The Agile Marketer, the summary

If you wish to purchase the book The Agile Marketer by Roland Smart, I invite you to click on the link below.

Table of contents

Part 1 - How development methods influence marketing

1. Why does marketing need to adapt?

a) Frustrations 2.0 of our consumers

Depuis quelques années, nous sommes entrés dans l’ère du « consommateur responsabilisé » notamment grâce aux réseaux sociaux, et plus généralement, à l’accès facile à l’information.

Les risques de frustration ont évolué avec ses comportements. En voici quelques exemples :

Major change in an app without informing the customers
Purchase from a manufacturer at a higher price than that offered by a distributor the following week, with no possibility of reimbursement for the price difference
Absence of reactions, responses from a company to negative reviews written about one of its products
Lack of responsiveness in answering questions posted on the company's social media channels
The information given by an online operator does not correspond to the reality in the store
The offer forces consumers to buy a fixed package of products of which they only need half

These frustrations are the result of a poor connection between marketing and the people responsible for product development.

b) The adaptive approach

Before, innovation was driven by marketing in the way of making the product known. Today, innovation is driven by product development. However, even with an innovative product, the collaboration between marketing and development is essential to build and guarantee a satisfying consumer journey.

Modern marketing is about competing on the basis of consumer experience. This requires new practices and platforms.

Ex: Tesla's car model - continuous improvement of the hardware and software of vehicles. Choice between multiple configurations. The buying experience is very different from a traditional car manufacturer. The car improves over time. And in large part, based on data collected and customer input. As a result, Tesla has a community of owners who are active online = adaptive approach.

Adaptive approach allows to innovate quickly and to respond to unexpected circumstances that in a traditional company could jeopardize the business.

We call it Lean or Agile.

Thanks to it, marketing and product development can iterate alongside each other as they evolve the product and brand towards a consumer ideal.

The transparency is at the heart of the adaptive approach.

The adaptive approach to development depends on constant consumer feedback to motivate iteration. Marketers, as stewards of the brand community, are perfectly positioned to act as a feedback channel between the customer and the product development team. Therefore, they have the potential to play a more effective and strategic role in facilitating product/market matching.

2. Le challenge du marketeer moderne

Marketing technology landscape has become complex, fragmented, and rapidly evolving. It is filled with overlapping technologies, integration challenges, data fragmentation, and a maze-like technology management.

a) A proliferation of technologies

In 2022, there were already 9932 marketing technology solutions !

Parmi ces technologies marketing, on peut notamment retrouver :

Web technologies that track behavior on the web
Social technologies that measure influence and conversations
Advertising technologies to test messages and understand which ones resonate most with specific segments
Retail technologies that analyze how consumers move through stores and which merchandising techniques have the most impact
Business Intelligence that allows to establish correlations between all the data collected by the above technologies.

To be able to use all these technologies for the benefit of the business, we must have an integrated marketing platform. C’est-à-dire un niveau technologique dont les données « discrètes » (veille sociale, ad retargeting, gestion d’influenceurs, ..) s’empilent au-dessus des technologies de base qui sont le CRM, le système de marketing automation et de gestion des contenus.

b) The added value of new technologies

Ce type de plateforme soutient l’agilité, la capacité à innover et à amplifier. Voici quelques exemples de questions auxquelles elle peut désormais contribuer à répondre :

Notre marque peut-elle suivre ses clients tout au long de son parcours : du site internet, vers l’application mobile jusqu’à l’expérience en magasin afin de placer les points de contact marketing au bon moment pour susciter l’émotionnel ?
Est-ce que la marque tire parti des données issues de sa communauté pour personnaliser son site web ?
Utilise-t-elle efficacement ses promoteurs les plus influents ?
L’entreprise utilise-t-elle la technologie pour comprendre où se trouvent les prospects dans le parcours d’achat ?
Peut-elle connecter les points de contact pour délivrer le bon message au bon moment via le bon canal au bon consommateur pour optimiser la croissance des ventes ?
Comment l’entreprise mesure-t-elle l’impact du marketing sur les ventes ?

There are many barriers to implementing an integrated platform.

Lack of time : Marketers already spend a lot of time trying to master the technologies and data they have
Lack of finance to build such a platform
The need to prove the added value of such an investment before being able to evaluate the first results.

Yet analysts predict that marketers are on the verge of spending more on technology than the IT department. CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) must get closer to CTOs (Chief Technology Officers). In addition to having the technological talent, they also have more experience in implementing agile processes.

When it comes to product development, marketing often comes late in the loop. Often, by the time the company begins to understand the potential of marketing, the product is already on the market.

3. Increase sales: marketing and automation

The challenge for marketers is to manage and guide the first step in the buying journey. If they don't provide an experience for empowered shoppers, it will be to the benefit of competing companies that will do. Many, almost all companies are not doing this enough, and are missing out on this opportunity.

a) Marketing automation is the core technology

For example, follow-up programs influence the purchase decision. They can range from automated email blasts that provide educational content, to event invitations, to mobile notifications. These programs respond to how the user engages with each message or element. The more information the prospect provides during the process, the more relevant and personalized feedback from marketing.

This is what we call " progressive profiling "This means asking for and collecting more and more information from the prospect in exchange for more and more valuable content and services.

This automation makes it possible to manage the buying journey long before salespeople have to enter the loop.

Automation does not only apply to emailing.. It can involve all points of the omnichannel strategy.

b) Align Marketing and Sales

Alignment between marketing and sales is key. Qualified leads generate, on average, 20% more sales opportunities than unqualified leads.

La méthode agile peut faciliter la mise en place de l’automatisation. En effet, un développement traditionnel ne serait pas tenable : au moment où le programme d’automatisation serait en place, il serait probablement déjà obsolète.

It is necessary to involve sales as partners, consumers and employees right from the development stage.

The goal of automation is generally not to create new buying behaviors. It's about making interactions between prospects and salespeople more efficient, consistent and targeted.

Technology is the best way to amplify existing human behavior.

It should be automatic but also personalized. Facebook and Google have accustomed us to get precise answers to our personal questions.

Salespeople should therefore focus on higher value customers, those that increase their magnitude as a resource.

c) Low value business transaction = service

Marketers, using automation, will turn low-value business operations into a service.

Ex: the travel industry. Most customers manage their own travel online through a fully automated process. There are still travel agents, but they are dedicated to more complex and higher value transactions.

Most marketers have very limited experience in service development. The latter is traditionally the job of the CTO and CPO (Chief Product Officer). These leaders have adopted the agile approach for 10 to 15 years to remain competitive. To do this, marketers must accept the influence of these leaders. Et ils doivent adopter l’approche adaptative pour tenir les promesses de la plate-forme de marketing moderne et d’un MaaS = Marketing as a Service.

4. The Agile progression

Agile does not fit all marketing activities. It is therefore important that this approach coexist with the Waterfall approach. They combine and reinforce each other.

a) Pourquoi l’agile progresse dans le marketing ?

Need for speed rather than magnitude
The progression of open-source and shared development
Availability of low cost development resources
The distribution of computing power at the limits of the network (e.g.: the Internet of Things)

These factors create the need for a trade-off of optimization for flexibility.

The agile approach offers a competitive advantage for those operating in fast-moving markets. Rapid cycles shorten the time to get feedback from the market. By getting responses to their feedback quickly, prospects/customers will be more likely to give positive feedback and advocate for your products.

b) Le marketing agile est-il le futur ?

Le terme « agile marketing » est toujours moins recherché que celui de « inbound marketing » sur Google. Pourtant, c’est l’approche agile qui soutient l’inbound. Mais il semble que ce terme ne bénéficie pas de la même notoriété dans le marché.

Part 2 - Adaptive methods to modernize marketing

1. An overview of the main methods

Agile works very well for services that are operational all the time (e.g. automation), moderately well for programs that have a regular cadence (e.g. monthly webinar) and very little for isolated initiatives.

a) Scrum

Principle: it is better to deliver on time than to delay a delivery in order to produce more.

It is therefore necessary to estimate the time needed to finish each story in order to evaluate what is realistic to add within each iteration.

Specific terms of the Scrum approach

Sprint : a collection of stories estimated and prioritized to fit into a defined time period. The duration of a sprint is consistent from one sprint to another and generally lasts between 1 and 4 weeks.

Scrum : nom donné aussi à la réunion quotidienne debout organisée par le scrum master. Les participants rapportent sur 3 sujets : (1) Qu’ont-ils accompli depuis la dernière réunion ? (2) Que vont-ils accomplir d’ici la prochaine réunion (3) Quels obstacles peuvent-ils rencontrer sur leur chemin. Deux questions supplémentaires, spécifiques pour le marketing peuvent être posées: (4) Qu’est-ce qui, selon eux, fonctionnent bien pour l’instant (5) A l’inverse, qu’est-ce qui ne fonctionne pas ?

User story : a short, plain language articulation that captures what the user does - or needs to do - and that the product is trying to solve. It ensures that the item being created is user-centric.

Functional specification : a detailed document generally called a Business Requirement Document (BRD).

Backlog : the list of stories that have not yet been assigned to a sprint.

Timeboxing : allocation of a fixed time period to each sprint that prioritizes on-time delivery over perfect delivery.

Retrospective : debriefing that takes place at the end of a project or iteration. The team discusses what worked well in proportion to the effort, what could be improved, and how to integrate the results into future projects and iterations. Both the product developed and the development process are discussed.

Planning poker an exercise to estimate the length of stories based on the Fibonacci sequence or T-shirt sizes. Cards are shared only after personal estimates of task size have been made (so as not to bias opinions).

Applying Scrum to marketing

Scrum is applied, for example, when creating a new section of a website or a new landing page template.

The delivery of the first version is fast. It will be basic but will allow to collect feedback rapidly. With this method, the 2^nd iteration often takes place before the classic waterfall approach produces a first version.

When teams use the Waterfall approach for a web project, they rely on best practices and individual opinions instead of direct user feedback. These biases are what prevent teams from discovering the realities of the market, often different from their own projection of reality.

Moreover, with Waterfall, the later the changes take place in the process, the more expensive they are. In agile, adaptations are discovered quickly. Therefore, they require less cost.

The Scrum methodology divides the company into small cross-functional teams that self-manage around a process. And it divides the work into a list of small deliverables.

Product Owner : the person responsible for prioritizing tasks and final output requirements. Marketers are often the ones who give input to the POs.

Scrum Master : a project manager whose role is to ensure that the team takes advantage of agile practices and works towards achieving the sprint objectives. This role can be compared to that of a facilitator.

b) Kanban

Not all projects have to fit into the Scrum model. Sometimes Kanban or even Waterfall are more suitable.

Kaizen

Originally, Kanban comes from the Lean approach which emerged in the automotive industry in Japan. It is still used today to identify specific causes of loss in the manufacturing process.

" Kaizen" = continuous improvement, a daily process of making small improvements that collectively have a huge impact. This is what allows Toyota to stop an entire production line if workers identify anything that causes a defect or loss. The Kaizen team immediately investigates and resolves problems during this interruption.

Having a dedicated Kaizen team is unique to Lean but dealing with process feedback periodically is familiar: this is the internal agile feedback loop at the process level.

Despite its roots, marketing departments use Kanban more frequently.

WIP

Kanban follows the WIP (Work in Progress) and visualizes the progress of the work (the stories) through each phase of production, by means of cards on a board. Unlike Scrum, Kanban does not prescribe timeboxing. It limits the number of items that can be processed at each stage of development.

A work item can only progress to the next column if there is availability in that new column.

Scrum measures speed : the total number of story points per iteration

Kanban measures cycle time : the average time it takes for an element to progress through the board.

The Kanban board is powerful because it uses visualization. One of its advantages over Scrum is also related to estimation. Kanban does not tend to have to deal with cyclical increases or decreases in pressure. Instead, Kanban teams support cycle time maintenance.

This means that the notion of emergency is more abstract compared to Scrum. This is why it is important to choose, combine and implement the appropriate method according to the project.

These 2 methods are both traction oriented. They pull work from the backlog when the current task is finalized.

c) Scrum & Kanban similarities

Both Lean & Agile
« Pull scheduling » : traction
Limit the WIP
Use transparency to drive process improvements
Focused on delivering products quickly and consistently
Based on self-managed teams
Need to divide work into small tasks
Empirical data (speed/execution time) is used to continuously optimize the distribution plan.

d) Différences Scrum & Kanban

SCRUM	KANBAN
Iterations within a specific time frame	Iterations within a defined timeframe are optional. Can be event driven rather than time driven
The team commits to a specific amount of work for an iteration	Commitment is optional
Uses speed as the default measure for planning and process improvement	Uses execution time as default measure
Cross-functional team prescribed	Cross-functional team optional
The elements must be divided in order to be performed during a sprint	No imposed size of elements
WIP limited indirectly (by sprint)	WIP limited directly
No addition of elements during an iteration in progress	Addition of new elements possible if the resources allow it
The backlog of a sprint is the property of a team	A Kanban board can be shared between several teams and individuals
3 roles required: PO, SM, team	No specific roles required
A Scrum board is reset between each sprint	A Kanban board is persistent

e) The Scrumban

Scrumban is a hybrid method. It incorporates Kanban principles such as limiting the number of items that can be processed (WIP) with Scrum principles such as cross-functional teams.

One of the successes is being able to align marketing agility with product development scrum. It is also important that all the elements on the Kanban are linked to the strategic priority objectives.

Feedback from the company ReadyTalk who has been working in agile for 10 years. Agile marketing increases transparency in the organization and also provides a tangible view on the contribution, the impact of each person within the company. It gives the satisfaction of visually moving tasks from "to do" to "done". And it also facilitates the onboarding of new team members, which is essential for growth.

2. Key elements to consider when implementing agile

Adopter l’agile implique de se conformer à une ensemble de pratiques au sein de l’équipe. Cela ne se passe pas sur un nuit.

It is necessary to have a plan that addresses the following points:

How to take advantage of in-house agile experts?
What external training will be required?
What method will be adopted initially?
When will the initial implementation be evaluated?

It may be useful to designate a Business Owner who can dive into key methods (Scrum, Kanban) and manage the team's transformation = first point of contact between the team and other stakeholders that maximizes agile.

a) Strengthen C-suite partnerships

Taking advice from experts like the CTO or CPO and their teams is a good place to start. They have experience on how to operationalize agile.

Moreover, they are partners that are becoming increasingly important for the future of marketing.

Modernizing the company means reconfiguring the executive committee to better support the business.

CMO+CIO : internal and external collaboration platform
CMO+CRO : sales & marketing automation platform
CMO+CPO : analytic platform
CTO+CIO : network infrastructure and storage

Marketers become more and more the steward of the customer experience.

Example of Intel IT and marketing collaboration to extend the marketing strategy with IT capabilities such as social intelligence, campaign management, and data management. This allowed them to amplify their message in the marketplace, find out what people really like and value, and push that to the target segment. The cost of a qualified lead dropped from $300 to $25 in less than 2 years. Conversions of these leads improved by 75% in terms of speed and engagement by 17%.

b) The role of the agile coach

For companies that do not have in-house agile experts, it is useful to consider hiring an external expert - an agile coach. The best possible approach is to have the coach manage a small project with a team and play the role of Scrum Master.

Then, the members of this pilot team can train the other teams.

The best coaches will adapt the methods to your team. And the marketing world doesn't have tons of best practices to refer to yet.

Most marketing projects fit better in Kanban than in Scrum. Marketers prefer less prescriptive and dogmatic process methods than developers. Kanban is also easier to get started with. However, Scrum is excellent for projects such as SEO, advertising or marketing automation - activities that are continuous and offer a continuous flow of feedback.

Peu importe la méthode choisie, le feedback sur « comment cela fonctionne » est essentiel au succès de la transformation. Il faut définir des jalons lors desquels des revues du processus avec les membres du comité de direction sont prévues. Si possible, faire correspondre ses revues aux rétrospectives associées à chaque sprint ou cycle.

The key is to set external expectations the same way you set internal ones. That is, responding to feedback and sharing progress in a transparent manner.

3. Common objections when implementing agile

Impossible to scale : Platforms like Asana increase the number of relationships an individual can have. They facilitate communication and store relationships, conversations, projects and documents in the cloud. To scale at the marketing level, you need to codify the ways you work.
Disruptions of active projects : It is not possible to move all projects to an agile process in one night. It is better to start with a project that allows the team to learn the process while adapting it to the company culture. During the pilot phase, it is essential to measure performance so that productivity can be compared between an agile team and a traditional team.
Impossible to plan ahead : We can't plan everything we do. Continuous change makes the planning routine obsolete as conditions change at a rapid pace.
How do we set a budget for this? The adoption of agile has an implication on finances. Without a fixed annual plan, it becomes more complicated to deliver budget projections for the year. Budgeting is one way to compensate for the lack of agility. It is more effective and efficient to engage with teams, as a bank would, who need more resources when the need arises. This allows finance to take a closer look at each investment when the inputs considered are fresh and relevant.

Agile = faster ? Yes & No. People don't get more done by being agile rather than waterfall. On the other hand, agile allows you to start the first iteration much faster. It allows you to get feedback faster and therefore to launch a product on the market faster.

The Waterfall approach can go faster if the initial plan does not deviate from its final destination.

In agile on the opposite, we sacrifice some speed to increase the possibility of reaching the right destination. This improves the ability to steer and change course. If the waterfall arrives at the wrong result, its speed advantage disappears. Faster-moving industries take more risk by choosing this approach.

CONTENT IN CUPCAKES

Let's imagine publishing a book by piece, chapter-by-chapter to a small audience and then launch the consolidated book including all the feedbacks received.

The advantage of this approach is that it offers a scalable mode to support content-eating programs like marketing automation, and social network (SN) marketing. Before the book is even published, you can deliver cupcakes from its recipe. By splitting and cutting parts of the book, it is possible to support content requirements for website, webinar programs, retail experience, social media campaign, etc. And all this while getting feedback on each small part that helps to improve the consolidation over time.

Part 3 - Combining Innovation and Consumer Experience

1. Integrate marketing and innovation with agile

The alignment of the Innovation & Marketing team through the common use of agile enables the development of a fully consistent consumer experience.

Sharing practices = speaking the same language through different groups. And agile serves as a platform for strategic alignment.

a) Pourquoi le manque d’alignement prévaut ?

Product Team vs Marketing Team

Before, product management reported to marketing. With new technologies, product management has become the responsibility of the CTO.

By aligning with marketing, product management and development could integrate the brand's vision, positioning and unique value proposition into their thinking.

Few companies are aligned in this way. However, this approach is likely to grow as organizations adopt agile.

The disconnection is often seen between the product team's UX design and the marketing team's. Creating an integrated team is therefore important. This allows for a smooth transition from the prototype phase to production and promotion. While product management will drive the prototype phase, marketing can help generate product ideas and concepts. When it comes to marketing-oriented initiatives, marketing drives with the support of product management.

Product innovation must be validated by consumer feedback and market research. Direct user feedback is constant, business feedback is collected through intermittent surveys. It is important to integrate these two perspectives in a measurable way and in an accountable way. Too many companies have problems when they focus only on feedback.

Reconciliation process

" Reconciliation process involves comparing and contrasting the feedback from each source. It is on this basis that strategic perspectives emerge.

Strategy remains essential to define a clear positioning on how and with what we will compete, in which market, our internal capabilities, our differentiations etc.

Research, feedback and strategy are intimately linked and the fact that these inputs come from different channels at different rates creates this challenge of reconciliation. Agile serves the immediate reality while strategy looks further ahead. Mais les deux doivent être réconciliés : la stratégie avec l’input du feedback immédiat et l’agile avec des considérations macro de la stratégie.

b) Scenario planning

The scenario planning is a lead. It is not about identifying the best possible scenario. It is designed to allow management to create a wide range of scenarios so that it can anticipate. And when the time comes, to respond more quickly to market changes.

On its side, the experience mapping, which traces the consumer journey through each stage, can require extensive research and a significant investment. It provides information on product improvement but does not directly correspond to an agile model.

Scenario planning must be led by product management, which is the steward of the product strategy. But it needs close collaboration with marketing, which is the steward of the consumer experience. Experience mapping is the playground of marketing. But here too, close collaboration with product management is essential when it comes to product XP.

Product strategy and consumer experience must be developed collaboratively. This collaboration allows marketers to integrate marketing with the product.

2. Behind agile: more methods to link Marketing, Product Management & Innovation

Marketers can't rely solely on agile to manage their work. They must integrate agile methods with traditional methods that support a broader range of practices.

a) Skunk Works .

This is a dedicated innovation team that operates outside the company's traditional structure (e.g. : Google X Labs). It is given autonomy to accelerate innovation, usually on a specific project and often in a confidential manner.

Since Google, this model is also found at Nike, Walmart, Nordstrom and Xerox.

b) Crowdsourcing

Opening innovation to the public (e.g: My Starrbuck Idea), to the whole community. Crowdsourcing can also be conducted exclusively internally where all members of the company submit ideas.

These 2 methods require an alignment between innovation and marketing to work.

In skunk work : Marketing can play a role in supporting the project by providing market research, branding and research topics.

In crowdsourcing : It can improve the network and the platform of communities to facilitate the collection of ideas.

E.g: " My Starbuck ideas ": it combines an innovation site, a consumer support site, an employee feedback site, and a marketing site. All of this generates lots of ideas that can be leveraged by PM. And launching each idea presents opportunities for marketing to celebrate a new launch and community members at the same time.

c) Dependency exercise

This exercise represents innovative ideas as potential initiatives. It allows Marketing and Product Development leaders to define the interdependencies that exist between these initiatives.

Les initiatives = Epics qui sont des backlogs de haut niveau

Segmented stories

Once, the epics collected, overlaps should be identified and consolidated where possible. This does not mean committing to doing them all. It just means organizing them first to better understand how they relate.

Dependencies must be placed between initiatives. Some initiatives may have multiple dependencies and others will share dependencies.

d) Prioritization exercise

Allows to see which initiative should be prioritized based on its feasibility and its importance. Which one has the best return on investment (ROI).

We start by listing all the initiatives, beginning with those that have no dependencies.

Then we assign to each one a feasibility score and an importance score. The product manager assigns the feasibility with the support of development. The importance is evaluated by marketing & the product manager in coalition.

The value to be assigned to each initiative is based on a total of budgeted points (e.g. 50 points to be distributed among 7 initiatives).

Then we put the values in a graph with the importance in (y) and the feasibility in (x).

Closest to the top right corner, at the best ROI.

Each participant in this exercise should give his or her assessment individually to avoid group bias.

e) The North Star

Sometimes the 2 criteria are replaced by 4:

Feasibility: technical + creativity
Importance: for the user + for the business

This articulated strategy becomes the North Star that agile teams can use to validate that they are not iterating too far. This document is not static and it is easier to adapt it in case of changes.

These exercise ideas are intended to complement the agile methodology with strategic practices. They can be different as long as they always guarantee an interface between innovation and agile.

3. Beyond agile: marketing in the consumer experience

a) Expérience consommateur : 1 + 1 = 3.

When well defined, the overall experience is worth more than the sum of its individual parts. We must therefore strive for an alignment of experiences across the different touch points. But this is complex. Often touchpoints are managed by different departments in a company in silos. Hence the importance of taking a collaborative approach and establishing common standards.

Simplicity is the key. Not too many messages, not too many promotional materials.

Our satisfaction with a product is based on the best or the worst experience we had at one of the contact points and on the most recent. Increasing the value of a single experience can have a lasting effect on the overall brand experience. Therefore, it is possible to offer an average experience as long as you include an exceptional experience in the journey. But be careful to avoid a very negative experience in the journey because it is expensive!

Hence, the importance of being aligned and consistent across all touch points. We also need to be able to measure the consumer experience in a reliable way.

b) Net Promoter Score

One of the most effective tools is the Bain’s Net Promoter Score which is calculated from consumers' response to a question: "How likely are you to recommend this brand to your friends and family? Scale of 0-10.

9-10: Promoters = loyal enthusiasts who will continue to buy and recommend the brand
7-8 : Passives = receptive to competitors' offers
0-6: Detractors = not happy, they can damage the brand and stunt growth by spreading negative comments.

Promoters - Detractors = NPS (can go from -100 to + 100)

3 steps to improve NPS:

Eliminate negative experiences first because they damage the brand in the long run
Simplify the experience and ensure its consistency: this will improve the base while identifying areas where to create a very positive XP
Develop a very positive experience that will provide long-term benefits and set our products apart from the competition

Agile plays only a supporting role in this marketing domain. Analyzing touchpoints requires a strategic perspective that emerges from mapping the consumer lifecycle across touchpoints, as does conducting long-term research.

Part 4 - Modern marketing and the consumer experience (CXP)

1. From deep consumer relationship to enriched CXP

"A brand is no longer what we tell consumers. It's what consumers say to each other".

Brand communities have become their innovation engine, their marketing platform and ultimately their competitive advantage. Consumers now buy more than a product. They buy a vision. Undertaking an agile transformation is vital for marketers because it empowers them to be part of the product strategy and helps define the company's own vision.

The consumer community represents opportunities to increase the ability to sell more to existing customers as well as to acquire new ones.

2. Growth Hacking

This term is shorthand for innovative marketing approaches known for establish and optimize acquisition tactics as an alternative to traditional paid media.

Growth hacker = technical marketers who specialize in optimizing experiences such as landing pages, email campaigns via A/B testing. They also seek to develop experiences that drive awareness virally and fuel new consumer acquisition.

Growth hacking can be addressed by using the agile method - a variation of Scrum - which consists of running many tests in a short period of time. In growth hacking, the Scrum Master is called the Growth Master. The backlog is a list of tests instead of a list of initiatives. Test ideas can be added to the backlog by anyone in the company.

2 types of tests can take place:

The pings which are tests to discover new channels or new opportunities
The A/B testing which are tests to optimize and whose objective is to improve the efficiency of content, experiences or interactions by exposing subjects to slight variations.

All tests conducted must have a hypothesis and a confidence level. Some are low risk and some are high risk (lowest confidence).

Leaders like Ben Chestnut (Mailchimp) and Elon Musk (Tesla) say they hate marketing. Of course in its traditional form. Although they are agile in their business model, they are not champions of agile in a marketing context.

Connecting marketing to agile and lean practices is probably the best way to facilitate a new mindset because its leaders are already converted to these new approaches. This shift can also be fueled by the adoption of growth hacking beyond the start-up world. Which is starting to happen.

Growth hacking can be useful for improving retention, referrals, revenue and consumer return - even acquisition and activation.

Adopting the agile approach is an effective way for marketers to influence & collaborate on product strategy. Now they can identify opportunities to leverage this influence by addressing marketing objectives from the products themselves

a) The Freemium model

Freemium : Stimulates awareness and demand

Freemium components are limited to the value that is provided to consumers on a regular basis. They are not free trials or demos because there is no ongoing value.

Examples of freemium products:

Google trends : indirectly promotes Google's advertising platforms by offering a view on the latest search trends.
Nike Apps : offers a series of free mobile apps to promote footwear
Bike Shop Air : offers free stations to re-inflate bicycle tires to stimulate in-store traffic and purchases.

Call-To-Action : access to free webinars on the use of the service and the opinion of experts on a topic related to the brand. We show some interesting parts of the program but only accessible in the paid version. CTA = do you want to upgrade or try these properties for free for a limited time?
Behind the scenesmassive data collection based on user behavior: which emails are read, which webinars are followed, which behaviors are adopted, which demographics. This is coupled with an automation system based on specific actions and the collection of data on the actions following the various automations.

The goal can be to educate and qualify users as much as possible before a salesperson engages with them. The latter benefits from a wealth of information about specific needs and interests before his first contact.

In this model, companies accept to lose money and register this lack of revenue as a marketing cost.

Even in markets with little competition, offering a value exchange can greatly accelerate market share acquisition. You need to be sure that prospects believe you have earned the right to present them with opportunities to become paying consumers.

b) Social Sharing

Companies should encourage engagement to lead to having true advocates, brand advocates.

E.g. : Ne Belgium’s Snapshot beer - the brand name inspires consumers to take photos of situations in which they consume the products, and then post them on Instagram. These photos are then printed on beer bottles, in-store displays, the website and in advertisements.

La défense de la marque peut se faire à différents niveaux : offrir des réductions en échange d’un statut de « super-consommateur », stimuler les consommateurs à travailler leur personal branding en prenant la parole à un événement d’entreprise, créer des challenges pour la communauté, utiliser les #,…

c) Converging media

By this he means the combination of several media channels: paid, owned & earned.

All channels work together, allowing the brand to reach the consumer exactly where, how and when they want, regardless of the channel, medium, device, online or offline.

This confluence strategy is unforgiving of the disruption caused by emerging technologies and the proliferation of devices.

Convergent media are much more effective than traditional paid advertising because people trust their peers more than companies, analysts etc.

Example of the Warby Parker (eyewear brand) campaign via podcasts.

The podcast invites a consumer to follow his or her journey to purchase new eyewear.
Podcast 1: The audience is asked to vote for the coolest model via social networks
Photos of the Guest posted on his social networks with the different models of glasses worn + request for a vote on the coolest
Podcast 2: sharing the Guest's experience of receiving his glasses, the fitting and the quality of the packaging
Scaling of this content in different marketing programs: automated communication, events, etc.
Amplification of paid and acquired media with payment for its own channels
A more global phenomenon of inspiration where the experience is repeated among friends

3. Lessons from the collaborative economy

Sociétés expertes dans ce modèle : Airbnb, Uber, Etsy, Indiegogo, Instructables.

Collaborative economy economic movement where everyday technologies allow people to get what they want from each other.

Collaborative companies have reset the expectations of traditional businesses. Now everyone, consumers and employees alike expect to be listened to. The power of Agile, as a powerful iteration tool, becomes even greater when applied to these 2 community sources of feedback.

It's not surprising that the growth of the collaborative economy coincides with the rise of agile marketing. Both reflect a new mindset, in which community feedback is integrated into product development. Agile is designed to accommodate high levels of participant engagement that allow for continuous adaptation and improvement of processes and products.

a) 3 models

This can be done in 3 ways:

Empower the community to define the product/service through platforms that leverage feedback and ideas (e.g., the My Starbucks Idea).
Turning product into service : this is the case for private jet rentals for example. Income is no longer exclusively from sales but also from rental services.
Create a marketplace for service providers : The best known example is eBay. We can also note Shein, List Minut.

Airbnb combine le modèle 1 & 3. Ils responsabilisent la communauté pour définir le produit : ils agissent en tant que steward de la place de marché : et ils fournissent aussi les règles. Il existe un énorme choix de logements parce que les hôtes définissent ce que l’expérience du client doit être chez eux. Mais il y a aussi de nombreuses règles de base pour protéger les deux parties.

b) Focus on servitization

From the 3 models, servitization has the greatest potential to transform a business. It can be seen as a way to reduce capital expenditures and free up resources - and in the process gain agility. Companies adopting this new model need to think carefully about how these new economic incentives will impact their relationship with their customers, their satisfaction, their perception.

How small can a company get and still deliver innovation and excellent CXP?

At the most basic level, it must be capable of these 5 things:

Identify market needs
Offer a basic solution that addresses this need
Communicate about the solution and accept feedback
Use feedback for iteration to improve product/market fit
Monetize the solution to support future developments

Agile has a key role here in preventing companies from going in the wrong direction in this collaborative economy. Smart marketers will maximize agile to validate directions, iterate on what works, mitigate risk, and pivot if necessary.

Conclusion : The steward of the CXP

Agile can facilitate community engagement to support innovation and marketing. It not only leverages feedback from that community but also offers a better approach to developing integrated marketing platforms. Marketers can use these to better understand and engage this community.

Agile, as a discipline that brings innovation and marketing together, strengthens relationships at the executive committee level where it sits alongside traditional strategic practices.

Marketing's ability to provide a platform as a service to its colleagues (Marketing as a Service) is a long-term goal that will position it as the steward of the CXP.

Appendix: Agile approach to content marketing

1. Why use content marketing?

Content marketing focuses on building a relationship with a prospect or consumer over time by offering valuable content. It is essential to nurture the relationship and impact the progression of the consumer's life cycle. It is a soft approach when it comes to selling using education and entertainment of prospects.

The objective: to establish a relationship of trust. For existing consumers, it supports adoption, successes and fosters loyalty.

Each touchpoint will involve content. One challenge is how to manage that content given the proliferation of diverse content in recent years. And in companies, content is moving out of silos without an integrated strategy.

Il faut donc construire un cadre qui organise le contenu marketing en relation avec les objectifs business spécifiques qu’il sert. Celui-ci doit pouvoir adresser les besoins des prospects et des clients à chaque étape de leur parcours. Il est aussi conçu afin de :

Improve content effectiveness through iteration
Improve CXP by closing gaps in the content portfolio
Simplify this portfolio by reducing the total volume of content and channels

2. The 8 steps of the content model

The content model is composed of 8 steps:

The list of business objectives with a prioritization of those.This list should be reviewed quarterly and shared with product managers and sales to drive alignment.
The definition of content themes
The definition of persona from the PM/MKT collaboration and includes key pain points, opportunities and priorities
The inventory of channels and the people who manage them. Then define the organic reach for each of them & the growth rate.
The definition of the different types of content (not to be confused with channel or format). Those which exist and those which are in project
The link between the characteristics of the contents : To do this, create a table with column 1: content types, 2 theme, 3 persona, 4 associated channels, 5 frequency, 6 conversion tunnel stage, 7 derived content.
Filling the content gaps identifiable via this new table. All gaps must be added to the content types backlog.
Consolidation of channels & content.

These steps can reveal the existence of multiple pieces of content aimed at the same persona and the same business objective. This represents an opportunity for consolidation. In general, less quality content is better than too much poor quality content.

3. Consolidate your content model

Here are the questions to ask to consolidate:

Ai-je 2 ou plus de canaux qui s’adressent au même persona à la même étape du parcours ? If so, I can consolidate to increase critical mass on a single channel. If not, I keep the different channels.
Chaque canal a-t-il au moins un contenu unique que je ne peux pas trouver ailleurs ? Pour faire avancer les personnes dans le tunnel de conversion, il est conseillé de garder les contenus de plus haute qualité sur ses canaux « owned ». Les contenus au début du tunnel sont plus granulaires, plus court dans la forme et percutants ; alors que les contenus plus bas deviennent plus narratifs, profond, et instructif.

Many companies tend to distribute the same content on all channels. As a result, channels become less differentiated and less effective for specific personas. And they don't stimulate people to move forward in the conversion tunnel. If the consumer wants quality content, he must be willing to give something in return like an opt-in or personal data.

The use of Content Management Platform is recommended to centralize the whole content strategy.

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