Agile Marketing - Whiteboard Friday Moz

Key Takeaways

[Music] [Applause] [Music] how to SEO o fans I'm Jonathan Coleman from REI and today we're going to be talking about agile marketing this is a discipline that we are picking up from software developers whove been practicing agile for decades and we're applying it to our discipline of marketing and we're doing that for a couple really good reasons first of all agile helps us focus on our users and create more value for them more often in ways that make sense and it also helps us as an organization adapt to change and you know better than anyone how much change there is right Google's releasing algorithm updates 52 of them last May 29 uh right after that um there's Panda there's penguin all the news and tips and tricks we see on inbound. org we are constantly taking in new information for organizations but often times our organizations aren't able to respond to them and why is that because they're structured like this because they're structured in a big hierarchy that's not centered around the user so even when they take in new information they can't apply it directly to the people who matter most their customers secondly we tend to work in models like this which is a waterfall development model where we take in requirements at the beginning and then we do a chunk of work and we do a chunk of work and we do a chunk of work and so so on but if changes come in down the road if something happens here like a penguin we can't respond to that because that's 6 months later and as you know SEO inbound marketing social media that's changing hourly not in six or one six month or one-ear Cycles so we have to become better at changing and that's what agile helps us do so let's talk about four principles of agile and a couple hacks that we can use to change our organizations first of all come customers um they're the most important people they're our reason for existing as a business so we like to say users are number one we're number one so um what we do is we structure our work and ourselves all around the user and one great way of doing that here's a hack you can use is to develop user stories so as you're doing research with your users if as you're uh collaborating with them and sort of bringing them into uh the business to find out what they need to succeed in their goals you'll start building these out and they have a really simple formula as a user or buyer or shopper or in our case maybe something like Backpacker I want whatever it is uh that they have as a goal perhaps um I want to be able to find the lightest weight backpacking products so that uh they can succeed so this would be so that I can have a great time in an outdoor adventure hiking the ater rondex um and what this helps us do what user stories are so good at is keeping us Focus focus on that increment of work that we need to do so that our customers can succeed so this is a great way of doing light and quick documentation to help us fulfill user goals the next principle we're going to talk about is cross functional teams and that's where we really blow away this hierarchy from the old school business days what we do is we take all those institutional silos and we just reduce them to rubble and we form this sort of cross functional team where content design code inbound marketing data or analytics project management we all sit together all in the same place work together on the same thing at the same time no one's ever gone you don't have to walk to another building or send a long email to explain something we cut down on documentation on all those pesky emails and IMS and we actually have person-to-person interactions it's a real strength of agile um so I have a couple tools to help you with that first is the standup meeting uh this is one of the few meetings you have in agile marketing and if it takes longer than 10 minutes something has gone wrong imagine just having one meeting of just 10 minutes 10 minutes uh once a day and then being able to focus on real work that creates value for users right it's awesome so here's how the standup meeting Works everyone uh gathers around you stand up and that helps keep it short and you talk about first what you did then what you're doing and then anything that might be blocking your progress and we'll talk about how to deal with problems like that in just a second some tools that can help you out with that uh if you visit trello.com uh they're in online collaboration tool distilled use them as part of their creation of distilled you which is an awesome tool um and then the meeting cost calculator which you can get at bitly meet cost and you can uh also click in these links uh below us here um so next we have the principle of having a bias toward action and really this is is very simple doing is always going to be greater than not doing so when we deal with problems like analysis paralysis when we have problems uh like uh uh politics who has the power to say yes or no um and here's my favorite when someone comes up to you and says H it sounds like a good idea but we just don't do it that way agile helps us break that down because we always go back to our user story and we say well this is something the customer needs so what we do is we negotiate to yes what we do is we find that ground that allows us to proceed with our work there's actually a role in agile um that does nothing besides remove impediments to your work so doing is always greater than not doing and another hack that you can use is to just say know because once you have your set of user stories developed if someone comes around um and tries to give you extra work or tries to uh say well you need to do this and this and this and this which happens quite a lot the old yeah I'm going to need you to have to come in on Saturday and yeah maybe on Sunday too uh that doesn't create value for the customer right now what we have to do is get this prioritized user story out the door as quickly as possible so we want to maximize the amount of work that we do not do by just saying no and our last principle is to don't hate iterate I'm stealing this from a colleague at Ari it's just a great phrase um when we don't release on a six-month or oneyear cycle when we're releasing every two weeks or every four weeks we fall into Eric Reese's build measure learn model here where uh we develop our products or we do our marketing campaign we get it out the door we launch it and then we see how it works for customers we have this measurement phase we see how it performs and you know what if it's not up to Snuff that's okay it's all right we learn and then 2 weeks later we we release a fix we do an iteration we do something better uh that customers are going to respond to and if that doesn't work either that's okay we go through the cycle again until we get closer and closer to what the customer needs to succeed in their goals and that leads us to our final principle which is you're not perfect I'm not perfect Rand fishkin is not perfect he's pretty good but he's not perfect um and that's okay we don't want to be perfect because perfect uh chasing Perfection holds us up in our work to get something out the door to customers we don't want that we want to always be delivering always be shipping to customers as fast and as quickly as we can so you shouldn't be chasing the A+ you should be chasing what's going to be valuable for your user go back to your user story that's what you need to succeed at and if you don't get there it's okay because two weeks later you'll have another chance so I talked about this at mozcon and you can download my presentation at bitly agile winds there's also a link below please comment on the story I'll come in and try to answer your questions and direct you to more resources so that's it thank you everyone and see you next Friday