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Getting started with the Agile Marketing Navigator

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Getting started with the Agile Marketing Navigator

We recently introduced you to the Agile Marketing Navigator, a flexible framework for navigating agile marketing for marketers, by marketers in the article A new way to navigate agile marketing. The navigator has four major components: Collaborative Planning Workshop, Launch Cycle, Key Practices and Roles. Within these categories, there are several sub-pieces for implementation.

In recent articles we covered the Collaborative Planning Workshop and the Launch Cycle. Now we’re going to dive into the fourth of our 6 Key Practices: Cycle Time.

Is work taking too long to get to customers?

If your team is plagued by work taking forever to actually get to customers, you may have inefficiencies in the way you work. For example, maybe your team is really great at getting social posts up quickly, but when it comes to email, there’s a huge lag in the delivery time.

Cycle Time measurement is all about measuring how a specific work item type, such as email, takes from start to finish — uncovering inefficiencies along the way. The team is then collectively accountable for discussing ways to improve the Cycle Time. In a truly agile culture, leaders would allow the team to make these changes. In a company that’s more traditional, it may not be so simple, but at least gaining awareness around the current state can actually start to move mountains.


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Are leaders aware of what’s holding the team back?

I’ve been at a lot of companies where leaders are asking why something can’t be delivered sooner — so the team works overtime to make miracles happen. Then it happens again. And again. The cycle is vicious and hard to break, but no one is really solving the root problem. 

Too many times, people are trapped by tunnel vision and only see their own piece in delivery of work, not the whole picture.

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I was working with a company’s CMO, and with him and other leaders in the room, we uncovered exactly why it was taking so long for emails to be delivered. We discussed every step of the process, from start to finish, and looked at where things were getting stuck.

We found that a lot of sign-offs were taking several days, including multiple rounds of reviews that were unnecessary. After making that discovery, emails went from taking more than a month to get to customers to being delivered in a week.

Read next: How to empower your agile marketing team

How to measure Cycle Time

There are tools that can measure Cycle Time for you, but I still believe that the most impactful way is to get people together in a room and have a conversation about it, with data to back it up if necessary. If you can get everyone that’s involved in the process, along with the person that’s complaining it’s taking too long, you can quickly gain transparency and alignment.

Let’s walk through an example using email. If you have a collaborative tool or whiteboard, have everyone list out the steps in getting an email done from concept to delivery. 

Understand the key audience
Segment the list from a database
Design the email
Design approval
Creative review
Revision #1
Creative edits
Write copy
Copy review
Final draft
Legal review
Send to martech team for coding
Deployment

Next, ask the team to list how many days on average each step of the process takes:

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Understand key audience 3
Segment the list from a database 1
Design  3
Design approval 3
Creative review 2
Revision #1 2
Creative edits 1
Write copy 2
Copy review 2
Final draft 1
Legal review 5
Send to MarTech team for coding 5
Deployment 5
Cycle Days (on average) 35

While it may not be exact, they can quickly see that it takes about 35 days on average to deliver an email. This may make a few people gasp! They probably didn’t realize just how clunky this process was until they could visualize every step in the way and realize the inefficiencies.

Now that they’ve identified Cycle Time, the real magic happens when the team can discuss what’s slowing them down. A few examples here are:

  • Approvals take too long.
  • Copy and design reviews happening sequentially.
  • Another team needed to code and deploy the emails.

After defining the issues, the next step is to brainstorm solutions. A few ideas could be:

  • Can we agree that approvals happen within 24 hours?
  • Can copy and design work together from the beginning and in tandem?
  • Can our legal partners agree to come to a huddle once a week and sign-off on requests?
  • Can we agree on what types of content actually need legal review?
  • Can we train someone on our team to code/deploy emails?

Understanding Cycle Time and building transparency around it are key steps to making your team run more efficiently and succeeding with agile marketing.


Catch up on the Agile Marketing Navigator series!



Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About The Author

Why leading an agile marketing organization requires a vision for

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Stacey knows what it’s like to be a marketer, after all, she’s one of the few agile coaches and trainers that got her start there. After graduating from journalism school, she worked as a content writer, strategist, director and adjunct marketing professor. She became passionate about agile as a better way to work in 2012 when she experimented with it for an ad agency client. Since then she has been a scrum master, agile coach and has helped with numerous agile transformations with teams across the globe. Stacey speaks at several agile conferences, has more certs to her name than she can remember and loves to practice agile at home with her family. As a lifelong Minnesotan, she recently relocated to North Carolina where she’s busy learning how to cook grits and say “y’all.”

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MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

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