The Agile Marketing Cell

Lean practices are followed with great precision in manufacturing and other environments, where repeatable processes exist. Occasionally, some of these ways of working can be applied to the build and deployment of marketing deliverables. And, with a bit of planning and investment, your team can better organize to release impactful assets or campaigns.

We have some ideas about what an Agile Marketing Cell looks like because our team has both built and worked within them.

Definition

Agile originated as a framework for staying adaptable and resilient in disruptive or fast-paced conditions. It is intended to get products to market faster, delivering the product or service to the customer as efficiently as possible with the most achievable quality. It’s also highly collaborative and iterative.

Lean (or kaizen-based) – at its origin – is also a methodology for ongoing business process improvement, waste reduction, and increased efficiency. By breaking down complexity into smaller pieces, each step can be mastered. Think about a manufacturing cell and a human moving within the physical space. Putting equipment closer together might reduce the time it takes for the worker to assemble the product they are making. Efficiencies like this example are carefully measured by a team, and then corrected as needed.

When you translate these practices to sales and marketing efforts, it can be quite powerful.

Characteristics of a cell, from ways of working to staffing

Ways of working

We recommend specific tactics to adopt this approach. One example of this is for the team to work in sprints, using appropriate project management software to measure team capacity and sizes of tasks. The entire marketing unit completes agreed-upon projects in periods of time of no more than 3 weeks in length, while placing those requests that aren’t ready to be tackled into a “backlog”. Each time-boxed cycle includes planning and retrospectives or post-mortems and staff improves how they work together with each iteration. Efficiently-run standups are held regularly during a sprint to identify obstacles in collaboration. Working in sprints is just one part of the repeatable process we understand to drive value.

Staffing

To fully adopt an agile cell, you are – in essence – setting up your marketing team as an “internal agency model”, with all of the expertise needed to support most marketing motions in-house. This typically looks like around 10 distinctly different roles from web development (front and back end, technical SEO, etc.) to content and creative to project / marcom management. We specialize in assessing the capability of existing employees and then identifying other roles that need to be staffed. If you’re curious, you can read more about our Capability Gap Analysis.

Even with the right expertise to support, we’ve found that certain environments are better than others for implementing this system.

Environments well suited for agile marketing

• Where there are multiple Business Units or requestors of services from Marketing

• A strong internal brand is maintained by the marketing team, including a substantial web presence and especially if web redesign is desired

• When products / services have “key release beats” requiring surge support at different times

• There is limited, cross-group visibility to what marketing staff is working on and when. Equally, prioritization tradeoffs need to be happening with more rigor

When the approach probably won’t succeed

• There might be gaps in periods of work for the marketing team to do and the risk of resources being below capacity occasionally is too high

• Headcount is frozen or no opportunity for shifting headcount exists

• Revenue Expenditures (RevEx) aren’t widely understood in an organization and budget doesn’t exist for quantifiable tool or platform expense

How to get started

Reach out or email us directly at business@martechconsultinggroup.com to discuss how we might assist with either the planning or implementation of a cell. We’re prepared to advise on anything from staffing to identifying the right MarTech Stack.

If you want to rapidly accelerate, we might be able to embed a fractional marketing operations leader on your team to guide the process.

Other resources:

· When Fractional Leadership adds up

· The power of the Daily Standup (upcoming article)

· Top 3 lean practices to adopt in 2024 (upcoming article)