Once upon a time I used to sit next to and work with a bunch of ‘proper’ software developers. I was aware of the waterfall method as applied to software development. A sequential process and one characterised by a fixed specification and longer development cycles. More recently I became interested in the Agile Manifesto and how we could apply that to our marketing planning and the implementation and ongoing optimisation of the campaigns we run. Over the last couple of years and almost without realising it we have been changing the way we approach things and that change represents the application of a more agile marketing method.
Why change and change from what?
I remember a time – not that long ago – when we used to develop a plan for the year, stick to it, measure it and improve it. But things changed.
Even in the corporate world increasing levels of uncertainty meant we were starting to deal with today much more than we ever had in the past. We are still dealing with that uncertainty and stability feels unobtainable – especially in the current economic climate. Survival mode seems to have become modus operandi.
At the same time we started working for smaller businesses – those turning over between £5 and £10 million. We became acutely aware that whilst they needed to understand how they achieved their longer term objectives they also needed to understand (right away) what they needed to do today, tomorrow and next week.
The rise of digital brought with it new opportunities and new ways of doing things. Measurement and ongoing optimisation can start the minute a campaign goes live. Test and learn is everything. “Give it a go and see what happens” became a viable approach to planning.
Which agile principles can be applied to marketing?
I agree with Scott Brinker and what he outlines in his post Ideas for an agile marketing manifesto. A couple of the ideals of the original Agile Manifesto are directly applicable;
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Responding to change over following a plan
He suggests some additional ideals that might apply to an agile marketing manifesto;
Intimate customer tribes over impersonal mass markets
Testing and data over opinions and conventions
Numerous small experiments over a few large bets
Engagement and transparency over official posturing
How does the agile marketer behave?
If you read our blog you’ll pick up on my “it’s all about the people” approach. In my mind Frank Days’ post Sex and the Agile Marketer is absolutely bang on. He compares a new breed of marketer to what he calls the ‘Waterfall Marketer’. It’s well worth a read. I bet you can spot the Waterfall Marketers in your organisation … but hopefully you can spot a few agile ones too!
Making the move towards a more agile approach
You probably already are. The pace of change is such that no one knows the answers anymore. As individuals we are all learning by doing. The trick is applying this approach more broadly and creating an environment which supports individual needs while at the same time ensures teams are constantly appraising what they are doing and adjusting things accordingly.
Practical advice that we certainly sign up to includes that provided in Marketbright’s post on the Agile Marketing Method. Specifically if you are managing marketing programmes and teams that includes;
Move from longer plans to six week “sprints”.
Have daily 15 minute “sprint meetings”. Bit like a Hill Street Blues morning roll call. Ask each person what they are working on, how things are going, and what if anything is preventing them from getting their job done.
Track your team’s commitments and understand the capacity you have and the “velocity” you can achieve i.e. how much stuff you can get done over what timescales. Make team production more predictable, reliable and repeatable.
Embrace change based on testing and actual campaign metrics.
Let people add new items to the list. Leave the room in your project planning meetings to help accommodate last minute adjustments.
The end result should be that your organisation is learning by doing. Not only are you getting things done right now but the planning process you are running alongside that means that you are driving ongoing improvements more quickly and making incremental steps towards a better future in an increasingly uncertain and changing environment.
This is the first in my series of ‘why digital can take so much bloody time’ blogs. Let’s start with email. How hard can it be? Most of us send and receive e-mail every day. But with our very precious customer base at the end of that send button the devil is most certainly in the detail and like any other digital marketing project (and that’s what it is – a project) it can be complex, resource intensive and time hungry.
To illustrate this point here are some things to consider and key questions to ask yourself. I’ve left out the initial heavy weight task of deciding on which e-mail platform to use and developing an appropriate communications programme … jumping straight into the design and build.
What’s it going to look like & how are you going to build it?
Early on, factor in time to agree and specify the e-mail design, content requirement and the functionality … not vaguely but in detail. Draw a sketch, think about word counts and image orientation.
Yes content is king, but not only that, it’s an unpopular, time consuming, resource draining white elephant. Content research, asset collation and copywriting all take a disproportional amount of time and effort. Anyone who’s ever built a website, written a blog or sent an e-mail can vouch for that.
Allow time to ensure the entire subscription process is in place. Will the user get a ‘Thank You’ page, a confirmation e-mail, a welcome e-mail, the ability to unsubscribe easily, a unsubscribe confirmation page or even a final goodbye e-mail. Is the ‘sign up’ form capturing the right data? Does the opt-in mechanism comply with data protection best practice?
There are many more questions. Is the email a newsletter, a specific communication or an incentive based e-voucher? Should it include additional functionality such as ‘Send to friend’? Can you cope with an ‘off the shelf’ template or do you need a custom template designed? Where will those receiving the email see the email as being sent from?
Testing and sending the final version
Check, check and double check the content of the email, the links and think hard about the subject line. Is the subject line relevant & intriguing – will it support open rates? Will it get blocked by spam filters? Avoid long subject lines and spammy words like free, cheap and offer.
Send a test e-mail, then send another test e-mail and another and another. Send the e-mail to yourself, your colleagues and your test accounts. Do this more than you think necessary.
There’s lots than can go wrong and having a checklist to go through each time will help minimise the chances of things going astray. Some of the problems you encounter can take a significant amount of time to unravel and fix. Make sure you build in enough time to allow for troubleshooting.
There are many things to go on the checklist. Has the copy been spell checked? Are all heading and sub-headings a consistent colour and size? Are all the links working and behaving consistently throughout the email? Are all your images and logos working links? Is the unsubscribe function working? Is it working across the full range of email platforms that your customers are using? If you are personalising the email is that working properly?
How did it perform and what can you learn to make the next one better?
You have hit the send button and almost immediately it is time to start looking at the results. First thing you are likely to be interested in is deliverability – how many emails actually reached their desired destination and if not why not. Beyond that you are going to be interested in things like how many emails were opened, how many unsubscribes you had, what links were clicked on and what they did when they actually arrived at your site. The results will develop over the few days following you sending the email and should ultimately help improve what you do next time.
So, back to the beginning … there is a lot to do and a lot of things that can go wrong if things are not planned and executed properly. In my experience, like most things digital, it is good planning, project management and, especially for email, appropriate use of checklists that are going to help deliver good quality email marketing and the right results.
Digital projects, be it building a website from scratch or sending an e-mail can crudely be divided into three production phases, and as a rule of thumb we work in thirds. A third specification, a third build and a third testing. Mentally, for web developers and digital marketers the last phase can sometimes feel like the most grueling.
A bit like my bike ride home after a long and busy day. For the final third of journey I always need to dig a bit deeper. I suppose I’m relaxing because the end of the day is in sight. But as soon as this happens my gears feel lower and my legs heavier. This last half a mile feels more like three and it seems to take forever. It’s also the time when I’m less alert and more prone to making mistakes. One day a grey squirrel will meet a sudden, dizzy end between my spokes.
In my experience digital projects often roll out like this.
There’s the lovely dreamy specification phase with all the excitement and expectation of bringing something new into the world. Then there’s the satisfying and rewarding build phase when our brilliant ideas take shape and we’re feeling smug and proud.
Then comes the ‘brutal critique’ – The user acceptance testing. Other people stand around our beautiful new born and point out everything that’s wrong with it. We find ourselves back in the specification and build phase but this time with a looming deadline and depleted self confidence and enthusiasm.
Over the next few weeks we’ll post our thoughts on why making digital stuff a reality sometimes takes longer than you might initially expect and how it’s our job to manage those expectations … and we’ll consider the project management techniques that help us all enjoy the process and keep our sanity intact.
Last week we met a friend and ex-colleague Neil Cocker for a coffee and a catch up. Apart from being an all round smart cookie and good egg Neil has been very aptly described as a “creative industries ninja” due to his ability to quietly be everywhere and work on several projects at the same time. To give you an idea of the pies he’s got his fingers in check out this list of his current projects.
Managing Director of Dizzyjam, a merchandising service for the independent music scene.
Co-organiser of the first TED talks in Cardiff due to be held in Millennium Centre on the 14th April 2010.
Co-organiser of Ignite Cardiff a networking event that brings Cardiff’s community of creative and digital folk together.
Mentor for Community Music Wales, working with disadvantaged young people and consultant for the Welsh Assembly Government.
Neil in one of those people who has an extraordinary knack for making friends and acquaintances and then rallying them to come together and do something. Malcolm Gladwell would probably call him a ‘connector’ and a ‘maven’.
Whilst chatting with Neil about work (and quite often and very happily veering off topic) I was struck by how Neil is almost pathologically interested in everything and just can’t help himself from being helpful. How does this man sleep? With so much going on how does he organise himself? We talked about this and quickly we all agreed that training yourself to say ‘no’ and do less was very difficult if you are indeed hard coded to want to know more, learn more and do everything.
The talk that Neil gave at the third Ignite Cardiff was called ‘The art of blackspotting, and having less’. It covered some of the ways he’s trying to simplify his life. He is hunting out spaces with no wireless and he’s going back to relying on email and Twitter for the information he needs. If you’re unfamiliar with the Ignite format it’s worth setting the scene; the speakers have 5 minutes to race through 20 slides, the slides rotate automatically every 15 seconds. The audience is around 200 strong. The art (so I’m told) is to make sure that what’s coming out of your mouth matches up with the slide. Meanwhile not giving away too much of the panic you’re feeling inside.
When I spoke to Neil about his talk his response was this:
“I really didn’t like my presentation a huge amount. I didn’t have time to learn it properly, and tried to fit too much in. It’s fairly garbled! In a way it was good, because it taught me to never commit to doing stuff I haven’t got time for. As I wrote a few days afterwards …” … read Neil’s post
I was there on the night and I thought it came across really well. Have a look and make up your own mind.
We couldn’t agree more with this formula. In fact it’s now written on a Post-it note and stuck on my wall to the left of my computer screen. It’s always there in my peripheral vision helping remind me to name my files accurately, back up my computer regularly, test, check and double check everything before we present it to the client.
Wrapping neat ideas in rigorous process driven stuff may feel uncomfortable, but delivering a good idea through to execution demands a large dose of meticulous, pedantic, attention to detail … and time. FACT … a painful one no less.
We realised some time ago that trying to keep up with the skill set required to roll out everything digital marketing has to offer was exhausting and nigh on impossible. Digital is multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary and so collaboration is essential. The magic happens when lots of individuals work together; planners, developers, programmers, copy writers, designers and search engine marketing and social media specialists, to name the ones I know about today. Tomorrow is anyone’s guess. Whilst we can cover a fair amount of the specialist stuff our job at Cinch is often about knowing enough to bring the specialists together and make sure they have what they need to do their jobs. I suppose you could say that in that sense we are specialists at being generalists.
Although not a natural ‘joiner inner’ I’ve long since loved working on projects as part of a team – preferably a small one. Something between 3 -7 is my optimum or comfort zone. I’d never stopped to think about this. All I knew is that given a meeting of 10 people or more I found myself ill at ease and frustrated by either the lack of focus on finding a solution collectively or the dominance of one person’s conviction to a single solution. When Idris Motote talks about collaborative groups he pitches the optimum size at between 5-6 people and recognises from experience that problem solving in large groups can sometimes be fractious and tense.
“you need both convergent vs divergent thinking to optimize any groups creative output.”
We work with teams as big as thirty people through to small businesses of five. Often in our role as project managers we see the best work come out of a combination of convergent and divergent thinking and as long as there is trust it is this friction that drives the best work.
Guiding large meetings will always be challenging, so as a rule once the overall direction of the project is clarified, we divide into smaller working groups and get the heck out of there. We brainstorm delivery options and tease out the key issues, moving things on quickly (the sprint phase). We then then regroup (the huddle phase). And start all over again.
The team is more nimble, adaptive and energised. There are no long lulls between big meetings. Every member of the delivery team is responsible to each other and are able and empowered to contribute to shorter more regular meeting.
In short it drives a good pace, keeps us all thinking and most importantly it gets things done.
You know what it’s like. You go to a conference and you return to work upbeat and enthused about what is possible, all the really interesting things you’ve been talking about and how this is going to make a real difference in your organisation. There comes the interesting bit – your organisation – and how to actually make things happen in a ‘real organisation’ with all that entails. Including the stuff that seems to stand in your way.
Earlier in the year I presented the closing session at the annual IDM/DMA West Digital Marketing Conference. Following the key note ‘The Digital Landscape 2009’ we heard from a range of expert practitioners across search, email, mobile and display. My session, based on a case study covering our work with Visit Wales dealt with some of the more practical lessons learnt – the ones we learnt while making digital happen in a real organisation. Here are some of the big ones.
When you are kicking off something new keep a low profile. Ironically big budgets can sometimes work against you. Test and learn. Build your case and present the facts.
Doing digital well is still fundamentally about people and being smart rather than technology or media spend. Your team, internal and external, are always going to be your biggest asset.
Ensure everyone is working to their strengths. Focus on what you do best and work with others who are doing the same. Yourself, your team, your agencies and suppliers.
New models require new ways of working. Managing digital is as much about managing change as it is about managing digital. You need to plan for that change.
Ideas rule. But don’t be seduced by ideas. You agency knows how to help you develop your business, but remember – you know your business best. Be challenged but trust your instincts.
If you head up digital be prepared to spend some serious time influencing those above you. Your challenge is to fill that gap between what your team know and what those above know.
Keep it simple – never underestimate the power of the fag packet diagram or the lift shaft summary. But let those above see all the numbers – they will ask silly, difficult and important questions.
The list of things to do will never stop getting longer. The way you prioritise that list is critical to your success. Beware the opportunity cost.
Don’t let anybody tell you any different. We are all still learning.
I’ll let you know …
You can check out the slides I used to illustrate the stuff I mentioned above;
PS 2002 (2 years BFB) = two years before facebook. Yep, that long ago …
