How to Be More Efficient With Marketing Input and Output
Originally developed for software development, “agile” can be used for any project or product management.
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The most effective and efficient way to do growth marketing — really, all marketing — is to take the “agile” approach.
Originally developed for software development, “agile” can be used for any project or product management.
During the days of traditional advertising, marketing, and media, campaigns were developed using a linear approach: Plan, create, implement, and then measure. But because of the hyper-dynamic pace of the internet, the vivid lines that once separated the four phases in this approach have been blurred.
As such, the “agile” approach emphasizes:
Responding to change over following a plan
Rapid iterations over Big-Bang campaigns
Testing and data over opinions and conventions
Numerous small experiments over a few large bets
Individuals and interactions over target markets
Collaboration over silos and hierarchy
Agile, in the growth marketing context, means using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real-time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly iterating. At scale, a high-functioning agile growth marketing business can run multiple campaigns simultaneously and multiple new ideas every week.
The truth is, many businesses think that they are working in an agile way because they have adopted some agility principles, such as test and learn or reliance on cross-functional teams. But when you look below the surface, you quickly find they are only partly agile, and they therefore only reap partial benefits.
For example, marketing often does not have the support of the legal department, IT, or finance, so approvals, back-end dependencies, or spend allocations are slow. Or their agency and technology partners are not aligned on the need for speed and cannot move quickly enough. Simply put: If you are not agile all the way, then you are not agile.
For businesses competing in this era of disruption, that is a problem. In many businesses, revenues in the segment offerings and product lines that use agile techniques have grown by as much as a factor of four. And even the most digitally savvy businesses, where one typically sees limited room for improvement, have experienced revenue uplift of 20 to 40 percent.
Agile also increases speed: Businesses that formerly took multiple weeks or even months to get a good idea translated into a practice fielded to customers find that after they adopt agile growth marketing practices, they can do it in less than two weeks.1
There are a number of prerequisites for agile growth marketing to work. You must have a clear sense of what you want to accomplish with your agile initiative (e.g. which customer segments you aspire to acquire or which customer decision journeys you desire to improve) and have sufficient data, analytics, and the right kind of marketing technology infrastructure in place.
This technology component helps marketers capture, aggregate, and manage data from disparate systems; make decisions based on advanced propensity and next-best-action models; automate the delivery of campaigns and content across channels; and feed customer tracking and message performance back into the system.
(It should be noted that the tech tools do not have to be perfect. In fact, it can be a trap to focus on them too much. Most businesses actually have an excessive amount of tools.)
While these elements are crucial for success, the most important item is the people — bringing together a small team of talented people who can work together at speed. They should possess skills across multiple functions (both internal and external), be released from their “BAU” (business as usual) day jobs to work together full-time, and be grouped in a “war room.”
The mission of the war-room team, as these groups are sometimes called (though some businesses refer to them by other names, such as “pod” or “tribe”) is to execute a series of quick-turnaround experiments designed to create real bottom-line impact.
The exact composition of the war-room team depends on what tasks it plans to undertake. Tests that involve a lot of complex personalization will need a team weighted more heavily toward analytics. By contrast, if the agile initiative expects to run large numbers of smaller conversion-rate optimization tests, it would make more sense to load up on user-experience designers and project-management talent.
The team itself needs to be small enough for everyone to remain clearly accountable to one another — 8 to 12 is the maximum size. Jeff Bezos famously referred to “two-pizza teams” (i.e. teams no bigger than can be fed by two pizzas).
A “scrum master,” ideally with experience in agile and often working with an assistant, leads the team. The scrum master sets priorities, defines the hypotheses, manages the backlog, identifies necessary resources, and manages “cycles” (one- to two-week cycles of work).
Building out an agile war room can also require working in new ways with external agencies, adding depth in key resource areas such as media buying, creative, and user experience (UX) design, or analytics as needed. Working at the pace of agile may challenge a business’ established workflows, but we have found that once they get into the rhythm, the performance boost justifies the change in procedures.
The business’ senior leaders will understandably need to oversee the activities of the war-room team. But they ought to interact with the team in a lightweight manner — once every three or four weeks, for example. Automated dashboards with key metrics can help provide leadership with transparency.
Once the war-room team is assembled, it works with the leaders of the growth marketing and other key stakeholders to align everyone on the initiative’s goals. After that, the war-room team has a kickoff meeting to establish clearly that former ground rules and norms no longer apply and to articulate the agile culture and expectations: deep and continuous collaboration; speed; avoidance of “business as usual”; embracing the unexpected; striving for simplicity; data-trumping opinions; accountability — and above all, putting the customer at the center of all decisions.
By its second day, the team ought to be up and running and doing real work. That begins with developing insights based on targeted analytics. The insights should aim to identify anomalies, pain points, issues, or opportunities in the decision journeys of key customer or prospect segments.
Each morning there is a daily stand-up in which each team member gives a quick report on what they accomplished the day before and what they plan to do today. This is a powerful practice for imposing accountability, since everyone makes a daily promise to their peers and must report on it the very next day.
For each identified opportunity or issue, the team develops both ideas about how to improve the experience and ways to test those ideas. For each hypothesis, the team designs a testing method and defines key performance indicators (KPIs). Once a list of potential tests has been generated, it is prioritized based on two criteria: potential business impact and ease of implementation. Prioritized ideas are bumped to the top of the queue to be tested immediately.
The team runs tests in one- to two-week “cycles” to validate whether the proposed approaches work — for example, does changing a call to action or an offer for a particular segment result in more customers completing a bank’s online loan application process? The team needs to operate efficiently — few meetings, and those are short and to the point — to manage an effective level of throughput, with a streamlined production and approval process. One team at a European bank ran a series of systematic weekly media tests across all categories and reallocated spending based on the findings on an ongoing basis. This effort helped lead to more than a tenfold increase in conversion rates.
The team must have effective and flawless tracking mechanisms in place to quickly report on the performance of each test. The scrum master leads review sessions to go over test findings and decide how to scale the tests that yield promising results, adapt to feedback, and kill off those that aren’t working — all within a compressed time frame.
At the end of each cycle, the war-room team debriefs to incorporate lessons learned and communicate results to key stakeholders. The scrum master resets priorities based on the results from the tests in the prior cycle and continues to work down the backlog of opportunities for the next cycle.
Getting a single war-room team up and running is good, but the ultimate goal is to have the entire business operate in an agile way. Doing this requires a willingness to invest the time and resources to make “agile” stick. The first step in scaling is building credibility. As the war-room team works its way through tests, the results of agile practices will begin to propagate across the business.
For each test that generates promising results, for example, the team can forecast the impact at scale and provide a brief to the growth marketing team, with guidelines for establishing a series of business rules to use for activities and initiatives based on operationalizing the finding more broadly. With credibility, it is easier to add more agile teams; one global retail company we know has scaled up its operations to include 13 war rooms operating in parallel.
As companies add new war rooms, it is important that each one be tightly focused on a specific goal, product, or service, based on the business goals of the company. Some companies, for example, have one team focused on customer acquisition and another on cross-selling or upselling to existing customers. Others have teams dedicated to different products, customer segments, or junctures in the customer journey.
We recommend adding agile teams one at a time and not adding new ones until the latest is operating effectively. As the number of teams grows and their capabilities increase, they can begin to expand their focus to assume responsibility for establishing business rules and executing against them.
That systematic approach not only gives each new team intensive support as it comes online; it also allows business leaders to develop the kind of metrics dashboard it can use to track and manage performance for each team.
This “control tower” helps to align resources as well, share best practices, and help break through bureaucratic issues. By scaling up in this way, the control-tower team has the opportunity to bring along all the supporting capabilities for marketing, everything from customer management to analytics to procurement, so that they operate at higher speeds as well.
A North American retailer established an agile marketing control tower and several war rooms to scale personalization across all key categories. The control tower ensured that the hundreds of tests run each year did not conflict and that the right technology was in place to collect appropriate data from the addressable audiences and to deliver a personalized experience across categories and channels.
The war rooms each focused on systematically testing different media attributes and optimizing conversion on the company website across categories. After 18 months, the retailer’s marketing-campaign throughput had grown four-fold, its customer satisfaction had increased by 30 percent, and digital sales had doubled.
As promising test findings become business rules, and as the number of war rooms grows, insights generated by agile practices will shape an ever-larger percentage of the organization’s marketing activities.
Business operators contemplating change often speak of the challenge associated with overcoming business as usual. By aggressively adopting agile practices, they can transform their business into fast-moving teams that continually drive growth.
Once you have your “agile” approach in place and your growth marketing wheels consistently turning, regularly updating the experiences that you are providing customers through growth marketing can help it stay fresh — and making the effort to deliver experiences that go above and beyond can be a powerful investment in the lifetime value of a customer. Broader reinventions can take place over the course of a year.
“Each quarter, I ask every department to submit three reinvention ideas,” said one hotel general manager. “Not only does it help brainstorm, but it also builds staff ownership.”
Still, it is always crucial to see the bigger picture. The focus should be on boosting revenue and building customer relationships, not just on costs. Where growth marketing sometimes fails is when it creates cookie-cutter leaders who make shortsighted cost-benefit trade-offs.
True growth marketing is less about lofty price points and fancy graphic design, and more about key messaging that is consistently executed with thought and care. A culture of excellence among staff is what paves the way for effective growth marketing (and can create great customer experience in more affordable contexts, as well).
Customers want businesses to speak with a common voice, even when they deal with different parts of the organization. That rarely happens. More often, the marketing unit says one thing while another department will say something entirely different. That creates confusion, which always detracts from the customer experience.
When doing growth marketing, it is integral to get everyone in your business on the same page about how you speak about your business and its different facets.
It is also critical that people leading growth marketing imagine themselves as “chief customer officers” because customers want their favorite brands to deliver an engaging experience with every interaction.
You have to create an obsession and ardor for your customers that transcends mere transactions. You have to build a business culture that is so obsessed with your customer’ needs and/or wants that all employees are motivated to truly bridge these gaps in tangible and practical ways, including but not limited to growth marketing.
Do not hesitate to go above and beyond. It is possible to be mindful of ROI — understanding where to spend and where to look for savings — while still finding ways to offer growth marketing that surprises and delights customers. When that occurs, feelings of passion and excitement are generated, which easily differentiate one business from all others.
There’s more where this came from at the Growth Marketing Institute.
“Agile marketing: A step-by-step guide.” Mckinsey & Company. November 9, 2016.