Understanding the basics of Agile Marketing

In today's world marketing can be astonishingly difficult. A Marketing team has to create marketing materials for weekly, monthly product releases, write content. understand and react to the tsunami of marketing analytics.

In our previous article, we explained you about What Agile Marketing is all about, but how does it work? Before we explain anything further let's understand the language of agile marketing first and they are…

Sprint Planning session

Scrum (Project Management)

User Stories

Burndown Charts

Sprint RetrospectiveSprint Planning session is the first step of Agile Marketing. The objective here is to have agreement on the goals of the sprint. This activity can be for an hour or even half a day. At the end of the motive behind the session is for all the stakeholders which would include business owners, Salespersons and even development team to agree upon priorities and the tasks that the marketing team commits to which must fit within the capacity of the team. Trying to fit too many points in a sprint session and using managers to drive the targets usually leads to cynicism and burnout. On the other hand, Agile methodology lets team members commit to their deliverables instead of the managers setting it for them.

In the entirety, Sprint Session lasts for 2-4 weeks. The process is monitored and managed by a process called 'Scrum'. Scrum is a project management method which was developed to manage software development projects. In the case, of Agile Marketing 'Scrum' acts with just a few tweaks which marketers can use to manage marketing projects.

One of the key elements of Scrum is to have daily meetings and it should be not more than fifteen minutes in length, each person involved in the project reports on following things.

A) What they did yesterday

B) What they will do today

C) Any obstacles that stand in their way

Usually, the person who leads this process does not handle the marketing team, but to run the scrum process and eliminate any hurdles on behalf of the team and is called the Scrum Master. The Scrum master is responsible for updating the Burn Down Chart. The Burn Down Chart is a publicly displayed chart of the work remaining in the Sprint, usually shown with two lines, one showing the ideal completion of tasks, the other showing actual completion.

Post the Sprint Process is finished there are two meetings that takes place, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective.

The Sprint Review Meeting is where the stakeholders reviews the commitments made at the Sprint Planning meeting, demonstrates the work completed and presents the results. The Sprint Review meeting is the most efficient way in making sure that the rest of the company is very aware of companies marketing initiatives and the results they’re producing.

Whereas, Sprint Review meeting is more like reports and analysis and on the other hand, Sprint Retrospective is all about how the Sprint went. Each participant gives feedback about how the sprint went and what could have been improved during the sprint. This meeting is usually attended by the Marketing Team and the Scrum Master.

In simple terms, User Story is simply something that user or buyer wants to accomplish and usually in software development, a developer writes user stories as a task which helps him translates into features and functions of a product. For marketers, they look at it in two different ways helping the consumers in buying process and second is making sure that the marketing team has a deeper understanding of what the consumers wants.

Devesh Chawla is the author of this article on Business Mentors. Find more information, about Business Startup Ideas