In the increasingly competitive world of content marketing it can be tempting to just put the pedal to the metal and produce as much content as possible: hundreds of blog posts, videos, webinars, infographics, emails, newsletters, white papers, social media posts – anything so long as it’s somewhat related to your industry. Continue reading

AT&T (then known as American Telephone and Telegraph) first described the idea of a network effect a century ago. They noted in a report that the more people who were on their network, the more valuable it became. Today network effects are central to growing many Internet companies. (They don’t affect, of course, companies with products and services that are valuable by themselves such as cars, food, clothes, health care, and so on.) Continue reading

A few years ago I attended one of those multi-city marketing tours that software companies do – this one was by Eloqua, a major marketing automation company. Held in a hotel downtown it was a full-day event with probably 150-200 people attending. Continue reading

The Internet is full of bots, which means that not only may the traffic to your website be inflated but so too your social media following.

Twitteraudit.com is a site that quickly analyzes a sample of an account’s followers to estimate how many are fake. For Trump and Clinton, TwitterAudit estimates that about 40% of their followers are unreal. But fake follower accounts are so prevalent on Twitter that TwitterAudit gives 40% a green thumbs up! Continue reading

This is part of chapter 24 of Louis Gudema’s Bullseye Marketing book, which is available on Amazon.

In this book, I’ve outlined a whole new approach to marketing that wouldn’t have made sense in the past when the Big Idea and big campaigns dominated marketing. Today we are much more focused on creating hundreds of small pieces of content – personalized emails, videos, blog posts, tweets, infographics, case studies, ROI calculators, website updates, and on and on. Then we need to continuously monitor this content and optimize these programs based on customer reactions, and be aware of – and possibly respond to — the moves that competitors are making. Often opportunities arise that we only have a few days or weeks to take advantage of.

We can’t afford to take weeks to create a master plan and months to execute it. We need to be more agile.

In 2012, taking inspiration from the agile software development movement, a group of marketers led by John Cass and Jim Ewel (who is interviewed below) came together for what they called SprintZero and created the Agile Marketing Manifesto[i]. It read:

  1. Validated learning over opinions and conventions
  2. Customer focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy
  3. Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns
  4. The process of customer discovery over static prediction
  5. Flexible vs. rigid planning
  6. Responding to change over following a plan
  7. Many small experiments over a few large bets

It’s worth stopping for a few minutes and reading each of those seven points again. Then read them again and take some time to consider how each can impact how you do marketing.

It’s a manifesto that focuses on the customer– and feedback from them – at the center of marketing, data over opinion, a responsive and flexible attitude and practice, and experimentation.

Agile intends to lower the risk in projects by increasing the ability of the team to respond to changes in the market and project requirements, and by being closer to the customer.

Many marketing teams who adopt agile marketing report being more productive: they increase throughput, get campaigns to market faster, and improve their business results. Employees also report improved job satisfaction with the agile method. It’s perfectly suited for the Bullseye approach.

Agile marketing is a philosophy. Agile marketing practitioners have tended to adopt one of two methodologies for implementing it: Scrum or Kanban. Each method has certain practices and tools that I’ll describe below – the sprint, daily team stand-up meeting, and Kanban boards – but all of those are mutable. Or can be combined in unique ways. Just as all companies are different, each needs to find or develop the form of agile that works best for it.

Scrum

Agile software development inspired the agile marketing movement, and Scrum has been adopted from the software world, as well. Some product development teams were using Scrum in the mid-1980s. (The term “scrum” comes from rugby; it is a means of restarting play in which a large number of players join closely together to try to move the ball.)

A key organizing unit for Scrum is a series of 2-4 week sprints in which the team works to achieve specific goals and tasks by the end of the sprint. The length of the sprint cannot be changed once it starts, nor can tasks be added to the sprint.

At the start of the sprint, the team holds a sprint planning meeting to determine the goals and the tasks for each team member for that sprint and to get buy-in from the team.

The team usually chooses the tasks from a product backlog of user stories. A product owner creates these user stories for the team; Scrum teams typically have one product owner, and this role is not combined with the Scrum master (below).

These user stories are customer-centric and include the Actor, Action and Achievement, such as:

  • As a [particular persona] I want to be able to [learn specific information] to [understand product differentiators].
  • As a potential end-user, I want to see a software product demo to understand how the user interface compares to other software.
  • As a car buyer interested in sustainability I want to learn the carbon footprint of this automobile.
  • As a person planning a trip to Croatia, I want to find the best seafood restaurants

User stories also include context for the request and acceptance criteria for the task. Some criteria are objective – this landing page will increase leads by X%, or this blog post will get Y shares. Some criteria are more subjective.

The sprint planning meeting, and the entire sprint, is facilitated by a Scrum master. Unlike a traditional manager, though, the Scrum master is not ultimately responsible for the outcome of the sprint, the team is.

The Scrum master helps the team decide which product backlog items to undertake for the upcoming sprint and identify what tasks are necessary to complete them.

During the sprint, Scrum teams often start the day with 15-minute standing meetings. The three questions that each person answers in the daily standup are:

  1. What did I do yesterday?
  2. What will I do today?
  3. Do I need help with anything that’s blocking me from accomplishing today’s tasks?

This keeps the team members focused on their goals for this sprint, and collaborating on how to achieve them.

At the end of each sprint, the team holds two meetings: the sprint review and retrospective.

In the sprint review, the completed work is presented to stakeholders, and the team and stakeholders review what they accomplished and discuss what should be worked on next.

In the sprint retrospective, the Scrum master and team review the last sprint and discuss how to improve their process going forward, and any changes in the process needed for the next sprint.

Wash, rinse and repeat.

Kanban

Kanban, which comes from the Japanese for “sign,” originated in manufacturing at Toyota in the late 1940s and has been applied to many other industries since then.

Right from the get-go, Kanban is different from Scrum in that it does not have the start-stop rhythm of 2-4 week sprints. Kanban is a continuous flow process, and when one item is completed the team member goes on to the next. Consequently, it also doesn’t have the sprint planning, review, and retrospective meetings that are central to Scrum.

As in Scrum, Kanban tasks can be created as user stories which are then put into the backlog on a Kanban board. Kanban boards are central to the method and are also used by some Scrum teams. (There are physical and software Kanban boards.)

The simplest Kanban board has three columns or lists:

  • To do
  • Doing
  • Done

More complex boards may have far more lists representing the stages of a process, such as this one for blog posts:

  • Conceive
  • Research
  • Write
  • Edit
  • Design
  • Post, amplify and promote

Cards aren’t moved forward until they are considered as good as possible or, as would be said in manufacturing, error-free. In the blog post example, a writer would not move a post into editing unless they felt it was correct regarding content, spelling, and grammar – ready for publication.

And each list has a defined limit. For example, the editing list may only be able to accommodate four pieces at a time. If the list is already full, but another post is ready, it is not moved onto the edit list until one of those four already there is completed and moved on to design.

So Kanban is much less structured than Scrum, with fewer new roles and meetings. It is a process of continuous delivery, and the continuous improvement of an existing process. It may not be as radical of a change as Scrum is for most organizations.

 

These are short descriptions of two complex methodologies. Entire books have been written about each.

And teams don’t necessarily need to choose between Scrum and Kanban. They can choose the aspects of each that work best for them. The important thing is to create a process that adheres to those agile principles that works for you.

Agile isn’t necessarily applicable to everything. If you have a big product launch or website redesign, those may need more traditional “waterfall” or other planning approaches.

While agile may seem like a relatively simple process to implement with a small team, it actually affects relations throughout the company — such as with product managers and sales — who need to be involved in creating new user stories and reviewing marketing’s work product. There may be some hiccups in transition, as there are with any change, but in the long run agile can help create smoother, more productive and successful working relationships.

A/B testing is a traditional technique in direct marketing, and it’s common in digital marketing, too. People test alternate versions of landing pages, images, email subject lines, colors, offers, creative, and on and on. (In some cases when they have large volumes they may do multi-variate testing, too.)

But don’t necessarily assume that just because one option won that it’s always better. Continue reading

Many companies have a President’s Club to honor their top sales people. Sales reps who meet, or exceed, quota and other goals such as new business, year-over-year growth, or territory growth get a handshake from the President, CEO or chairman, and rewards can include cash bonuses, trips, and even cars, as well as the public recognition. Multiple President’s Club winners may reap even greater rewards. Continue reading

The amount of content (blogs, videos, infographics, webinars, market research, etc. etc.) being developed is increasing so rapidly that you could call it a tsunami. Unless you’re one of the fortunate few who’s in an industry where your competitors are not yet generating much content, it gets harder and harder every day to get your content noticed. Continue reading

You can use three types of marketing data to enhance your customer and prospect targeting:

    • First party data is your data. It includes previous customer buying history, how a person interacts with your website and emails (what Eloqua calls their digital body language), their attendance on webinars or physical events, and so on. First party data rules, and it’s inexpensive for you to gather and use.

Continue reading

Instagram is one of the largest social networks, with a quarter of the entire adult population using it. In terms of demographics use is somewhat heavier among women (which is true for most social media), and much heavier by Blacks (47% of Black Internet users are on Instagram) and Hispanics (38%) than Whites (21%). Continue reading