How To Use Agile Marketing To Get Extremely Organized With Jeff Julian From Enterprise Marketer [AMP 021]
When it comes to marketing, all of us want to work smarter and faster. In order to do that, marketers need to have not only the know-how, but also excellent project management and organization skills.
Today we’re talking to the guy who literally wrote the book on agile marketing, Jeff Julian.
Jeff is the co-founder of Enterprise Marketer, the author of Agile Marketing: Building Endurance for Your Content Marketing Team, and an event speaker. Today he’ll tell us all about how to boost your efficiency and become more agile as a marketer.
Some of the topics we’ll talk about today include:
- What Enterprise Marketer is and what Jeff does there.
- The definition of Agile Marketing and how Jeff has used it in his career. He also explains how the team works and defines some of the jargon that goes along with Agile Marketing.
- The importance of scheduling and consistency.
- Ways to estimate how long a project will take.
- Tips on breaking down a project and assigning it to team members.
- Why being specialized in more than one thing is vital to the success of the Agile Marketing team.
- Jeff’s thoughts on taking baby steps when it comes to marketing. Where can you start so you’re headed toward achieving your goals?
- Tips on hitting a deadline, delegating work, incentivizing your team members, and ending a project.
Quotes:
- Nathan: “Content shouldn’t ever be the result -- content produces results.”
- Jeff: “We’re not trying to make generalists of everyone; we’re trying to specialize in more things.”
- Jeff: “Take baby steps... and continue to develop rhythms and learn how the pros are doing it.”
How To Use Agile Marketing To Get Extremely Organized
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Jeff: Just because 2017 is the year of live video, doesn’t mean spending 10 hours prepping for a live video, doing the one hour love video and having 10 people watching and actually no sales occur. That’s not as valuable of an asset to your organization as it would take maybe to write one compelling piece of content that a thousand people see over the next six months and then actually you can track two returns on that. You have to look at that, you have to start weighing at the benefits, there’s always that opportunity cost that we do need to learn, do things and we need to adapt and the we become more digital but at the same time we need to be able to say what’s actually working. Usually, that opens up the conversation of ‘do we have the right systems in place to track what’s working in our marketing efforts?’
Nathan: I think it boils down to measurement there. Jeff, I want to circle back just a little bit, let’s just say we have the project estimated now, we understand how long it’ll take to complete. How do you actually break down a project and assign it with team members at Agile?
Jeff: At first usually, it looks more like an assembly line and that’s the problem we’re trying to solve. The reason that the Agile process is so popular is because there was this tiny little company called Toyota, something you might have heard of.
After the war, they adopted lean principles that they learned from manufacturing different types of things in their automotive division. By doing that, they broke the assembly line and were able to start producing more and more vehicles than Ford or anybody in Detroit was able to do because they had an assembly line. If you have an assembly line, if you run out of tires, the whole thing stops.
Wherein a lean manufacturing model, you never run out of anything because when you start getting low of that item, somebody’s put to work to build that particular item. There’s always a rotation of assets.
In Agile, when software developers took it on, they have the same problem. If the DBA went on vacation, no database tables are getting created, no queries are being put into the system because no one was giving access to that end. The front end guys or the business logic guys really didn’t know how to do it. They had to break that model by saying we’re no longer front end developers and we’re embracing this thing called the web or this thing called mobile and to do that, everyone has to create JavaScript, everyone has to create HTML, everyone has to write sequel. Everyone has to write PHP or C#, whatever your team uses and then we pick off items on our backlog based off of availability. I could be working on the login page and you could be working on the home page and we’re using similar skills but we’re able to go on vacation or to call in sick and not have it really affect the entire team.
Content developers need to get that same rhythm to say, I don’t know how to use Photoshop, I’d better learn because we only have one designer so let’s go take a class on Photoshop, so that way I can always put the graphic up there and write the content and edit somebody else’s content and make it to where I’m a more valuable resource to the whole team.
Nathan: I was just going to pick on that, too. I was just going to say I think, that’s why you said there’s no such thing with content developers as a graphic designer versus a writer. Because of this, it’s cross functional.
Jeff: Yeah. It’s not generalist. We’re not trying to make generalist of everything, we’re trying to become more specialized in more things. Take my book for instance, the Agile Marketing book. I created the cover, I did the graphics on that, I did the layout inside, I wrote every chapter, I did a lot of the editing but I also had other people edit, I wrote the website for it, I created everything that went into that book because I’m a cross functional kind of developer, I can do all those things. When you look at our podcast, I created the equipment set up, the video set up, the entire booth set up, the multiple cameras, the TV studio, all that stuff we have, I put all that together. I record everything, I edit everything with Premier Pro, I created all the graphics for, I write all the show notes and I built the whole website that actually host it. I’m a cross functional developer when it comes to marketing and I’m an extreme case because I’m a nerd, and so I love to take into that stuff, I love photography, I love videography, I love telling stories, so it just make sense but marketers need to start embracing more of those talents.
Nathan: I think it really goes back to your whole thought of when a writer’s done and the graphic designer isn’t available, the project just is at stand still. I’ve seen that happen before and it’s not a pleasant experience for anybody on the team to have that.
Jeff: The things is if you look at CES this year, everything was about AR and VR. If the world truly has moved as fast as it has, or in the past decade, we have no iPhone and now we all love the iPhone, we can’t live without it. Imagine how quick the VR and AR is going to start being embraced. If it’s already in the home on the platforms, or the gaming platforms, Facebook’s in it, Amazon’s in it with Echo and Alexa and Microsoft’s in it with HoloLens and the search engines being the thing that powers the whole thing. Every large company is pushing out something this year in AR, VR technology.
One thing that doesn’t actually work on any of those is written text. Because the robot has to read it if it’s on Alexa or it’s scrolled across the screen, if you ran a VR mask or AR and that’s not a fun experience. All of a sudden, you have to really embrace things like video and audio and experiences- real experiences, live experiences, and you have to become amore well versed marketer with more than one type of content.
Nathan: That really boils down to skill acquisition. If you think about you can do anything that you set your mind to, you just actually need to do it. I think that that’s totally possible.
Jeff: If you’re going to go run a marathon, you don’t go sign up for that marathon, show up, put your tennis shoes on for the first time and go. You go outside, you run as hard as you can, you stop, you pant, you breathe, you turn around, you still see your door and you walk home the first time and ten after three or four months, you can get away with running a couple of miles without stopping. And then after a year, maybe you can do a half marathon.
Marketers, you got to stop and say, okay, what’s that first step I need to take into doing something like this? Maybe it’s recording the home video of my kids at their birthday party and actually editing it in iMovie and doing more than just start and stop on that. Maybe it’s trying to get on Instagram and putting up richer images that aren’t taken with your phone, that are taken with a real camera. Figure out what that is and take that baby step and then you continue to develop those rhythms and those practices and learn how the pros are doing it.
Nathan: Jeff, I think that’s really good advice to something that we could definitely all learn from. Start, improve as we go, not shooting for perfection, all that bits really seem to tie into Agile.
Something that I wanted to talk to you about is, again to circle back on this whole idea of managing the projects, how we figure out who does what. I’m wondering if you could share how do you hit deadline with Agile? How do you make sure that you are publishing what you’re supposed to be publishing?
Jeff: We have to stop and think about what our marketing teams, where the pressure is, where is it coming from, where is the pressure to get done coming from. Some of the times, it’s just psychological pressure like we were told as kids, we had to have all A's and we never could and so we put this false pressures on ourselves. How are we going to get all this stuff done and really no one in the organization is doing that.
But sometimes you do have pressure to get things done based off of different things that are out of your control. When that happens, typically, your team then gets weighed down, they get tired, they get exhausted and you see a lot of people leaving at that point.
What I like to do is to say for your team, when we go into a Scrum model or Sprint model that whatever’s up on the board, whatever we start with and we say we’re going to get done this week or these next two weeks, that the team commits to that. By committing they just say, we’re finishing that. If it takes us an extra day and we have to work evenings, if somebody’s not doing an awesome job and we have to sit down with them and teach them how to get better, whatever it is we’re going to get done. That’s our skin in the game.
By doing that, we can than send the message to people above us to say look, here’s the pace that we can sustain, that we can do over the next two years with this content marketing effort and we’ll be here and we won’t be over burdened with all those other stuff because we’re truly building amazing content for our customers and we’re building it at the pace that we found through estimating and through exercising of that estimate into reality. Your team starts to become more like a pride of animals where you start to see the weak ones that are being hoarded out. You find out who’s not working and you let them go excel other places and you find those new people and you embrace them and you teach them and then they become much stronger players over the time.
Nathan: I think that’s an interesting thing to think about taking on projects as a team that way. It goes back to what you were saying about just looking at the task list or the backlog and tackling the next thing available. If you commit to a group of projects for a two week sprint and it just needs to happen, the team really steps up I would think.
Jeff: That’s one of the issues with Kanban. A lot of people love Kanban, they use it, it’s another Agile approach we haven’t talked about but there is no time box. There is no Scrum master prescribed, you can have one but they’re not there and it allows the team to just be an honest representation of what we’re working on. Because of the bucket limits it has, you can only have a certain number of items within this column, it does require that you actually move things forward. It is an effective Agile process.
But in software development, it was effective because we had the rhythms of using Agile and Scrum to then start to loosen up things to take off some of the training rails that were there and to allow us to be more agile when requests were coming in and we started to release in different fashions. I don’t think marketers are there yet, right? We don’t have good project management process, planning, rhythms built. Having as many training rails as possible to have our teams become more effective and then after that we adapt Agile based off of our own findings and not the findings of software developers. I think that’s why we really need to take Agile.
Nathan: Something you just mentioned was based off our own findings. I wanted to pick your brain on let’s just say we hit our deadlines. How do you end a project with Agile?
Jeff: Because content marketing is the thing that never ends, it’s like that song that goes on in the loop. We need to continue going a steady pace overtime that’s consistent, that delivers on the increment that our audience is looking for. There is never an end. The content backlog will continue to grow and shrink based off of our developing of it.
I like to put in rewards and put in the process wins for our teams. After we have a successful sprint, let’s go out to lunch. Let’s buy lunch as a company, let’s do something fun, let’s go out and break out of our room or something, let’s spend half a day ideating on this particular audience. People want to do good work and they want to do different things at work that will help them be better, it’s just you have to consider what those rewards are.
Sometimes, it’s straight up buying them cool stuff. If you guys rock it, and you’ve done three great sprints in a row, I have developed point systems internally before where the more accurate you were on your estimates, the more honest you were, the less debt you had in the content you created, then the more points you built and the higher the points you get, the more stuff you could buy. The point might have equal $2 and now you’ve got 100 points, so you can go on Amazon and buy something for $200. That would help you order something you want to tinker with. Maybe it’s a new type of book, maybe it’s a camera, something along those lines, you’re trying to create different content or a pair of a really good headphones because people are making noise. Whatever it is, give it to the people.
Nathan: I could see myself thriving on that because I drive on a challenge and the point sound like that’s something that I would really want. As you earn them, it’s challenging.
Jeff: I was so jealous of all those kids that had the Pizza Hut cards, the more books you read, the free personal pan pizzas you got. I never got one because I sucked at reading. I was jealous of all of the kids with the gold stars and all the points because they followed the plan. The plan was developed for them. Figure out what each member on your team needs and what plan would work for them and then reward them when they make progress, when they make movements forward, when they help the team win.
Because let’s be honest, we’re working directly with sales now and sales are still commissioned, their salaries are based off of the number of leads that they actually close. THe more those leads are going to be coming from marketing, we’re not going to see them, they’re not going to put marketing on that commission. We need to figure out what makes marketers happy, what makes marketers want to stay and work with sales to create qualified leads and then over time, just like we’re hearing about the idea of tips going away in restaurants, the idea of commission based sales will probably go away the more the decision is made on the customer’s side and not so much during the persuasion portion of the sales process.
We’ll have to find ways to incentivize other groups but with marketers, it’s pretty cut and dry, they all want to go to conferences, they all want books, not all, majority want books, they all want to network, they want free time to learn, they want to try to embrace new things, they want to define their skills and so those are great ways to reward teams for doing good work.
Nathan: I love it. Jeff, if I could, I’d give you two points for this awesome talk today. I guess that wraps our conversation today. I want to just say thanks for sharing everything on Agile in general, the prioritization process, what a team looks like, how to come up with a backlog pointing. This was all a really great conversation. Thanks, man.
Jeff: There’s a more thorough dive through it in the book. Try to keep the cost way down on it and it’s available on Amazon if you check it out. Just go to Agile Marketing and then just hit me up if you have any questions, you’re digging into the thing, I love working with people who are playing with Agile. And I love to help you guys out.
