it can get you the consensus and buy-in needed to make the change work, get it wrong and it can lead to resistance.

When we talk about incentives this doesn’t have to be monetary. Developing new skills, whether that is in different areas of marketing, or new experiences across different markets or products can also be meaningful incentives. Whatever you choose, it’s important to be consistent, follow through with any promise and ensure it ties back into the shared vision.

Strategy

You wouldn’t go to market without a clear strategy so why should your transformation be any different? A clear strategy, milestones to work towards and plan of action for how you progress is key. This helps to monitor the transformation and give your teams a clear direction.

Without this, programmes risk false starts or a sense of moving around in circles and not gaining any traction with the programme.

Governance

Ensuring your programmes have a clear governance and framework in place is critical to success. Without governance it can cause inconsistency and slow progress due to confusion re who is in charge / where to go for support, back-tracking on decisions etc.

That means ensuring:

Clear marketing transformation leadership roles
Clear structure that organises and coordinates the transformation programme
Clear processes and decision-making structure

Manage the change curve to realise impact of change at pace

In any marketing transformation there is going to be a dip in performance in the short term. As business leaders we must accept this with the view that the longer-term gains (improved customer experiences, ROI, and higher performing teams) will outweigh any short-term impact.

The aim of any change management process is to manage and address all the elements above to create a shorter dip and increased pace of sustainable change. If change is constant and inevitable, managing that change for a successful transformation is essential. If you’re not managing the marketing transformation, you are missing a key opportunity to harness change, which is happening in your team, but could be to the detriment of your marketing rather than improvement – direct the change, set a vision, and implement change sustainably.

December 6, 2022 Sian Heaphy Marketing Strategy

Setting clear objectives and key results can transform your marketing

Does it feel like you’re working away on marketing activity, without focusing on the overall business goals? You’re not alone.

Without clear and tangible goals, it can be difficult to measure marketing progress, and to ensure it is aligning with what you want your teams to achieve. By implementing a system to regularly check in on clearly defined objectives, you can create a culture focused on measuring results and delivering value. This is where OKRs come in.

What is an OKR?

OKRs have become pretty well adopted across most businesses now, but it’s always worth a reminder… Objectives and key results – or OKR’s – are a great way to define what your individual and teams’ goals are, and what achieving them will look like.

As the name suggests OKRs are broken down into:

Objectives: the business goal you wish to achieve. Your objective should be aspirational, memorable, and qualitative.

Key Results: results we want to achieve on the way to successfully achieving the objective. A general rule of thumb is to have no more than 2-5 key results per objective.

When used effectively, OKRs allow an organisation to:

Focus and commit to priorities
Align and connect teamwork
Be accountable through tracking
Stretch to achieve ambitious results

Using OKR’s for greater marketing agility

Having well-defined OKRs are a great way to encourage a move away from untargeted, scattered and ad-hoc marketing activity, and towards work aligned with achieving wider business goals.

OKRs can help transform your marketing activities into business value by:

Keeping teams on track – with OKRs set, teams can act more autonomously on their own initiative, with clearly-defined goals. They encourage a “what’s next” mentality which can help drive campaigns & projects forward.

Focusing on results – by adopting OKRs, you’re promoting a results-focused culture. This will have a knock-on effect in terms of your teams’ bandwidth – doing more doesn’t help if there’s no significant impact on the overall goals, meaning the sole focus is on work & tasks that contribute to the right outcomes, rather than quantity.

Prioritising goals – OKRs help with prioritising your marketing backlog, if a user story (or task) won’t assist in achieving your OKRs, it’s not a priority. They can also help you evaluate progress and against clearly defined goals.

Self-organising teams – agreeing on objectives as part of the OKR process allows teams to take initiative, and work towards confirmed goals. This incentivises a leaner, more focused workload, with a lesser chance of teams burning out.

Agile marketing transformation – one of the main obstacles to greater marketing agility is a perceived lack of predictability. With OKRs, you can overcome the unknown, by committing to deliver business results within a set period, such as a quarter. OKRs aren’t about sending a certain number of emails per month for the sake of doing so – they are about working on what delivers the best outcomes and incremental experimenting to discover what works best. Through iteration, you can not only measure progress, but also have the scope to experiment with marketing outputs to achieve results, without using excess time or budget.

Getting started with OKRs

When introducing OKRs, you don’t have to start large – one way to do it is to identify 3-4 key objectives to be achieved across a longer period, such as an entire year. These will be larger objectives and are usually agreed upon at a senior level, such as by the board or leadership team for the business to focus on. Once identified, then marketing needs to decide how they can best contribute and demonstrate outcomes and results to support the business achieving them. The final stage is to break them down within each quarter of the year.

This mixture of a larger, yearly target, alongside smaller quarters can assist in showcasing how objectives in one particular area can contribute to the wider organisation. As well as making it easier for the marketing team to stay focused and work towards larger goals by achieving and calibrating against quarterly targets as well as breaking them down further into shorter sprints.

Setting measurable key results is essential for reaching your objectives. While having an annual measurement may be beneficial, one opportunity a year won’t provide enough insight into whether the work has been successful or not – regular data collection can ensure that goals are being met in real-time across the year!

Questions to ask when setting OKRs

When setting your OKR’s, you should ask yourself some vital questions to ensure they make sense from a business and resource perspective.

OKR setting – questions you should ask

What does the business want to achieve?
Who do you want to target, in a given timeframe?
What milestones are you putting in place to track your goals against your sprint activity?
What reporting are you using to monitor your work? Consider what is available to measure based on your current tech stack.
What performance do you want to see across chosen channels?
Does this data provide insight am I avoiding vanity metrics?

Getting your OKRs right at the start of the process can prove highly beneficial for a campaign, so it’s worthwhile to spend some time thinking about these questions. Well defined and realistic OKRs can have a positive impact on marketing strategy, by promoting learning and reflection.

Performance matters, OKRs give the scope to improve marketing performance

OKRs can have plentiful benefits for your business and teams. They can promote a culture focused on delivering – and measuring – value and help align activity towards achieving business goals. They also act as a safety net to enable timely course correction and demonstrate how marketing is contributing towards achieving the overall business goals. By highlighting areas of underperformance or market opportunities you can adapt and realign your strategy, campaign or project to achieve better marketing outcomes.

December 2, 2022 Lydia Kirby Marketing Strategy