As with any change, introducing Agile Marketing into an organization will benefit from a thoughtful approach:
- Get educated on Agile values and processes
- Enroll management early and often
- Start with a small, well-defined project
- Scream your successes from the mountaintop
Certain areas of marketing lend themselves more easily to agile marketing than others, and it may make sense to get started in one of these areas: digital marketing, email campaigns, case studies, collateral, microsites, social media campaigns, lead generation, event support and channel training.
Other areas of marketing do not lend themselves as well to agile marketing: positioning, pricing, market definition, competitive analysis, product roadmap.
Start small, with a group of 4-7 marketers, and make sure that everyone understands agile marketing and is excited about trying out agile as a methodology. You will probably spend extra time in the sprint planning, sprint review and sprint retrospective meetings, as everyone is new to the process. Allow for this extra time. Have your scrum meetings in the same place every day, and make sure that you have a prominent visual artifact of the work: a white board or a kan-ban board with a row per team member and Post-It notes with user stories and tasks. For your first iteration, try to make sure that everyone is local, and not part of a geographically distributed team.
Make sure that management is on board, and that you set reasonable expectations. Invite management to the first Sprint Planning sessions, and get alignment on the goals, and how marketing will be measured. Also invite sales, and make sure that there is a clear understanding of the interaction between sales and marketing. This means getting agreement on topics like “What is a qualified lead?”, “What messages are we telling our customers?”, “What are the critical steps in the buying process?”
At the end of the Sprint, invite management and sales back for a review of the results and a “demo” of some of the deliverables. Make sure that everyone is aware of your successes.
