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How Agile Can Change How Marketers Think, Work, and Succeed
74 Plays3 years ago
In the software world, agile has been around for many years.
It's how software is developed more efficiently and iteratively.
But agile is also being embraced by organizations looking to make their marketing more successful.
Michael Seaton says agile fundamentally changes how marketer think and work.
It's about making marketing more structured, focused and effective.
It's about giving marketing teams the psychological safety to test and learn without getting sent to the penalty box if they make mistakes.
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Transcript
The Evolving Nature of Marketing: Constant Learning and Adaptation
00:00:02
Speaker
Hi, it's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. Here's the thing about marketing. It's dynamic, fluid, and ever-changing. There's no time to rest on your laurels. You constantly need to be learning, training, and embracing new approaches and tools. And as important, marketers need to be flexible and agile. They need to roll with the punches, quickly and seamlessly seize new opportunities, and turn on a dime when needed.
Outdated Strategies vs. Digital Needs
00:00:32
Speaker
The challenge is many organizations use outdated marketing management strategies, which don't work in an always-on digital world. So how should marketers operate so they're smarter and more successful?
What is Agile Marketing?
00:00:44
Speaker
Well, Michael Satin, president of Level C Digital, believes the solution is agile marketing. The most innovative and forward-thinking companies embrace agility to grow and thrive.
00:00:55
Speaker
On today's podcast, we're going to take a deep dive into agile marketing and why it's the new way that marketing happens. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Michael. Well, thanks Mark. Thanks for having me and having the conversation on agile. So let's level set. Let's start by talking about how many companies currently manage or operate their marketing. Fundamentally, why is the current approach antiquated or the wrong approach given today's marketing landscape?
VUCA: Challenges in Modern Marketing
00:01:21
Speaker
Yeah, so that's great because it's the natural lead into how we talk to this subject. So I'd like to say the state of marketing, and I hate the word, but I'll use it. It's called VUCA. I don't know if you're aware of the VUCA environment we're in, but it's the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment that we find ourselves in both at a business and marketing level.
00:01:41
Speaker
If we take a classic SWAT sort of look at things and we look at the external factors that are threats that are hitting us, the explosion of choices that we have as marketers today, the fragmented channels and touch points, the data and the martech that is on top of everything that's making it a bit more complex than it's ever been, the rapid pace of change, the hyper competition,
00:02:03
Speaker
distraction of consumers and the fight for attention. So if we situate that in the marketing world that is no longer the big bang explosion of a campaign, it's always on. We have niche skills and silos that have been created. We're not really good at collaborating, although we should be.
00:02:21
Speaker
We have skills and capabilities that aren't being shared and cross pollinated. And by the way, we're trying to deliver customer experience through all of this. And it's the way we manage it that's really broken. So, you know, the tech over marketing discipline, we need to blend those together.
00:02:38
Speaker
we need to have this knowledge transfer from everybody who's within the world of marketing these days and boost morale and then focus as well on the outcomes from our marketing versus just the outputs because that's what I think we are. So that's what agility is providing benefits for.
The Need for Agility in Planning and Execution
00:02:56
Speaker
Well, let me challenge you. And one of the things you just said, you said that marketing is broken or the way that we manage or strategically approach marketing is broken. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? Cause that's a pretty bold statement. Yeah. So we have, um, you know, antiquated ways of going to managing things. Uh, one of the things that agility presents us with is, you know, back it up to the plan over planning.
00:03:24
Speaker
We've been really good in the past at creating these big-ball plans that are broken by the time we actually go to market with it. Things change, we need to adapt, and we haven't built in the flexibility that we need as today's marketers. Layer the pandemic on top of everything, and if we were slow to change, that brought us really quickly to the point of needing to change.
00:03:45
Speaker
And so it brought into play all these elements and still to this day, the always on nature of work versus the point in time or temporal projects, we need to balance those things out. So that's where it really is leading the fix. The second thing is that we are focused again, as I mentioned on the
00:04:02
Speaker
outputs of our marketing. And so where are we actually sitting down and going through getting those customer insights, dealing with their needs and creating value for them in the chain of what we do? I think one other last point is marketing has been really good at selling. And I think that switches to how we can service our base, our customers, our audience. So that's another place where I think we need to shift from selling at all costs to serving our audience for longer term.
Why Has Agile Been Delayed in Marketing?
00:04:29
Speaker
What's interesting is that agile in my world, in the B2B SaaS world, is nothing new. We've been talking about agile development for many years because it allows companies to iterate, experiment, test, and learn on the fly what resonates with customers and what doesn't. It is interesting that despite
00:04:53
Speaker
the presence of agile and the embrace of agile is that many organizations haven't applied it to marketing. Can you explain why that is the case? Um, well, it was born in the software world and in the product management world. And we saw that, you know, back about 20 to 30 years ago, what we were getting out of that world was not great. Um, and so along came agile and I guess the develop, um, sort of the delivery frameworks of scrum or canned end.
00:05:20
Speaker
And they started to fix things. And they started to fix things by orienting their teams to be more autonomous and deliver that value. And do it through, as you mentioned, the increment so that we could learn along the way. Back to where it took so long is because these things aren't easy. And they take some time. It's not a magic quick fix.
00:05:43
Speaker
But we started to see that the products were getting a lot better in the software world that customers were being impressed by how we were meeting their needs and were delivering on what we had promised. So there's a lot of, to back it up,
00:05:58
Speaker
where I think this really situates itself in terms of its mindset and its values and its principles truly drive agility. And software got it first, and they started to improve things. And we started to look over the shoulder at them and say, how did they go about that? And so it started to then break out to other areas of organizations like HR, like intermarketing. In fact, it was about 10 years ago that marketing
00:06:24
Speaker
Sort of you know shook their heads and said we've got to improve because you know digital transformation kind of hit us first And we were going through it, but we realized that we needed to sort of fix and mend our ways But it's taken a while for us to get from we need to fix this to now Where we see it really evolving and starting to be absorbed in marketing
Defining Agile Marketing: A Transformative Approach
00:06:44
Speaker
So we've danced a little around the idea of agile marketing. Maybe you can take a step back and I don't want you to dumb it down, but I'd like you to explain or define what is agile marketing and what's the difference between agile marketing and the way that we currently, many companies currently do marketing. So I'm going to start with, with, you know, very, I'm going to make it simple because we can get carried off into the nomenclature and then somebody wants to hear that and really down that rabbit hole.
00:07:14
Speaker
It really is about organizational effectiveness, and I like to call it modern marketing management. I think the simplest way to think about it is that it's the ability to change the way that we think and that we work and that we share, and we get to creating that highest customer value. I think the power is, like I mentioned in the mindset and the values and the principles, and at the core,
00:07:36
Speaker
If we think about the SWOT analysis again, it really puts us in the position of building new internal strengths that we can then take to seize new opportunities. Put in this way, I believe it changes, it's transformative because it changes our beliefs, again, about how we move from selling to more servicing our customers. It changes our behaviors in terms of looking at the highest value that we can create and put into market and learn from immediately.
00:08:02
Speaker
And the actions that we take also are transformative in terms of being more empirical, more iterative. And again, more transparent in what we're doing and how we're driving value and then how we're looking at ourselves to continuously improve. Big marketers sometimes do a lot of dark work. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. We need to kind of bring that out and show people what we do.
00:08:24
Speaker
how we go about it and how we're learning along the way. I think there's this notion that marketing is just the arts and crafts kind of department. We color in between the lines. We put fancy words on things. We talk about stuff and metrics that nobody else cares about aside from marketing. So I think this is our chance to really start to marry up where we've come from and where we find ourselves with digital and really put the stamp of business strategy and business outcomes on it.
00:08:47
Speaker
Before we take a deeper dive into agile marketing and how companies can embrace it, I do want to ask you about the rise of data and technology and how they're being used or how they're being embraced and used by marketers. Because my thesis is that a lot of marketers have gotten lazy.
00:09:08
Speaker
due to technology tools that allow them to scale their work, to extend campaigns, to analyze just about anything digitally. I believe as marketers, we've gotten away from being creative and iterative and
00:09:24
Speaker
and trying new things and I think most of all and this is increasingly something I see on LinkedIn a lot is the importance of knowing your customers and serving them in the right ways with the right kind
The Role of Creativity and Customer Understanding in Marketing
00:09:38
Speaker
of marketing. What are your thoughts on data and technology and how they're being used by marketers and what the relationship is to agile marketing?
00:09:48
Speaker
That's a great question and a great setup because it brings into play a lot of things that agile marketing is set up to actually do and do better than we do today. So, you know, let me start off with a more air cover kind of a statement that, you know, we've talked for years and we've known each other for a long time in this world about customer centricity and personalization and testing and learning and continuous improvement. And, you know, I've seen a lot of what goes on in marketing and we're just not doing it. Your question specifically about marketing technology and data
00:10:17
Speaker
I mean my background why i love the agile marketing pieces because it really does go back to my beginnings in marketing as a direct marketer, a database marketer, someone who was involved in CRM and then took off with the digital piece later on. But yeah we are I find and I say this through my experience and through my teaching and instructing and training that what I see is a lot more people familiar with the technology
00:10:40
Speaker
They understand the platforms in terms of our skill sets, but they don't have the marketing discipline behind them to know what they're actually looking to do with it.
00:10:49
Speaker
And then on the other side, we have a lot of marketing that still is sort of stuck in old ways of thinking without understanding how the technology and data will work. So we've got to marry those two together. And agile is a really sweet way to do it. Your question though is, yeah, I think we got lost in the worrying too much about automating everything, about it all happening programmatically.
00:11:11
Speaker
Or or through the martech solutions and i think the complexity of that and making it work or the magic of making work i should say is really understanding marketing in the first place.
00:11:22
Speaker
Don't throw tools at, you know, tools become the solution to a problem that doesn't exist. I believe that the problems that exist for marketers are more upstream, understanding sort of the quintessential, you know, your brand, your positioning, the story you tell, your calls to action, a great website, a great user experience. And I think what agility allows us to do is start to break that down by using concepts like personas and customer journeys and user stories.
00:11:50
Speaker
and understanding the increments of value that we can actually put in front of our customers to learn from. So I really see it as being a really sweet, nice toolkit where we can start to play into the right areas and gain those insights that we've been asking for. We just haven't had the right dominoes falling in the right order for us to achieve that.
00:12:09
Speaker
As you know from our relationship and some of the things that I write about, I'm all about first principles. I'm all about the fundamentals and really being strong around the key pillars of positioning and messaging and knowing your customers and all the good things that underpin successful marketing.
How to Embrace Agile Marketing Effectively?
00:12:28
Speaker
One of the things that I'm curious about is how and when should companies approach agile marketing?
00:12:35
Speaker
What needs to happen so they can successfully embrace it strategically tactically and as important culturally because I suspect that the shift to agile may rub some marketers the wrong way given it's a new approach to doing things. Let me define what it's not first because I think there are misconceptions out there.
00:12:52
Speaker
because we hear about agility and we think that it's being on a dime, being flexible. The true power of agility comes from it being more of a noun than a verb, meaning you've got to be actually understanding the mindset, the values, the principles,
00:13:08
Speaker
And it does take us to the side a little bit as marketers because marketers just want to playbook. We just want that algorithm. Tell us what works and we'll do it. This is not, by definition, super easy or everybody would be doing it, right? What it's not, it's not reactive or unsustainable marketing. Everybody thinks the Oreo Dunk in the Dark response within two minutes was agile marketing. That's an element of what agile marketing can help you with, but that in and of itself isn't
00:13:37
Speaker
Um, you know, we're, we're, we have a million priorities coming down the pipe at us. How do we know what work we should be doing? And by default, how do we also know what work we shouldn't be doing? I think that's a, that's a huge concept to understand. What's the max, how do we maximize the value of the work we do and how do we maximize what we're not doing as well? Again, the outputs over, the outcomes over outputs sort of, um, decision culturally, this is not a simple thing, meaning that.
00:14:05
Speaker
Part of what this does is it creates sort of self-organizing autonomous teams that are allowed to decide what value, what they want to prioritize in terms of delivering to our customers. It kind of removes this layer of middle management and the command and control, you should be working on this, go do that. And it brings it into the team, the team deciding what they need to do to deliver against objectives right now
00:14:35
Speaker
in an incremental or iterative fashion that then we'll build upon our learning, validate what we're doing, or invalidate it, and then we can move forward with that knowledge in our back pocket. We've known about this for a long time through direct marketing and database marketing and test and learn, maybe testing and marketing, but we haven't been that great at executing it all the time. I think that's what agility allows us to do. In simple terms, is agility
00:15:02
Speaker
Does it have a lot to do with focus and establishing and focusing on the key priorities? Because as marketers, off the top, you talked about the fact that there are so many options, so many channels, so many things that marketers could do to achieve their objectives and to connect with
00:15:19
Speaker
prospects and customers. And it sounds like agile marketing is a way to add discipline to the process to make marketers focus on what is important to the customer, what is important to achieving our goals, as opposed to running often in a million different directions. Is that a simplistic way of talking about the value of agile marketing?
00:15:41
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I think you're getting a large part of that equation. It really is about the value that we can deliver and also how the team looks at the work that we need to work on. What we need to do and visualizes our work and says, what is the most important thing we can do right now to satisfy
00:15:58
Speaker
the customer and the audience. How can we make this easy? It's not about doing everything at once but selecting those key things and the team prioritizes what they find of most value. It doesn't mean that we don't align to strategic objectives or align to what
00:16:14
Speaker
I'm a stakeholder one or you know but it really does put the focus on delivering against the customer needs we do that as i explained through understanding the better insights on i think that's the discipline. It's really going through this world we're not guessing or or you know thinking that this is gonna be the right thing we're actually getting into the mind of the customer.
00:16:34
Speaker
and understanding where they are on the journey to pain points, their solutions. I mean, it goes back to Clay Christensen and that very simple, like understand the jobs and the tasks that your customers have and make it as simple as possible and make it easy for them. Don't complicate it. Don't make it something that they shake their heads at. It should be as simple as anything.
00:16:57
Speaker
example in my banking days, mortgage was the ugly product detail of what people had to reconcile with about homeownership. When we attacked that, we thought about the insight was it's about homeownership. We should talk about all the wonderful things that come along with it. Oh, and by the way, we do have a mortgage that we can get to you and it's at a great rate. It's thinking in that capacity that really puts it into the marketer's head that
00:17:21
Speaker
It's not all about the product. It's about the customer and how they can live with our product. Did that answer the question about the values and the priorities that empowered the team to deliver? Yeah, it does. And I think one of the things that maybe I didn't have clarity on is that is defining agility versus flexibility. Agility is about focusing on what
Differentiating Agility from Flexibility
00:17:44
Speaker
matters. Flexibility is about being able to turn on a dime. And there are different concepts when it comes to agile marketing. Is that correct?
00:17:50
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And so I think one, and I just had this conversation earlier, I believe it's really more about effectiveness. We get to efficiency later on, but if you're doing the wrong things and you're just making the wrong things efficient, that's not going to work out well. So I put sort of the effectiveness of what we do. And you mentioned earlier, and I didn't hit on this point,
00:18:10
Speaker
It allows us to be hyper-focused. It reduces the distractions and hopefully the mindset for agility when it's absorbed by executive and our leaders. They understand their role in this world is they're the constant source of interruptions and distractions and new priorities.
00:18:29
Speaker
And it sort of embeds in them, you know, we have a methodology in the process that we're actually going to deliver this value. The more that we get interrupted, the more that we get asked for other things because we have this notion that agility is all about flexibility and turning on a dime. We want to quash that out of the gates. And one of the other things that agility allows us to focus
00:18:49
Speaker
Sorry, helps with the focus on is allowing the team, it's not just autonomy but psychological safety, that they can test and learn and they won't be put in the penalty box for doing something outside the realm of what the executive thinks is their opinions or conventions for where they think marketing should be or what marketing should be doing.
00:19:12
Speaker
Okay, so let's assume that you're the CEO or the head of marketing or an entrepreneur and you like the idea of agile and you're looking at making your marketing more effective and more focused and you are ready to explore or ready to embrace agile marketing.
00:19:32
Speaker
What do they need to do to make sure that they become agile marketing catalysts or change agents? You know, what are the keys to taking a concept and turning it into a corporate reality so that an organization can be structured differently, can focus on what's important and can become more efficient and more successful from a marketing perspective?
Becoming Agile Catalysts: Steps for Leadership
00:19:57
Speaker
Well, my company is embedded in workshopping and training and coaching, so I'd say that's a quintessential piece of it that you need to get going with. But it's more, I want to say, but it's sparking the imagination. What is the art of the possible and the ways that we manage? We've been under the guise of this military-tailorism approach to all of our corporate marketing.
00:20:19
Speaker
Sorry, all our corporate structure and hierarchies. And I mentioned before the command and control. This is a radical change. So the first thing is understanding what it is. And like I mentioned before, what it's not. Because it is driven by values and principles, again, in the way that we think about our work, the way that we behave with our work, and then the way that we take action with ourselves and with our work. So it's understanding that, understanding the values and the principles that allow us to be more collaborative, adaptive to change,
00:20:49
Speaker
deliver that value and also be able to be transparent in our work. I think that's one of the huge things that executive is kind of a little wary of, like how far does this go? And what does it mean in terms of how we operate now? Once the mindset is sort of established and it creates that air cover for how we can operate differently,
00:21:10
Speaker
We start to shift how we think about a waterfall type of a project management approach to, we need to do just enough planning to get us to the next stage because we are starting to acknowledge that the world's best plans change in five seconds after the project starts. So it is that shift. It's also this absorbing the work that we actually need to do in
00:21:40
Speaker
determining what, again, that value piece is. I think the other piece is looking at how empirical we get. One of the mistakes that we make in bringing in
00:21:55
Speaker
agile is thinking that it's all about a framework like Scrum or Kanban. Those become the methodologies for which we can deliver, but following those dogmatically, getting somebody who's really good at Scrum, bringing them in with no marketing background is not necessarily the recipe for success.
00:22:13
Speaker
So there's a lot of elements that need to sort of balance out. I think the key though is understanding what it is versus what it's not and then getting involved in understanding values and principles and how that fundamentally changes how we look at what we do and then approach the change to how we do it.
Transitioning to Agile Marketing: Support and Practical Application
00:22:32
Speaker
Let's segue given that into what you and Level C do. How do you work with organizations? How do you help them embrace and be successful with agile marketing? Is it workshops? Is it one-on-one coaching? Is it seminars? What are the different ways that you can then work with a company to help them with this process? The answer is yes to all the above. So Level C Digital has accredited courses with
00:23:01
Speaker
to teach agile marketing where those participants can get an agile marketing certificate. So that's sort of the back end of where we go with the workshops. What I found along the way with delivering the workshops, and we've known each other for a long time, you know I was teaching digital marketing strategy and management for quite a while.
00:23:20
Speaker
What I always found, Mark, was that you deliver the training, and if there's no follow-up after, it really kind of hits with a thud that people are, they love what they learned, but they have no application for it. So where I take things is, I will discuss with companies, is this right? It's not right for everybody.
00:23:38
Speaker
That's the first step, is really talking with leadership and understanding the issues and problems and obstacles to overcome in their marketing. Then look at, because it's not a one size fits all, how can agility help them? We have those natural conversations. I will come in and do a training and workshop over several days to train the core execution team. I will then teach leadership what it means as part of this package that I put together, teach leadership about
00:24:05
Speaker
how to think about agility, how they need to behave and understand how they can either stop it in its tracks from being successful or help to reinforce its benefits and behave in different ways. And then I follow up with 90 days of coaching. And the coaching comes into play where the team decides what they're going to do. And we pilot something, but it may take two weeks to set it up. It may take
00:24:32
Speaker
Two days to set it up. This then becomes their work to do with coaching along the way that I will provide in an ongoing way.
00:24:38
Speaker
And what we find is that we start slow and we build. We don't do everything at once. We sort of build in things that we test and learn. We are being agile in our agile implementation of AgileMark. So that's what I bring. And it's really funny how fast this stuff does break down, right? We go back to old ways of working. I'm there to sort of remind people that this is called agility because we're supposed to be being agile with it. And it really changes the way that people think about
00:25:06
Speaker
about their work and about how they work together. One final question in terms of how companies are embracing agile marketing at a time when many people are still working from home.
Impact of Remote Work on Agile Marketing
00:25:18
Speaker
Has this whole work from home phenomena been a positive or negative influence on the adoption of agile marketing?
00:25:26
Speaker
It's had its challenges, but we, you know, I like to say Agile is not about the tools or the software, but they certainly help a lot in the online environment when we're working from home. You know, these teams work really well when they're co-located, when they're all sort of, you know, face to face. And hopefully we'll get back to that environment one day soon. But there are ways you can do it online. In fact, I had to take my whole course and build it for the online environment.
00:25:54
Speaker
There's a lot of learnings, but how you can make it effective online. Some of the fundamental changes that agility brings to how a team operates really facilitates using the online space, but also one of the detractions in a true piece of agility is when we lose that human touch and that working side by side with people and looking over their shoulder,
00:26:17
Speaker
That's one of the pieces that I hope to get back and I don't know that any software can help with that. That's where the mindset and behaving with the values of how we work really steps into play when a team can jump on Zoom for 10 minutes as opposed to an hour really to solve a problem and then do what they need to do.
00:26:38
Speaker
Well, this has been great insight into agile marketing, a subject that I didn't know much about before we touch base. So thank you for that. Uh, where can people learn more about you and level C digital? Um, people can learn more about level C digital level, see digital.com. Um, I have a newsletter that I also send out called the digital, uh, digital digest that comes out weekly. And actually you were the inspiration for that newsletter. And then you changed your whole way of doing newsletters and stuff. I'm just going to stick with my knitting on it.
00:27:07
Speaker
Well, I was trying to be agile with my newsletter. Well, that's great. And hopefully, you're measuring and validating your learnings, and it's continuously improving for you. So you can find me at my website. I also teach at the University of Toronto. I'm also taking on a role at Seneca, where I'm teaching there as well. So I've got a lot of sort of irons and flyers, but it's the core of my website and my blog. Well, if you enjoyed this conversation, leave a review. Subscribe by iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media.
00:27:36
Speaker
To learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor and coach, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you next time.