 By Brianna Valleskey
Marketing agility refers to your ability to adapt your go-to-market programs in response to a new situation with speed and quality. Both of those attributes are necessary. If you’re first to market, but your programs/messaging/etc. are poor then they won’t resonate. If you’ve got the best programs in the world, but you take too long to go to market then your competitors will surely have you beat. But what can you actually do to make your marketing more agile or even agile to begin with? What muscles do you need to strengthen in order to enhance this skill? Research shows that agility consists of several factors, including leg muscle, running technique, and straight sprint: “Agility requires muscle power in order to move quickly and technique to move efficiently.” Let’s hone in on these three areas and see how they translate to marketing: 3 Exercises for Increasing Marketing Agility 1. Leg Muscle Strength = Team Collaboration Strength Do you have strategic, corporate-level objectives that your team’s collective goals roll up to? Have you empowered your team members by letting them know what you need them to achieve, but allowing them to work together to determine how they get there? Agility starts with the strength of your team. They need strong collaboration skills to not only move together quickly but move together at all. Collaboration can’t happen on a one-off, project-by-project basis; but must be instilled into everything the people on your team do. The best way to bring people together? Unite them under the same goal. Determine the top 3-5 priorities your team needs to tackle that year or that quarter in order for you to meaningfully affect the corporate-level objectives during that time period. Keep that number to less than five; if everyone is a priority then nothing is. I’m not talking about activity goals like “launch X eBook” or “host X event” or unquantifiable goals like “assist sales team in driving pipeline velocity” or “drive customer retention through education,” but metrics-driven priorities like “penetrate 80% of target accounts” or “increase product usage by 25%.” These types of goals not only clearly demonstrate what you’re trying to do (accelerate sales and drive retention, respectively) but also how you’re going to get there. Let your team then determine the programs or initiatives they think will be most effective to address the priorities. Remind them that not all actions are created equal: Focus on what will have the biggest impact (based either on historical data or data-driven guesses) and act as the most efficient use of your resources. Work together with them to solidify which programs you’ll keep, modify, or table for the time being. This process prepares you for when objectives, goals, and programs/initiatives need to change. When a change in company objective or team goal is needed, your team can work in an orchestrated fashion to adjust. 2. Running Technique = Go-to-Market Technique The programs or initiatives your team thinks will be most effective to address the set priorities will largely depend on your go-to-market technique. A strong GTM technique involves using adaptive storytelling (staying in tune with your customers) and being channel agnostic: Your story should constantly be evolving to stay aligned with your customer and you should be able to tell that story across any channel. At least one person on your marketing team (the more, the better) should be responsible for “customer stories” or “customer research” to ensure that you’re not only telling the right stories, but that you’re telling them in the right places. This is a good fit for someone in customer marketing, product marketing, or content marketing as they are likely already in touch with your customers on at least a semi-regular basis. When things change for our customers, a strong go-to-market technique allows us to change with them. Turning the ongoing interviews with customers into an established process helps you answer the question, “Are these tactics still relevant?” and “Does our messaging need to change?” Tactics do become irrelevant. Messaging will need to change. And sometimes an unforeseen event of global proportions will force you to all of it at once. Sharpen your running technique by keeping all of your go-to-market programs (marketing, sales, and customer) aligned with the value prop at the core of your current messaging, and then updating them in sync with every messaging change. Sure, that’s a lot of work. But it’s better than creating an inconsistent or confusing experience as buyers move throughout the customer lifecycle. Sometimes your stories will need to be adjusted for different media. Keep your GTM technique tuned by constantly reporting on the success of different messages across different channels and making adjustments where necessary. If a message doesn’t seem to be working in one place, test it in another channel or part of the buyer’s journey before you throw it out entirely. Sometimes the form factor simply needs an adjustment. 3. Straight Sprint = Day-to-Day Planning & Execution How do we plan, execute, and stay focused on goals rapidly in a rapidly changing environment? My father once told me that to run a mile, you need to keep your mind on the goal and your eyes on the next three feet in front of you. (Coincidentally, that strategy also allows you to jump over obstacles or change direction when needed.) As marketers, we love to plan in quarters. But three feet is a sprint. Planning in shorter “sprints” allows you to very clearly define what you’re saying “yes” to over the next two weeks (or however long your sprint is). They also provide a framework for making trade-offs when priorities that do come up that cannot wait until the next sprint: If we’re taking on X during this sprint, then will A, B, or C will have to wait until our next sprint. This enables your team to focus on what is most important right now and ensures that you meet deadlines. You exercise your straight spring muscles simply by practicing your sprints. If you’re not familiar with Agile software development or project management, Atlassian has a great guide here. Start by planning a quarter—not just what you’ll do during that time frame but approximately when you’ll do it—in a way that aligns with the programs happening across your company also within your team. Break that quarter down into months. What does it mean for each of your marketing team members and marketing teams? Then break those months into sprints. I’d recommend running sprints for one or two weeks at a time: The goal is to be able to operate, communicate, and change quickly; bigger and bulkier plans don’t work for that. The sprint should comprise all the tasks, projects, and campaigns/programs that will be completed within that given period of time. Allow your teams and team members to elect what they think they can complete within the sprint. (A smart product manager I used to work with taught me that no one person should plan for more than five hours of tasks each day because we know that, inevitably, more things will always come up.) I recommend using a project management tool like Jira, Asana, or Trello to keep track of the tasks each of your teams and team members commits to each week. Sprinting means creating a program calendar and task list, but being ready to pivot. Keep evergreen programs in your back pocket for when things fall through or you experience an unexpected change. This brings us back to that idea of uncertainty and discomfort: The smartest teams control what can be controlled, and then build the muscles needed to be ready to change. Why does marketing agility matter? Because faced with the weight of sudden or massive change, the teams who have focused on building this strength will not falter. They’ll keep moving like water: fluid enough to slip through pebbles, but strong enough to carve through rock. This piece is part 2 in a series about marketing agility. To read part 1, click here.
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 The best marketing teams know when to throw punches and when to roll with them. By Brianna Valleskey
Our marketing agility has been tested as of late. COVID-19 stripped away core components of business strategies across the globe, forcing us to face the weight of unprecedented change; a new world where business travel and in-person events are replaced by remote work and budget cuts (for both us and our customers). Our strategies were hit with an asteroid. Overnight, our ecosystems changed. Most of the mass extinction events on earth have been due in some way or another to global warming—with as much as 75% of all life on earth disappearing in a single episode. In a changing environment, you either collapse or adapt. Nothing is as costly as inaction. Adaptation vs. the Fear of Change In nature, adaptation is the process of a species becoming fit to live successfully in its current environment. Nature is very budget-conscious; it can’t afford to simply let life in an ecosystem die out when things change. Biological forces are always working to maximize the return on nature’s investments in living things, so adaptation is a natural reaction to an evolving ecosystem. Marketing agility means successfully adapting to new (and continuously evolving) environments. It’s the ability to adjust your marketing programs quickly and easily based on often unforeseen circumstances related to your company, your customers, or something else in your ecosystem. This isn’t a foreign concept to marketers. We’re constantly making changes based on different criteria like timeframe, data, or engagement. But in this case, I’m talking about dealing with seismic shifts: tectonic plates moving inches at a time below the surface that form a richter-breaking earthquake. Having the marketing agility to maneuver massive change not only rescues you in dire situations, but it helps you execute more effectively on day-to-day changes. Fear of the unknown is very real. When something unprecedented happens, no one wants to just throw away a go-to-market approach that has worked for 24 months straight without another surefire plan in place. But we must come face-to-face with that fear in times like these, when our families, our companies, and our customers depend on us. We must be brave enough to stop for a moment and take stock of the current situation in order to determine the best course of action moving forward—whether or not that means abandoning programs we spent 18 months trying to build. You never have to throw anything away, of course, as long as it continues to drive measurable results. But keep a close eye on it, and at the same time proactively research your new environment and test some new things based on what you learn. Utilize adaptive storytelling. On Relevance Stories build our identity. They help us understand the world, and they shape the way we see it. In business, we tell stories with our brand design and messaging, through our events and experiences, via the content and communications we share, in the sales and customer conversations we have, and so much more. We’re telling stories constantly to help people understand why our product or service is relevant to them. What we say in those stories must be relevant to our audience—not ourselves. The messages you bring to the market must answer the question of why you’re reaching out to that audience (whether on a one-to-one or one-to-many basis) and why they should care. Otherwise, you’re a stranger with a sales pitch or a glazed-over digital ad. If a brand is the sum of all interactions someone has with your company, then your collective go-to-market message is the conversation you’re having with your audience. Are you talking about you or about them? Hopefully, your core narrative and messaging framework are, indeed, relevant to your audience. You solve a challenge, satiate a desire, or provide something else valuable enough for people to invest. And that value is something that’s relevant to each and every individual in your audience. It's what ties them all together in a common thread. “Personalization” is for building relationships with individuals. Relevance is for building relationships with the masses. PSA: Call Your Customer Relevance ensures that the way you communicate your value speaks to what matters most to your audience today. Your core message might resonate with your audience on an overall basis, but if it’s not among the, say, three-to-five top things they are thinking about prioritizing within the next week/month/year then they’ll scroll right past you. In the attention economy—where scarcity exists not in the amount of space we can use to get in front of our buyers, but in the length that we can hold someone’s interest—being relevant means staying close to our buyers and customers. We hold someone’s attention by bringing valuable information as a resource, answering their questions, and helping them make informed decisions. But the world changes quickly. What mattered to many of us two months ago isn’t even a blip on the radar anymore. And that can happen to our buyers or our customers on any scale (big or small) at any moment, whether or not we know it. We must always know how to make our core value and messaging hyper-relevant to what matters most to our audience today; this month; this quarter; this year. If we can’t speak to that, then maybe we need to rethink what we’re doing. This approach, of course, requires staying very close to your audience. Listening, conversing, interviewing your customers as much as possible. As marketers, we spend so much time reading about them and writing for them and talking about them, but we don’t often get the same amount or frequency of face time as some of our other customer-facing counterparts. This is the part where I tell you, The Marketer, to call your customer. Living, Breathing Stories Of course, many of us in the marketing discipline do already call our customers. We interview them for case studies and put them on our advisory boards and ask for product feedback. But what I’m suggesting is just a regular cadence of check-ins just to understand what’s top-of-mind for them. It’s not a sales call, but rather a way to understand how they’re thinking on a day-to-day basis, throughout different times of the year, and during unique events. What decisions are they considering and when (and why)? Thank them for taking the time to speak with you with a coffee or cocktail. (Alternatively, you could send them a handwritten note or another token of appreciation if you don’t live in the same region.) Cycle through interviews with different customers to ensure you’re getting a diversity of perspectives. Keep the questions short (don’t exhaust your interviewees) and focus on getting into their state of mind to be the best resource possible. Find out …
At the same time, be sure to establish a strong pipeline of feedback from your sales, support, and other customer-facing teams. Use the same set of questions with these internal teams and compare that research to yours. Find the patterns. Then craft a mini messaging framework that aligns with your core framework but is hyper-focused on where your audience’s head is at right now. As a situation changes or time goes on, allow that messaging framework to evolve. Even something as small as a change in certain vernacular should or a specific emphasis should be allowed to inform you’re saying to the market. Use continual research in order to make educated guesses on where to iterate. Let your stories live and breathe. “Brand journalism” is one of those murky terms that typically has to do with sharing stories about a brand to build affinity; and it usually involves some combination of public relations, content, and corporate communications. What I’m describing here is more like ... adaptive storytelling, where you know the story but you allow it to grow and adapt to the situation as necessary. This allows you to be a lighthouse to your buyers, customers, and community when they’re navigating uncertain waters; a reliable and trustworthy safe harbor. Tone-deaf messages without relevance (and in uncertain times, hyper-relevance) fall on disinterested ears. Winning brands build relationships like people do: by creating mutual value, through shared positive experiences, and being there in times of need. This piece is part 1 in a series about marketing agility. To read part 2, click here. |
AuthorFearless Thoughts are my insights on marketing, entrepreneurship, startups, business growth, creativity and whatever else comes to mind on any given day. Writing is how I make sense of the world. Archives
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