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Do marketers need their own agile framework?

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Do marketers need their own agile framework?

As agile becomes more and more the norm in marketing departments, is it time for marketers to have their own framework? It’s been the common practice for marketers to cobble together parts of Scrum and pieces of Kanban and to figure out what resonates with them, but is that good enough, or would a framework that’s designed just for marketers by marketers be a better solution?

The question that I get asked in almost every training session is something like, “I love the idea of agile marketing, but what’s the best way to implement it at my company?”

Leaders in the agile marketing community have been meeting regularly to discuss many of the pain points associated with marketers and what needs to change to make lasting change.

“Marketing professionals face some serious challenges today. Agile marketing gives marketers the ability to be effective communicators with their stakeholder groups. Stakeholders no longer feel like they’re being marketed to; instead, they understand that they’re part of an ongoing conversation between them and the marketer. Adding an agile marketing framework would be a good step for marketing as the profession deals with the challenges facing the practice today,” says John Cass, co-founder of AlContentGen and a prominent leader in the agile marketing community.

The challenges with Scrum

I’ve always been a huge proponent of Scrum, and it absolutely can work for marketing teams when implemented well. But a lot gets lost in translation. It can easily be adapted for marketers with the luxury of a coach to help them make it applicable to marketing. However, companies without a guide often struggle to bring it to life in their world.

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One of the key missing ingredients with Scrum for marketing is that the framework begins with the team’s backlog. Still, it doesn’t address anything that occurs upstream with how work originates and gets to the teams. When the practice starts there, marketers still don’t have a seat at the table.

In my experience, great agile marketing begins when marketers work with stakeholders early on to align on the desired outcomes of a project or campaign, allowing the team members to ideate on how they would go about creatively solving the problem.

At most companies, work is submitted through a brief, and the creative team is expected to execute to the exact specifications. What’s hugely missing here is the conversation around the business goals. 

So if I were to create an agile marketing framework, it would begin with collaborative planning between the stakeholders and the team, where they go back and forth between outcomes and creative solutions, leaving with shared alignment and understanding.

Another gap I’ve noticed with Scrum for marketing is the timing around feedback loops. While the Sprint Review was designed for product development teams to get feedback on what was completed with a product, typically taking several sprints to build and release, marketers have much quicker execution times, which often involve multiple customers and channels. So the Sprint Review may be a moot point for marketing because they likely have several campaigns in flight at any given time.

What marketers do need to focus on, however, is how those campaign assets are performing at any given time. So instead of the traditional Sprint Review, a tweak in marketing would be looking at how campaigns are doing, and using that data to drive conversations.

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Scrum roles aren’t apples-to-apples in marketing either. While the idea of a dedicated Scrum Master that doesn’t do work is great, marketing teams are so lean that this seldom happens unless it’s a very large company. 

With my clients, I often create a role called “Agile Champion,” and that’s the person on the team who will champion new ways of working but still does work themselves. This practice seems much easier to implement. The person in that role feels empowered to lead change but doesn’t feel like they have to master a new job altogether.

The role of Product Owner doesn’t always resonate with marketers since they aren’t out there looking at a vision for a new product. However, I’ve often used “Marketing Owner,” which is quite similar. However, a marketing strategist typically fills it, and their role doesn’t change too much, except they become the one person that prioritizes the team’s backlog. 

Blending in Kanban

Most of the time, Kanban alone doesn’t solve the challenges marketers face because there isn’t adequate planning and stakeholder engagement. Nevertheless, a few practices from this framework greatly benefit marketers.

The ones I’ve found most useful to incorporate are: visualizing the work, work item types, measuring cycle time and setting work in progress limits. By visualizing work, teams can understand where work is at any point in time. Work item types (such as a social post or blog) are great for understanding individual efforts and process inefficiencies. Measuring cycle time allows teams to understand how long a work item type takes to complete and streamline the flow. Setting work-in-progress limits helps teams finish the task rather than starting too many tasks at once.

I would build all of these practices into a unique framework just for marketers. Today, we’re telling marketers to figure it out, but would historical experience from agile marketing leaders help take the guesswork out of everything?

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Read next: More on agile marketing from Stacey Ackerman

The evolution of agile marketing

In 2021 marketers came together to revamp the Agile Marketing Manifesto during a community event called #sprinttwo. We’ve come a long way in alignment with values and principles as a community, but we don’t have any standard practices.

“Marketing is a unique organizational function, and I’ve never seen two departments built the same. There’s excellent alignment and consistency with agile values and principles as air-cover to guide modern marketing. However, the execution team’s challenge is in mapping and working with methods not designed for the specifics and overall breadth of marketing,” says Michael Seaton, president at Level C Digital and agile marketing coach and trainer.

What do you think — do marketers need their own agile marketing framework?


A marketers glossary to essential agile marketing terms

Many marketers struggle to apply agile marketing in a way that adds value to team members. Learn how to break that pattern in this free e-book, “MarTech’s Guide to agile marketing for teams”.

Click here to download!



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

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About The Author

A marketers glossary to essential agile marketing terms

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.

Get MarTech! Daily. Free. In your inbox.

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