• Proposition. How do you align and concentrate your creative marketing firm’s or in-house agency’s services with a focused vision, positioning strategy and value proposition? 
• Principles. How do you unify your people with a shared set of operating principles that guide them on how to lead, collaborate, communicate and make decisions related to their work?

In this article, I’ll cover the third related point:

• People. How do you align your organizational structure, staffing and professional development opportunities to deliver on your vision, strategy and value proposition? 

The purpose of structure

The purpose of organizational structure is to guide your people down a pathway to deliver on your firm’s or agency’s vision and strategy. In other words, structure also prevents your people from going down other pathways that don’t support your vision.

Every organization will have a unique vision and strategy. In the environment we’re all operating in today, we should aim for three common goals when designing or evaluating our structure:

For your people to work in an environment where they can produce great work. That’s what your people want, so that’s what you should want. But, for that to happen, they need to feel heard and valued and have a sense of ownership over their work. They’ll need the right information, tools, resources and support to flow freely.

For your stakeholders and clients to be happy. For that to happen, they need to receive their work quickly and with the flexibility to change marketing priorities. Overall, they want to see business value from your relationship, which comes from your interactions, how you manage their work and the outputs and outcomes you can deliver.

For your firm or in-house agency to have the flexibility to quickly and easily adapt to any shift in the market, new disruptive technologies, business opportunities or crises.

3 categories of organizational structure

When thinking about the organizational structure of your in-house agency or creative marketing firm, consider three categories:

• Foundational structure.
• Departmental structure.
• Team structure.

Foundational structure

Foundational structure is the starting point for guiding how your people work to support your agency’s vision, strategy and operating principles. Agency leadership should define this layer of structure because it provides a critical level of business value, and it would be costly if anyone in the organization opted not to adopt it.

Some examples include:

• Reporting lines.
• Process maps.
• Project management software.
• Centralized file-storage.
• Internal company-wide policies.

Foundational structure should be adhered to by all staff. However, everyone should still feel empowered to propose improvements or changes. But guidance is needed. 

When proposing a change to your existing foundational structure, use the following questions to evaluate the benefits and costs: 

• How will the change impact our client’s experience?
• How will the change impact other teams?
• How will the change impact the integration of work across teams?
• How will the change impact the agency’s creativity, quality of work or ability to innovate?
• How will the change impact revenue or expenses?
• Is any of the above more valuable than other gains that the business is receiving from leaving the foundational structure intact?

Departmental structure

Departmental structure works to guide how groups like functional areas, disciplines or departments. These group members should define this layer of structure because they are the subject matter experts and closest to the work.

Some examples include:

• Roles and responsibilities.
• Department-level decision-making.
• Department-level meeting rhythm.
• Department software (i.e., Photoshop, DAM).
• Professional development/career pathways.

Team structure

Team structure works to guide how cross-functional project teams or delivery teams operate. Like departmental structure, the team should come together to determine their specific structure because the outcome defines how they will work together. Each subject matter expert on the team will know their craft and what they need to do their best work. 

Some examples include:

• Team-level agreements.
• RACI and similar frameworks.
• Project-level decision-making rights.
• Team-level meeting rhythm.

Striking the right balance of structure and agility

As your firm or agency grows, it’s common to introduce new structures and processes for scalability. But it’s critical to balance that structure with agility.

Too much structure can hinder creativity, innovation and adaptability, while too little can lead to chaos, inefficiency and misalignment. Encourage open dialogue and invite your people to propose improvements and adjustments.

Next steps

Designing a high-performing marketing organization requires a thoughtful approach. Begin by evaluating how your foundational, departmental and team structure work together to support your vision and strategy and achieve our original three goals:

• To create a supportive environment for your people to produce exceptional work.
• To create happy stakeholders and clients.
• To develop your organization’s ability to adapt to the market, new technology and current events.

Just know that the best marketing organizations don’t start that way. Instead, they begin by testing new working methods, learning and iterating. That’s what I’d like you to do.

The post 3 key categories of a high-performing marketing organizational structure appeared first on MarTech.

This theory is fundamentally flawed because agility is a mindset and a new culture with strategies that support how you achieve the new desired state. When agility is expected to happen without any leadership changes to support new ways of working, the benefits are limited. 

Agile means everyone — from the junior copywriter to the CMO — must change the way they work. Some companies may already be very agile in their culture, so not as much transformation is needed. However, most large organizations have worked in a siloed “command and control” structure for decades, meaning they have a bigger mountain to move.

The need for agility to take place at all levels in the company is why we created the roles of Stakeholders and Practice Leads in the Agile Marketing Navigator framework. This article takes a deeper dive into those roles and how they can help to navigate agile marketing.

Leading a practice vs. managing people

In the traditional marketing organizational structure, managers managed people and assigned work. With agile marketing, we’ve changed this entire paradigm so that work comes in a strategic and prioritized way and the team is empowered to deliver on those priorities.

When set up properly, an agile marketing team is cross-functional, meaning they have people delivering work from many different disciplines. The goal is for them to run like a small startup, even inside a large company.

What’s shocking for many marketers is that setting up a team cross-functionally doesn’t mean that the reporting structure of the players needs to change. I strongly advise against that because you want to create a team that can work more autonomously.

So if you’re a manager with employees on an agile marketing team, how does your role change? This can be a really sensitive question for people because it is a huge shift from the old way. 

Essentially, you no longer assign work or manage the work itself. Your job is now to empower team members to be more independent, ensuring they have the right tools, skills, training and coaching to hone their craft. 

As a manager, you may have people who report to you who are now dispersed across several agile teams. While you may feel like you’ve completely lost control, you haven’t. You need to think about it differently, and that’s where the role of Practice Lead comes into play.

As a Practice Lead, you’ll want to set up a regular cadence with everyone who reports to you, called a Community of Practice. This role is more inspirational than managerial. You bring people together to become a strong, united practice that masters its craft. You’ll look to team members for their ideas and opinions. You’ll facilitate and unite this group, empowering them to be leaders of their craft on each agile team.

Stakeholder as collaborator vs. requester

If you rely on marketers to produce work for you, your role is a Stakeholder. Stakeholders can come from several different places, such as product marketing, sales or a line of business.

In the old way of working, you probably went to a department manager and told them what you needed. Or you submitted a brief, which someone picked up to interpret your request.

We are getting away from the requester/receiver dynamic with agile marketing. This has been the number one reason marketers are burnt out — the workload is endless if anyone can request work. And how do we know we’re working on the right work at the right time?

As a Stakeholder in agile marketing, you have a critical role to play. You need to communicate your needs to the team’s Marketing Owner, who will determine the priority of your request and if it aligns with the team’s business goals and Guidepoint.

Your ideas will be discussed rather than your request submitted, as agile marketing is about collaboration. Also, the team will determine the best way to deliver what you need, so communicating desired outcomes, not desired output, is really important.

Within the Agile Marketing Navigator framework, we always encourage Stakeholders to participate in the Collaborative Planning Workshop with the team quarterly. This is a way to work together and gain alignment.

The other place where Stakeholders need to be active is during the Team Showcase. This is a great opportunity to see what the team is working on and how campaigns are performing and offer feedback for upcoming work.

The critical thing to remember with agile marketing is to work with the team, viewing them as your partner in creating the right solution to drive the business outcomes you need.

With the roles of Practice Lead and Stakeholder, you’ll have the right people in place to successfully navigate agile marketing.

The post The importance of Stakeholders and Practice Leads in agile marketing appeared first on MarTech.

Agile marketing emphasizes speed and flexibility, collaboration, communication, and data — the qualities needed to navigate today’s constantly shifting marketing ecosystem. It allows marketers to adapt their campaigns and test new strategies in near real-time. It’s popular because the approach is helping companies become more efficient at managing the entire marketing process — from swiftly changing priorities and increasing brand visibility to improving marketing’s productivity.  

In this post, we’ll cover:

• What is agile marketing?
• Core values of an agile marketing framework
• Why should marketers care?
• Who uses agile marketing tools?
• What types of tools or software enable agile marketing?
• How agile marketing can help marketers succeed
• The future of agile marketing 
• Additional reading

What is agile marketing?

Agile marketing is a framework that uses self-organizing, cross-functional teams that work in frequent small bursts (called “sprints”). This allows marketing teams to adapt campaigns and strategies quickly based on continuous feedback and data. 

Agile marketing borrows some of the principles of agile software development methodologies and tools like Kanban, a system of visual project planning (think sticky notes on whiteboards) and Scrum, a sprint-based approach to team collaboration. But marketing is not software development, which is why agile experts like Stacey Ackerman, MarTech contributor and agile coach, are developing frameworks like the Agile Marketing Navigator, specifically for marketing teams.

Gartner’s official definition of agile marketing, which they refer to as “agile marketing project management” is:

“A method that applies tools, processes and organizational design concepts, inspired by software development methodology, to make marketing programs more relevant, more adaptive and efficient.”

Core values of an agile marketing framework

According to the Agile Marketing Manifesto, which outlines the values and principles of agile marketing, an agile marketing approach incorporates the following core values: 

• Outcome over output. Agile marketing prioritizes customer and business needs first versus simply engaging with marketing for marketing’s sake. It requires input from all team members, who must agree on a desired outcome before any work begins. Initiatives and tasks are done with purpose. Team members work together and collaborate to finish all aspects of a project.

• It dispenses with perfection. Agile marketing uses an iterative approach that seeks to deliver value early and often versus attempting to achieve a flawless campaign right out of the gate. It leverages efficiency and viability, focusing on what’s executable now, what can be repurposed, and if a simple (versus complex) approach will suffice to get something launched quickly. The goal is to seize opportunities as they arise and refine as you go along.

• Data and experimentation. An agile approach is data-driven, with learning derived from constant experimentation and strategy driven by actual results versus opinions or adherence to outdated conventions.

• Cross-functional collaboration. Agile marketing depends on collaboration using self-functioning teams. It seeks to eliminate silos by with a cross-functional approach that unifies departments and fosters collaboration. Agile teams are aligned with their organization’s goals and objectives rather than a single department’s goals. It dispenses with hierarchies, though team leaders help drive projects and ensure workflows are maintained. 

• Responsiveness. Agile’s iterative approach makes it inherently responsive to changing needs. Rather than being tied to a static strategy or plan, it allows for perpetual deviation based on changes in the market, customer needs, or campaign performance.

Why marketers should care about agile marketing

Agile marketing focuses on quantity over quality. It’s outcomes-driven, allowing marketers to measure success in early intervals and pivot quickly when something’s not working. By following agile methodologies, marketers can try lots of new things, repeat what works, and support their decisions with data-backed evidence. 

Since agile teams are collaborative and self-guided versus siloed and hierarchical, marketers can develop and modify campaigns by coordinating with multiple teams and departments. This allows people to work outside of their job title, taking responsibility for all aspects of the campaign rather than a specific piece of it. It also enables quick pivoting and responsiveness based on what’s happening with your customers and market in real time. All of this helps you remain competitive while increasing efficiency and productivity.

Who uses agile marketing tools?

Agile marketing tools focus on collaboration, data management, task management and team communication. Multiple teams and employees use them to facilitate an agile marketing framework. Here are some of the teams and people most likely to use these tools:

• Stakeholders and practice leaders – to align marketing objectives with company goals, ensure team members have a vested interest in marketing output, and review progress. 
• Marketing, sales, and team leaders – to foster collaboration and facilitate execution.
• Project/program managers – to create plans, prioritize work, track progress, and liaise with team leaders. 
• Developers and tech managers – to maintain tools, develop digital assets, and optimize content/workflows.
• Content creators and marketers – to develop content assets, execute plans, and optimize campaigns.
• Analysts – to collect campaign data, create actionable insights, and inform campaign strategy based on data and results.

Which technologies support agile marketing?

Agile marketing uses a combination of technology solutions and tools to facilitate team collaboration, break down silos, track performance, and maintain project workflow. Here are some of the different tools you might encounter as an agile-enabled team:

• Marketing work management platforms. Platforms like Adobe Workfront and Airtable help distributed employees collaborate and communicate, track hours, provide visualization tools, and often have other features like data asset management (DAM) to help with seamless communication and workflow.
  
• Project management tools. Tools like Jira and Trello support agile frameworks with Kanban-style interfaces that help teams implement and manage agile workflows.
  
• Data gathering and analysis tools. Tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager help teams collect data, create actionable insights, and inform campaign strategy.
  
• Collaboration and work management tools. Tools like Slack and Asana act as collaboration hubs, allowing teams to track progress and check-in without having to be in the same physical space.
  
• Customer data platforms (CDPs). Tools like Blueconic and Tealium collect, organize, unify, and activate customer data from different sources. This is the technology that enables marketers to create personalized experiences and test new channels.
  
• Digital experience platforms (DXPs). Tools like Acquia and Contentful help teams manage their content assets and provide a central content repository that allows for content collaboration and access. They also allow teams to orchestrate customer journeys, personalize and optimize messaging, and support multiple customer experiences.

• Marketing automation platforms (MAPs). Tools like Salesforce and Acoustic help teams automate marketing and sales processes like lead nurturing, email marketing, lead scoring, landing page creation, and more. 

Most companies are already using some tools and tech that facilitate collaboration, data analysis, and asset sharing. Thus, use the above list as a starting point when assessing your agile marketing readiness. Be sure to consider the solutions that you may already have in-house and what’s needed to augment them to support an agile framework.

How agile marketing can help marketers succeed

Agile marketing helps marketers succeed because it’s inherently more flexible, responsive, and customer-centric than traditional marketing models. Since one of the main values of agile marketing is collaboration, it facilitates close alignment and communication with company stakeholders and customers. This makes it much more likely that marketers will align the goals of their campaigns with their organization’s growth objectives.

According to AgileSherpa, marketers who use an agile approach are more satisfied—and confident— with their outcomes versus those who take a traditional or ad hoc approach. Benefits include a greater ability to handle fast-paced work, clarity around marketing’s contribution to their organization’s success, and the confidence to experiment with new and emerging opportunities.

When MetLife’s pet insurance division implemented an agile framework, they began selling more policies than ever. They were able to use this this successful approach as a model to roll out to other departments throughout MetLife. This is another big benefit of agile—since it’s iterative, it enables marketers to test and experiment different approaches until they find a formula that works.

What’s next for agile marketing?

Agile marketing is still in the early stages of adoption. Marketers need more training, certification, and confidence around what tools to use and how to use them. But it’s growing in popularity, with 31% of respondents in AgileSherpa’s latest report stating their marketing departments are fully agile and another 62% of respondents who have partially agile marketing teams preparing to go fully agile in the next year.

Agile frameworks are also extending beyond marketing teams, to total organizational agility. Per AgileSherpa, organizations that embrace an agile framework in other departments are seeing much greater benefits from implementing an agile marketing approach. Their data reveals that when finance uses agile, marketers are 2.5 times more likely to report success and when human resources uses agile, they’re three times more likely to report success.

Keep in mind that for agile to be truly successful, executive buy-in is needed. AgileSherpa notes a strong correlation with agile success from marketers who stated they had executive support. Agile marketing has matured significantly over the past five years and we anticipate even more exciting developments as more companies pivot away from traditional marketing frameworks that make it difficult to adapt to shifts in customer behaviors, market trends, and organizational needs.  

Additional reading

Everything you need to know about agile marketing, plus a guide to the Agile Marketing Navigator — an approach to agile designed specifically for marketers — dive into the MarTech archive for articles written by agile coach Stacy Ackerman.

You can also download a free eBook on the Agile Marketing Navigator.

If you’re interested in the broad history of agile development that sets the context for agile marketing, here are a couple of good guides:

• “To agility and beyond: The history—and legacy—of agile development.”
• “The Complete History of Agile Software Development.”

The post Agile marketing: What it is and why marketers should care appeared first on MarTech.

“Pet insurance is a business that has a huge amount of white space,” said Sabrina Sebastian. “There was a significant opportunity to expand awareness and penetration rate of pet insurance which is less than 3% for all pet parents today.”

In 2019, global insurance provider MetLife had acquired PetFirst, a pet health insurance company founded in 2004. After the acquisition, Sebastian, PetFirst’s former CMO, and now MetLife’s AVP for Pet Insurance Marketing, was tasked with growing the MetLife Pet Insurance division.

In 2021, there were approximately 135.2 million dogs and cats owned by Americans, with about 3.9 million U.S. pets (mostly dogs and cats) insured that year. As a growth-focused business, MetLife saw a significant opportunity to expand the pet insurance division. They’d been using a traditional marketing workflow with modular teams that were highly skilled in marketing. 

Said Sebastian, “If we needed to tap into other teams, we would do that, but it was a really traditional way of working. We discovered that we also needed to rely heavily on our tech partners, our data partners, and our business partners.” 

This need is what drove the shift from a traditional marketing approach to an agile marketing framework.

Bringing cross-functional teams together

Agile marketing, which has its roots in software development, is a way for marketers to respond rapidly to the changing needs of customers and drive successful business outcomes. It’s done through a team-based approach using collaborative practices. This new way of working empowers marketers to do the right thing for the customer at the right time, eliminating a lot of wasteful process overhead.

“It’s a very natural way of working when you need to tap into another skill set or another opportunity that exists outside your core team,” said Sebastian. “When we started to think about how we wanted to operate and work differently, we asked ourselves, okay, what do we need to be able to do that?”

MetLife was already using agile pods in certain departments within the organization. Their global CMO and other senior leaders within the company provided the support that Sebastian needed to move from a traditional marketing to an agile marketing approach.

“We had the support and the executive sponsorship of the MetLife global CMO. He was behind these efforts and got everybody else excited about that,” said Sebastian. “It was great to have that support starting at the top and from senior leaders in all areas of the business. It really does require a cross-functional team.”

In addition to buy-in and support from leadership, Sebastian was focused on how to put together her multidisciplinary marketing team. She ultimately approached all the teams that needed to be involved in the process including traditional marketing, content strategy, data and analytics, technology, and the more traditional IT and infrastructure teams. 

“We went to those leaders and said, okay, we’re putting together this team and we’re putting together a new way of working and we want to tap into the resources that you have,” said Sebastian. 

When bringing together cross-functional teams, Sebastian emphasized the importance of starting foundationally and understanding that not everybody is a marketer. Marketing needed to take a step back and educate various teams on what they were doing, why they were doing it, and how they were planning to get it done. 

“Ultimately, we needed to get them ingrained in the actual business goals that we had in front of us, said Sebastian. “A lot of these people had never worked on Pet before. Then secondarily, a lot of the people had never been part of a marketing team before. So, we had to do a lot of training and education and really just make sure folks were on the same page.”

Getting agile off the ground

To get the agile group up to speed with the pet insurance division’s new agile marketing approach, Sebastian’s team did some on-site training to make sure that everybody understood the foundations and principles of agile marketing. This also allowed the team to get to know each other. 

“Part of the agile marketing process is just making sure that the team stays connected,” said Sebastian. “There are daily stand-up meetings and different ceremonies that take place throughout the process to make sure that everyone is on the same page. We also did a fair bit of education and work on our side to make sure that everybody was comfortable and getting to know each other as a team.”

The agile marketing approach is collaborative. That extends to the way teams are lead and managed. Instead of a single manager or leader, there are Product Owners (POs) that help facilitate communication and keep people connected. One of the principles of agile marketing is the team is self-functioning and self-governing. 

“It’s not that there’s not someone in charge,” said Sebastian, “But there’s not someone who’s the boss. You depend on the team to manage itself. We have a PO that does an amazing job of organizing all of the things that need and managing the activities that a PO should.”

Dig deeper: Introducing an in-depth guide to the Agile Marketing Navigator

Focusing on outcomes and business impact

One of the biggest challenges that Sebastian’s team had to overcome, beyond the de-siloing of teams, was to adopt a more business-focused mindset when it came to goals. That is, when teams are isolated from each other, they tend to focus on the goals of that specific team, whether it’s marketing, sales, technology, or business.

“The great thing about Agile is that the business goal is really the guiding principle of what we’re all working towards every single day,” Sebastian explained. “So we’re making sure that we stay close to that goal and understand the ‘why’ behind the work that we’re doing.” 

Said Stacey Ackerman, partner at NavigateAgile and MarTech contributor, “It’s really common in marketing to be going 100 miles an hour trying to do as much as possible, but if you ask anyone what goal they’re trying to achieve for the business or the customers, most marketers have no idea. What I love about agile marketing is that everyone from senior leaders to the team executing the work is aligned and working towards the same outcome. Therefore, marketers that are really succeeding with agile marketing are actually doing less work with better results,”

MetLife’s agile approach is focused on outcomes and adding value versus just being busy. It’s a big-picture mindset that ties marketing activities to those outcomes that add value to the business. “That’s one of the ways that we really have seen a shift in our team,” said Sebastian. “We’re not just doing things. We’re doing things that are really impactful, are adding value, and are helping us get closer to those big business goals that we have.”

Sebastian notes two key achievements from having implemented an agile marketing methodology within MetLife. The first is that, while there were already several other agile pods within the company, her agile team has been able to blaze the trail for agile marketing. “We’re laying out the foundation for how an agile pod should work. And we’re able to share that knowledge across the organization.”

Sebastian confirmed that they’re selling more policies now than they ever have. Year over year growth is in double digits. “This is definitely a way of working that we’d like to continue to expand at MetLife, specifically in the marketing space,” said Sebastian. “We’ve seen really significant impacts from the work that we’ve been doing.”

“The other thing that’s interesting is that we have a direct connection with the consumer. MetLife is a voluntary benefits company, so we have a large portion of our efforts concentrated in the group business, but we also have the opportunity with Pet to go direct to consumer. That’s one of the reasons that Pet was a good fit for agile marketing. We’re all about meeting pet parents where they are. Being able to connect in meaningful ways to the consumer, regardless of where you find them, has been really impactful for us.”

The post MetLife uses agile marketing to unleash pet insurance sales appeared first on MarTech.

The practices we’ve established in the Agile Marketing Navigator help drive culture change and the right behaviors for agility. Today, we’ll focus on Cycle Time, Waste Removal and the roles of Stakeholders and Practice Leads that can help you to take agile marketing to the next level.

Remove waste by overhauling old ways of working

When it comes to waste removal, a team can make changes if they can work autonomously. But more significant effort is required to make impactful changes in larger organizations where systems and processes reach far beyond the team.

Let’s say that several agile teams have identified that too many sign-offs are required to get work delivered quickly and with agility. Now you know this is a systemic issue across marketing that requires more than a Band-Aid repair.

The first step is measuring the problem’s impact on overall marketing delivery. It’s best to do this collaboratively, getting in put from representatives of several teams and levels in the company. You can break down items by the types that seem most problematic. 

Let’s say everyone says the process for launching a landing page on your website is really slow and has the most sign-offs. Take sticky notes and map out all the steps in the process, focusing on each sign-off. This allows you to quantify a baseline for just how many steps are in your process and how long it’s taking today. 

You’ll then look at the total number of average days it takes to deliver the landing page across the organization. In this example, we’ll say it takes an average of 45 business days to launch a landing page from start to finish.

Everyone should then discuss what seems like a more reasonable timeframe. This group decides to strive for 30 days. Now they need to uncover where they can get back those 15 days, most of which are tied up in approvals and wait time.

Because this issue is constraining all marketers, leaders need to be able to step up and be willing to radically empower the change from old ways of working. They will have to allow this change to happen and empower Lean thinking. This often means giving up a bit of security or safety in exchange for speed. And yes, mistakes may happen. But this is where trusting that people will learn from them and the overall change will outweigh the risk.

It’s this type of culture change that will lead to true agility. Leaders: You can’t just hand off agile marketing to your team and walk away. It’s imperative that you empower the teams to identify the issues while actively paving the way for them to implement new ways of working.

Lead Communities of Practice

As you mature in your agile practice and form teams around business needs, you break away from traditionally built departments around disciplines. However, as you involve more and more teams in agile marketing, it will be really important that those disciplines still have strong leadership and best practices.

A Design Community of Practice is a great example. The Practice Lead needs to work with all the designers across all agile teams to ensure branding quality and growth in the field happen. 

A Practice Lead in our framework is typically a department manager, but their role alters with agile marketing. They are no longer assigning or managing work, but they still need to work to ensure everyone in the field can be successful with skills, tools, knowledge sharing and practice standards.

If you’re working in agile today and have found that the functional roles are being diminished, immediately start operating a Community of Practice, and you’ll find that you can succeed with a delivery team that has multiple skill sets, as well as in a community where shared skills are maximized.

As you grow in agile marketing, remember it’s not just a check-the-box process or framework. Really good agile marketing takes great leaders that are invested in true transformation.

The post Scaling agile with the Agile Marketing Navigator framework appeared first on MarTech.

Organizations thoughtfully designed to run lean, easily adapt to changing priorities, and produce remarkable work at the speed of modern marketing, have an advantage over others.

They have clear, actionable rules of engagement for how they will and won’t operate. 

They’ve channeled these rules into a written set of operating principles to guide their people and business affairs and benefit tremendously. You may think your firm or agency has what I’m describing, but I’ve observed that most do not. Read on for examples and a way to put your organization to the test.

What do we mean by ‘operating principles’?

Operating principles create a shared internal mindset for how teams think, act and make decisions about their daily work. They are critical for alignment and smooth scalability. While “principles” is often used interchangeably with “values,” there’s a significant difference.

What are values? 

Company values define your culture. Firms and agencies typically present their values as a list of qualities or phrases that reflect how their people treat each other. 

Here are some examples that I’ve pulled from a variety of creative marketing firms:

• Integrity, accountability, listening, simplifying, persevering, collaborating.
• “Create amazing work,” “Be honest,” “Share your voice,” “Be bold and brave,” “Deliver value.”

It’s helpful for an organization to communicate how they believe people should interact with each other. However, the average list of values is not actionable, memorable or even differentiating. Principles intentionally differ.

What are principles?

Principles reflect your organization’s philosophies and beliefs about how your firm or agency should and should not operate. They are the line in the sand defining the things you will always do and those you will never do. 

Principles should not prescribe — they are not a “how to” instruction manual, leaving room for autonomy. But they should be actionable enough to guide how people think, act and make daily business decisions. 

As an example, if we took the value “be honest” from the values above and wrote it as a principle, we might say: 

• Tell the truth no matter what the cost. 

As a written, defined principle, it draws a line in the sand. I’ll share more examples and a way to test the strength of your own organization’s principles in a moment.

Competitive advantages from operating principles

You can gain many advantages from using a principles-based approach to leading your marketing organization.

• New team members can rely on your principles to guide their decisions.
• You’ll have consistency in the way people approach their daily work. 
• You’ll reduce the need for managerial oversight and prescriptive direction.
• You’ll be able to scale more smoothly without negatively impacting speed or quality.
• They differentiate your firm or agency and generate a competitive advantage.

Principles are critical for alignment and smooth scalability.

“If you focus on principles, you empower everyone who understands those principles to act without constant monitoring or controlling.”  

– Stephen R. Covey

In addition, when a creative marketing firm or in-house agency has strong operating principles about the quality of their work, their teams know when to push back on a client’s request if it conflicts with their principles.

To the team, being accountable to their principles is more important than being accountable to their clients. As a result, they are more comfortable saying no to unreasonable budgets or deadlines or uninformed requests from stakeholders to change their creative direction.

Relevant examples of operating principles

Here are some operating principles from creative marketing firms and other organizations.

TBWA

Referring to themselves as the “Disruption company,” TBWA’s principles help them “achieve the diverse, inclusive lens in our work and create real-world impact.” 

They state that their principles are the “standards we measure ourselves against; the standards we hold each other accountable to; the standards getting us where we want to go.”

Massive Change Network

This global design consultancy takes a different approach. They live by “The Incomplete Manifesto for Growth,” a list of 43 principles with explanations of each.

RedScout

The brand innovation consultancy, RedScout, lists five principles they use to drive meaningful change.

37signals

37signals, the makers of Basecamp and Hey, share their principles to guide internal communication.

Future Forum

Future Forum is a consortium focused on helping organizations build flexible, inclusive and connected ways of working. They have collected samples of principles being used across various companies to reshape how those companies work — specifically, to develop their flexible work models. 

How to define a set of principles

Since your principles will guide how your creative marketing firm or in-house agency operates, you should take a strategic approach to draft them. Consider the following questions:

• What type of service experience do your clients expect from you?
• What do your current and prospective employees expect from you?
• How do technology and digital channels impact your work and your target market?

1. Define principles that help you meet the expectations of your clients

Over the past several years, client-side brand and marketing leaders have increasingly evaluated creative marketing firms based on criteria beyond capabilities and creativity. Client-side marketers are becoming more focused on how creative and marketing firms operate, per the 2018-2019 Global Digital Outlook Study by the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) in partnership with Forrester Research. They want partners who can deliver with greater speed, nimbleness and value.

• Speed of delivery had become a significant factor in whether or not creative marketing firms won new projects. 
• A “more flexible and nimble working model” was cited as a top area of improvement that marketing clients wanted to see from their creative marketing partners. 
• And “price vs. value” was cited as the top reason clients terminate a partner relationship. They wanted greater value from their agencies. 

I’ve seen similar data reported in other industry research and regularly hear similar stories firsthand in my consulting work with creative marketing firms. Some have also shared that they’ve lost clients due to delivery speed. For them, it has become normal to receive RFPs and RFIs from client-side marketers with questions about their firm’s process, turnaround times and how they collaborate.

Whether you’re a creative marketing firm or an in-house agency, consider how you can draft your principles to help you meet your client’s demand for speed, nimbleness and value.

2. Define principles that help you meet the expectations of your creative talent

Many years before the pandemic, there was already a lot of talk about the “future of work.” Businesses applied the principles and frameworks of different future work movements to redesign their organizations.

Some examples of the movements and frameworks that have been reshaping how companies work are:

• Re:Work.
• Holacracy.
• Sociocracy.
• Teal.
• Responsive.org.
• Lean.
• Agile.

The pandemic accelerated the adoption of many values behind these movements and some of their practices. But, if you were to study these movements, you’d learn they are largely about giving people what they need to deliver great work. 

Some of the shared values behind these movements are:

• Trust.
• Transparency.
• Autonomy.
• Adaptability.
• Co-creation.
• Continuous improvement.
• Work-life balance.

An increasing number of companies are making significant changes to apply these values and create work environments that appeal to your talent pool. Can you afford not to do the same? 

When drafting your principles, consider how they can help you align your firm or agency with these values.

3. Define principles that help you adopt technology for a competitive advantage

Most marketing organizations focus on digital and online marketing channels, but many haven’t adapted to keep up with the variety, volume or velocity of content needed. Instead, they’ve continued business as usual or slightly adjusted their operating model. As a result, they’ve been building up what Steve Blank called organizational debt.

Organizational debt happens when a business grows but doesn’t invest the necessary time and energy toward adapting how it operates to keep it running smoothly. The firm or agency is too focused on just getting work done. Then, one day, they step back and realize they have a set of performance challenges.

When drafting your principles, consider how they could help you take full advantage of existing and emerging technology.

4. Define principles to clarify what you will and won’t do

I’ll leave you with two last questions to answer as you consider drafting operating principles for your creative marketing firm or in-house team. 

• What will you always do to create remarkable work?
• What will you never do to create remarkable work?

Remember, a well-drafted principle will draw a clear line in the sand, defining the things you will always do and the things you will never do. 

How to test if you have clear, actionable principles

Here’s how you can put your creative marketing firm or in-house agency to the test. Whether you’re drafting principles for the first time or they already exist, evaluate them against the following questions. 

• Are they actionable?
• Will they help someone make a decision?
• Can you logically argue their opposite? 
• Are they differentiating?
• Are they polarizing?
• Do they create a competitive advantage?
• Will you stick to them even if it comes at a cost or disadvantage?

The more you can give the right answers to these questions, the stronger the principle. 

To further make the point, Bill Bernback, one of advertising’s greats and co-founder of the highly-ranked worldwide advertising firm DDB, famously said, “A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you something.”

Wrapping up

Operating principles are a tremendous tool for creative marketing firms and agencies. I’ve seen their power firsthand in my work. However, the work doesn’t stop with drafting them. You’ll need to ensure everyone in your organization understands them and knows when to rely on them for guidance. Perhaps that’s a good topic for a future article.

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That may not be surprising, as agile marketing started about 10 years after it did in software development, but why are we still so far behind? What are the barriers that are getting in our way and how can we remove them?

In this article, I’m going to share with you three reasons why I think marketers are behind with agile implementations and what we can do to catch up.

1. Language Barriers

A few years ago I had an amazing opportunity to teach an agile class in Haifa, Israel. While I’d taught the content many times before, what I didn’t take into consideration was the language barrier. I’m sure I made a lot of American references that they didn’t understand, and when they went to do team activities, they all spoke in Hebrew, making it incredibly difficult for me to validate if the learning was registering. So while the learning can and does happen, the time to get there will expand in those kinds of circumstances.

But barriers can also be created by aspects of a common language — for example, acronyms.

When you see the term “PM” what do you think of? Depending on your perspective, this could be a project manager, program manager, product manager or even preventative maintenance — not to mention just “afternoon.” It’s really confusing.

When marketers are forced into translating terms from a language that was written with product and software development in mind, problems can arise because the language doesn’t speak to them.

2. Framework resistance

When I began moving my agile coaching practice into the marketing space, I quickly realized that I was trying to teach Scrum the same way that I did in software development. It wasn’t working. I was met with a ton of resistance.

Here were some common objections I heard:

• “Scrum is a process for IT.”
• “Scrum doesn’t make sense in marketing.”
• “The language in Scrum is for software developers.”
• “We don’t want a rigid process.”

I kept thinking about this resistance. The problem I concluded wasn’t in the framework. The problem was getting acceptance of the framework outside of the software world.

3. Reinventing the wheel

As an industry, more than 60% of agile marketers are implementing a hybrid or scrumban (Scrum/Kanban combination) approach, according to the 2022 State of Agile Marketing survey.

While inventing a hybrid approach seems like a great way to take what’s out there and customize it to marketers’ needs, the biggest challenge was that there was no consistent way that this was happening. Going from company to company, I saw a lot of marketers trying to reinvent the wheel, which meant it took them a lot longer to get off the ground while software teams were already flying.

However, if we look back at our agile history, software development had a similar beginning. There were dozens of methodologies that are no longer talked about today such as the Crystal, XTreme Programming, Adaptive Software Development and many more.

It wasn’t until Scrum became the gold standard in software development that real change began to happen. I believe it’s because, when everyone agrees on a common method and language, we have a mutual starting point. We don’t have to start at square one. We can just learn from there, all agree on the path and work on what’s really important — lasting cultural change.

Getting ahead!

Now that you know my theory on why agile in marketing is 10 years behind, how can we break the cycle and move forward? Here are 5 things to try:

• Avoid technical jargon or terms that people don’t understand.
• Don’t try to sell teams or leaders on a process, but rather what you’re going to do to resolve their business problems.
• Allow flexibility around agile practices and choice. By allowing teams to choose from a few options that meet their needs, they’ll be more accepting.
• Provide a clear roadmap for teams on how they’ll go from point A to point B.
• Clearly outline what success looks like for each team and steps for getting them there. 

For more ways on how we’ve bridged the gap between software teams and marketing teams with agile, read our latest eBook on how to get started with the Agile Marketing Navigator.

Download the free ebook here.

The post 3 reasons marketers are 10 years behind with agile — and how to catch up appeared first on MarTech.

Stacey Ackerman is an agile marketing coach who has written some 60 articles for MarTech on the topic. She recently launched the Agile Marketing Navigator, an in-depth guide to implementing agile within marketing foundations. Stacey was brought up in Minnesota but recently relocated to North Carolina where “the winters are much milder.”

We asked her about her route into agile.

Q: You’re the owner of Agilify Coaching & Training and recently became managing partner of NavigateAgile. How did you get into marketing — or indeed into agile?

A: I went to college for journalism and communications because I wanted to be a newspaper reporter, but I ended up working in public relations and somewhat in marketing as well — dabbling in event marketing — and I kind of worked my way up to marketing manager. My husband worked in IT at the time. He suggested I look at IT project management; so I got hired doing that. My clients were ad agencies, so it was a nice hybrid of working with the agency side of things but also working with IT.

I had a colleague introduce me to agile [development] and I was really fascinated by it. Without having any formal training, I decided to use my client — unbeknownst to them — as an experiment. I saw such a night-and-day difference that I was sold on this: I’ve got to get out of traditional project management stuff and get into agile.

I started taking certification courses, became a scrum manager in IT spaces, and started working my way into being an agile coach — mostly in software in the beginning, but then in marketing and communications and medical devices, and kind of everything. In 2017 or 2018 I decided I had to take this back into marketing. That led to where I am today.

Dig deeper: What is marketing work management and how do these platforms support agile marketing?

Q: There’s now an extensive community of agile marketers. How and when did that start to come together?

A: I think there were some early adopters who wrote the original Agile Marketing Manifesto. That was ten years ago, the original pioneers. I think it was really in the last five years that there have been more of us stepping into this and seeing it work in marketing.

Download the free ebook here.

Q: Tell us more about your new venture, NavigateAgile.

A: Just in October of this year, Michael Seaton and I joined forces to create NavigateAgile. He has a much more extensive marketing background. Last April we launched the Agile Marketing Navigator framework and found a lot of people really excited about it as a kind of missing piece in the marketplace. There’s been a few really exciting developments since then. One is that I’ve had people coming from multiple countries wanting to translate it. We also have a certification course which just launched and a whole implementation program.

We’re also going to be launching a partner program. That’s on the horizon for later in 2023. We have a lot of content out there and want to start making those things accessible to people so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Q: In addition to creating all this content, you’re still planning to work directly with clients?

A: Yes, exactly. It’s been a really exciting year. In March, I’ll be speaking in Miami at an agile marketing conference and I think there will be more of those to come as we come back to in-person again.

The post Stacey Ackerman: Spotlight on the expert appeared first on MarTech.

What does this mean for marketers? It’s time to be more strategic.

By knowing where you’re headed, you can use agile marketing to focus on the work that’s going to perform best.

1. Know where you’re headed

So many marketers are working reactively. Until you know where you’re headed, you’ll always be spinning your wheels and throwing darts, hoping one will stick.

As a marketing team, it’s critical, especially in this climate, to understand what business goals you’re driving towards or you’ll be caught in an endless cycle of execution without much impact.

In agile marketing, we align on a Guidepoint that ties directly to our larger organizational business goals. The Guidepoint ensures that everyone understands what success looks like to the team, the business and the customers. It’s a shared understanding that keeps us on the right path forward.

2. Focus only on a few high-return initiatives

The biggest mistake that most companies make is too many projects or campaigns happening at once without evaluating the impact on the business results they are driving toward.

We’ve found that by measuring an idea’s impact, you can be more selective about the work that the team is spending time doing.

Here are a few things you can measure:

• Key performance indicators (KPIs), such as clicks, interaction rates, traffic and page completion rates.
• Baseline metrics that measure your current performance.
• KPI goals for improving current metrics.
• Impact on your business if the KPI goals are met, such as a percentage of sales increase.
• Value in dollars that this brings to your business if the KPI goals are met.

When you take a little extra time upfront to understand the data behind a marketing idea, you get away from simply saying “yes” to everyone’s requests, which will lead to employee overload, especially if you’ve had a reduction in staff.

Dig deeper: The dangers of saying ‘no’ in martech

3. Continuously evaluate metrics

Once you begin launching your marketing, you can’t ignore the data. It’s imperative that you’re always monitoring performance at regular intervals and that you understand when to turn an initiative off.

Too many times as marketers we’re only focused on what we’re going to do, but we forget to ask ourselves what we’re not going to do, or what we’re going to stop doing. 

A few good questions the team should ask themselves are:

• How long will we let something run that’s underperforming from our goal?
• What’s our threshold for stopping work?

4. Quickly ditch low-performing campaigns

Evaluating metrics should be a continuous process that the agile marketing team does daily, or as soon as data is available. 

As part of the team’s Daily Huddle, looking at performance is something they can spend 5 minutes doing, and it will go a long way. 

Why waste time and money on low-performing marketing? Stop and pivot — that’s what agile is all about!

Dig deeper: Why doing less is more in agile marketing

Be quick and nimble in the face of uncertainties

As we head into times of uncertainty, we can no longer afford to work on every marketing tactic that our stakeholders request. 

We must take a consultative and data-driven approach to make marketing less of a cost center and more of a value-added partner.

The post 4 steps to becoming a more strategic marketer in 2023 appeared first on MarTech.

That’s what agile marketing coach and regular MarTech contributor Stacey Ackerman told me back in May 2022. Over the following months, in collaboration with her fellow agile coach Michael Seaton, and with the support of the agile marketing community, Stacey delivered on that promise in the form of the Agile Marketing Navigator.

Download the free ebook here.

The Navigator takes important principles of agile software development and transforms them into practices and processes that make sense for marketers and can be implemented by them. It also introduces new agile elements that marketers need but which traditional agile systems overlook.

Dig deeper: A new way to navigate agile marketing

In a series of 21 articles, Ackerman broke down the four main pillars of the Navigator — the Collaborative Planning Workshop, the Launch Cycle, the Six Key Practices and the Six Roles — into their component parts, setting out a flexible and practical framework for agile marketing.

Marketers today need to move at the speed of light to meet the needs of their audience and realize critical business outcomes. The Navigator makes a huge contribution to showing how agile principles can boost the performance of modern marketing organizations.

In partnership with Stacey, we now present an ebook that captures all you need to know about an agile framework designed specifically for marketers. You’ll find a free downloadable pdf at the link below.

Getting Started with the Agile Marketing Navigator

The post Introducing an in-depth guide to the Agile Marketing Navigator appeared first on MarTech.