How Agile Can Change How Marketers Think, Work, and Succeed

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Mark Evans: Hi. It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. Here's the thing about marketing. It's dynamic, fluid, and ever changing. There's no time to rest on your laurels. You constantly need to be learning, training, and embracing new approaches and tools. And as important, marketers need to be flexible and agile. They need to roll with the punches, quickly and seamlessly seize new opportunities, and turn on a dime when needed. The challenge is many organizations use outdated marketing management strategies, which don't work in an always on digital world. So how should marketers operate so they're smarter and more successful? Well, Michael Seaton, president of Level C Digital, believes the solution is agile marketing. The most innovative and forward thinking companies embrace agility to grow and thrive. On today's podcast, we're gonna take a deep dive into agile marketing and why it's the knee new way that marketing happens. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Michael.

Guest: Well, thanks, Mark. Thanks for having me and having the conversation on agile.

Mark Evans: So let's level set. Let's start by talking about how many companies currently manage or operate their marketing. Fundamentally, why is the current approach antiquated or the wrong approach given today's marketing landscape?

Guest: Yeah. So that that's great because it's the natural lead in to how we talk to this, to this subject. So I like to say the state of marketing, and and I hate the word, but I'll use it. It's called VUCA. I don't know if you're aware of the VUCA environment we're in, but it's the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment that we find ourselves in both at at the business and marketing level. If we take a classic SWAT sort of look at things and we look at the external factors that are threats that are hitting us, the explosion of choices that we have as marketers today, the fragmented channels and touch points, the the data and the martech that is on top of everything that's making it a bit more complex than it's ever been, the rapid pace of change, the hyper competition, the distraction of consumers and the fight for attention. So, you know, if we situate that in in the marketing world that is no longer the big bang explosion of a campaign, it's always on. We we have niche skills and silos that have been created. We're not really good at collaborating, although we should be. We have skills and capabilities that aren't being shared and cross pollinated. And and by the way, we're trying to deliver customer experience through all of this. And it's the way we manage it that that's really broken. So, you know, the the the tech over marketing discipline, we need to blend those together. We need to have this knowledge transfer from everybody who's within the world of marketing these days and and boost morale and then focus as well on the outcomes from our marketing versus just the outputs because that's what I think we are. So that's what the agility is providing benefits for.

Mark Evans: Well, let me challenge you on one of the things you just said. You said that marketing is broken or the way that we manage or strategically approach marketing broken. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? Because that's a pretty bold statement.

Guest: Yeah. So we have, you know, antiquated ways of going about managing things. One of the things that agility presents us with is, you know, back it up to the plan over planning. We've been really good in the past at creating these big bold plans that are broken by the time we actually go to market with it. Things change. We need to adapt. And we haven't built in the flexibility that we need as today's marketers. You know? Layer the pandemic on top of everything. And if we were slow to change, that brought us really quickly to the point of needing to change. And so it brought into play all these elements and, you know, still to this day, the always on nature of work versus the, you know, point in time or temporal projects, we need to balance those things out. So that's where it really is meeting the decks. The second thing is that we are focused again, as I mentioned, on the outputs of our marketing. And so where are we actually sitting down and going through getting those customer insights, dealing with their needs, and creating value for them in the chain of what we do? I think one other last point is marketing has been really good at selling, and I think that switches to how we can service our our base, our customers, our audience. So that's another place where I think we need to shift from, from selling at all cost to serving our audience for longer term relationships.

Mark Evans: You know, what's interesting is that agile in my world, in this in the b to b SaaS world is nothing new. And we've been talking about agile development for many years because it allows companies to iterate, experiment, test, and learn on the fly what resonates with customers and what doesn't. And it is interesting that despite the presence of agile and the embrace of agile is that many organizations haven't applied it to marketing. Can you explain why that is the case?

Guest: Well, it was born in the software world and and in the product management world, and we saw that, you know, and we talked about twenty to thirty years ago, what we were getting out of that world was not great. And so along came agile and, I guess, the develop, sort of the delivery frameworks of scrum or Kandan, and they started to fix things. And they started to fix things by orienting the teams to sort of be more autonomous and deliver that value and do it through, as you mentioned, the increments so that we could learn along the way. Back to, you know, where why it took so long is because these things aren't easy and they take some time. It's not a a magic, you know, quick fix. But we started to see that the products were getting a lot better in the software world, that customers were being impressed by how we were meeting their needs and we were delivering on what we had promised. So there's a lot of, to back it up, where I think this really situates itself in terms of its mindset and values and its principles to really drive agility. And software got it first and they started to improve things. And when we started to look over the shoulder at them and say, how did they go about that? And so it started to then break out to other areas of of organizations like HR, like into marketing. You know, in fact, it was about ten years ago that marketing sort of, you know, shook their heads and said we've got to improve because, you know, digital transformation kinda hit us first. And we were going through it, but we realized that we needed to sort of fix and mend our ways. But it's taken a while for us to get from we need to fix this to now where we see it really evolving and starting to be absorbed in marketing.

Mark Evans: So we've danced a little around the idea of agile marketing. Maybe you can take a step back, and I don't want you to dumb it down, but I'd like you to explain or define what is agile marketing. And what's the difference between agile marketing and the way that we currently many companies currently do marketing?

Guest: So I'm gonna start with with, you know, very I'm gonna make it simple because we can get carried off into the nomenclature, and then we wouldn't want to hear that unless we're really down that rabbit hole. It really is about organizational effectiveness, and I like to call it modern marketing management. I think the simplest way to think about it is that it's the ability to change the way that we think and that we work and that we share, and and we get to creating that highest customer value. I think the power is, again, mentioned in the in the mindset and the values and the principles. And at the core, you know, if we think about the SWOT analysis again, it will really put us in a position of building new internal strengths that we can then take to seize new opportunities. Put it in this way, I believe it changes it's transformative because it changes our beliefs, again, about how we move from selling to more servicing our customers. It changes our behaviors in terms of looking at the highest value that we can create and put into market and learn from immediately. And the actions that we take also are transformative in terms of being more empirical, more iterative, and and again, transparent in what we're doing and and how we're driving value and then how we're looking at ourselves to continuously improve. I think marketers sometimes do a lot of dark work. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. We need to kinda bring that out and and show people what we do, how we go about it, and how we're learning along the way. I think there's this notion that marketing is just the, you know, the arts and crafts kind of department. We color in between the lines. We put fancy words on things. We talk about stuff and metrics that nobody else cares about aside from marketing. So I think this is our chance to really start to marry up where we've come from and where we find ourselves with digital and really put the stamp of, like, business strategy and and business outcomes on it.

Mark Evans: Before we take a deeper dive into agile marketing and how companies can embrace it, I do wanna ask you about the rise of data and technology and how they're being used or how they're being embraced and used by marketers. Because my thesis is that a lot of marketers have gotten lazy due to technology tools that allow them to scale their work, to extend campaigns, to analyze just about anything digitally. I believe we've as marketers, we've gotten away from being creative and iterative and and trying new things. And and I think most of all, and I and and this is increasingly something I I see on LinkedIn a lot, is the importance of knowing your customers and serving them in the right ways with the right kind of marketing. What are your thoughts on data and technology and and how they're being used by marketers and and what the relationship is to agile marketing?

Guest: That's a great question. A great setup because it brings into play a lot of things that agile marketing is set up to actually do and do better than we do today. So, you know, let me start off with a more air cover kind of a statement that, you know, we've talked for years and we've known each other for a long time in this world about customer centricity and personalization and testing and learning and continuous improvement. And, know, I've seen a lot of what goes on in marketing, and we're just not doing it. Your question specifically about, marketing technology and data, I mean, my background, why I love the the agile marketing piece is because it really does go back to my beginnings in marketing as a direct marketer, a database marketer, someone who was involved in CRM, and then took off with the digital piece later on. But, yeah, we are I I find and I say this through my experience and through my teaching, and instructing and training that what I see is a lot more people familiar with the technology. They understand the platforms in terms of our skill sets, but they don't have the marketing discipline behind them to know what they're actually looking to do with it. And then on the other side, we have a lot of, you know, marketing that still is sort of stuck in old ways of thinking without understanding how the technology and data will work. We gotta marry those two together, and and agile is a really sweet way to do it. Your question though is, yeah, I think we we got lost in the worrying too much about automating everything, about it all happening, you know, programmatically or or through, you know, Martech solutions. And I think the the complexity of that in making it work or or the magic of making it work, I should say, is really understanding marketing in the first place. Don't throw tools at, you know, at a at a tools become the solution to a problem that doesn't exist. I believe the the problems that exist for marketers are are more upstream, understanding sort of the the quintessential, you know, your brand, your positioning, the story you tell, your calls to action, a great website, a great user experience. And I think what agility allows us to do is start to break that down by using concepts like personas and customer journeys and user stories and understanding the increments of value that we can actually put in front of our customers to learn from. So I really see it as being a really sweet, nice toolkit where we can start to play into the right areas and and gain those insights that we've been asking for. We just haven't had the right dominoes falling in the right order for us to achieve that.

Mark Evans: As you know from, know, our relationship and some of the things that I write about, I'm I'm I'm all about first principles. I'm all about the fundamentals and really being strong around the key pillars of positioning and messaging and knowing your customers and all the good things that underpin successful marketing. One of the things that I'm curious about is how and when should companies approach agile marketing? What needs to happen so they can successfully embrace it strategically, tactically, and as important culturally? Because I suspect that the shift to agile may rub some marketers the wrong way given it's a new approach to doing things.

Guest: Let me define what it's not first because I think there are misconceptions out there. Because we hear about agility, and we think about spinning on a dime, being flexible. The true power of agility comes from it it being more of a noun than a verb. Meaning, you you gotta be actually understanding the mindset, the values, the principles. And it does take us to the side a little bit as marketers because we marketers just want a playbook. We just want that algorithm. Tell us what works, and we'll do it. This is not, by definition, super easy or everybody would be doing it. Right? What it's not, it's not reactive or unsustainable marketing. Everybody thinks the Oreo dunk in the dark, you know, response within two minutes was agile marketing. That's an element of what agile marketing can help you with, but that in and of itself isn't. You know, we're we're we have a million priorities coming down the pipe at us. How do we know what work we should be doing? And and by default, how do we also know what work we shouldn't be doing? I think that's a that's a huge concept to understand. What's the max how do we maximize the value of the work we do, and how do we maximize what we're not doing as well? Again, the outputs over in out the outcomes over outputs sort of decision. Culturally, this is not a simple thing. Meaning that part of what this does is it creates sort of self organizing autonomous teams that are allowed to decide what value what what they wanna prioritize in terms of delivering to our customers. It doesn't it it kind of removes this layer of middle management and the command and control. You should be working on this. Go do that. And it brings it into the team. Team deciding what the what the what they need to do to deliver against objectives right now in incremental or iterative fashion that then will build upon our learning, validate what we're doing or invalidate it, and then we can move forward with that knowledge in our back pocket. We've known about this for a long time through direct marketing and database marketing and test and learn, AB testing and marketing, but we haven't been that great at executing it all the time. I think that's what agility allows us to do.

Mark Evans: In simple terms, is agility does it have a lot to do with focus and establishing and focusing on the key priorities? Because as marketers, you know, off the top, you talked about the fact that there are so many options, so many channels, so many things that marketers could do to achieve their objectives and to connect with prospects and customers. And it sounds like agile marketing is a way to add discipline to the process to make marketers focus on what is important to the customer, what is important to achieving our goals as opposed to running them often in a million different directions. Is that a simplistic way of talking about the value of agile marketing?

Guest: Yeah. Absolutely. So I think you're you're getting a a large part of that equation. It really is a bit the value that we can deliver and also have a team looks at the work that we need to to work on, right, what we need to do and and visualizes our work and says, what is the most important thing we can do right now to satisfy the customer and the audience? How can we make this easy? And it's not about doing everything at once but selecting those those key things, and the team prioritizes what they find the most of most value. And it doesn't mean that we don't align to strategic objectives or align to what our stakeholders want or you know? But it really does put the focus on delivering against the customer needs. We do that, as I explained, through understanding them better, gaining insights on them. I think that's the discipline. It's really going through this world where we're not guessing or or, you know, thinking that this is gonna be the right thing. We're actually getting into the mind of the customer and understanding where they are on the journey, the pain points, their solutions. I mean, it goes back to Clay Christensen in that very simple, like, understand the jobs and the tasks that your customers have and and and make it as simple as possible and and make it easy for them. Don't complicate it. Don't, you know, make it something that they shake their heads at. It should be as simple as anything. Example, in in my banking days, you know, mortgage was the ugly product detail of what people, you know, had to reconcile with about homeownership. We, when we attacked that, we thought about the insight was it's about homeownership. We should talk about all the wonderful things that come along with it. Oh, and by the way, we do have a mortgage that we can get to you and it's at a great rate. And it's thinking in that capacity that really puts it into the marketer's head that it's not all about the product. It's about the customer and and how they can live with our product. Does answer the question about the values and the priorities that empower the team to deliver?

Mark Evans: Yeah. It does. And I think one of the the things that maybe I didn't have clarity on is that is defining agility versus flexibility. Agility is about focusing on what matters. Flexibility is about being able to turn on a dime. And there are different concepts when it comes to to agile marketing. Is that correct?

Guest: Yeah. Absolutely. And so, you know, I think one and I just had this conversation earlier. I believe it's really more about effectiveness. We get to a finch efficiency later on. But, you know, if you're doing the wrong things and you're just making the wrong things efficient, that's not gonna work out well. So I put sort of the effectiveness of what we do. And and you mentioned earlier, and I didn't hit on this this point, it it allows us to be hyper focused. It reduces the the distractions and and hopefully, the mindset for agility when it's absorbed by executive and our leaders. They understand their role in this world is they're the constant source of interruptions and distractions and new priorities and it sort of embeds in them, you know, we have a methodology and a process that we're actually going to deliver this value. The more that we get interrupted, the more that we get asked for other things because we have this notion that agility is all about flexibility and turning on a dime. We wanna quash that out of the gates. And one of the other things that agility allows us to focus sorry, helps with the focus on is allowing the team it's not just autonomy, but psychological safety that they can test and learn and they won't be, you know, put in the penalty box for doing something outside the realm of what the executive thinks is the the their opinions or conventions for where they think marketing should be or what marketing should be doing.

Mark Evans: Okay. So let's assume that you're the CEO or the head of marketing or an entrepreneur, and you like the idea of agile, and you're looking at making your marketing more effective and more focused, and you are ready to explore or ready to embrace agile marketing, what do they need to do to make sure that they become agile marketing catalysts or change agents? You know, what are the keys to taking a concept and turning it into a corporate reality so that an organization can be structured differently, can focus on what's important, and can become more efficient and more successful from a marketing perspective?

Guest: Well, you know, my my company is embedded in workshopping and training and coaching, so I'd say that's a quintessential piece of it that you need to get going with. But it's more I I wanna say that it's sparking the imagination. Like, what is the art of the possible in the ways that we manage? We've been under the guise of this military tailorism sort of approach to all of our corporate marketing. Sorry, all of our sort of corporate structure and hierarchies and I mentioned before the command and control. This is a radical change. So the first thing is understanding what it is and and like I mentioned before, what it's not because it is driven by values and principles, again, in the way that we think about our work, the way that we, you know, behave with our work, and in the way that we take action with with ourselves and with with our work. So it's understanding that, understanding the values and the principles that allow us to be more collaborative, adaptive to change, deliver that value, and also be able to be transparent in our work. I think that's one of the huge things that executive is kind of a little wary of, like, how far does this go, and what does it mean in terms of how we operate now? Once the mindset is sort of established and it creates that air cover for how we can operate differently, you know, we start to shift how we think about a waterfall type of a project management approach to, you know, we need to do just enough planning to get us to the next stage because we are starting to, acknowledge that, you know, the world's best plans change in five seconds after the project starts. So it it is that shift. It's also this, you know, absorbing the work that we actually need to do in determining what, again, that value piece is. I think the, you know, the the other piece is looking at how empirical we get. One of things and one one of the one of the mistakes that we make in in bringing in agile is thinking that it's all about a framework like Scrum or Kanban. Those become the the the methodologies for which we can deliver, But, you know, following those dogmatically, getting somebody who's really good at scrum, bringing them in with no marketing background is not necessarily the recipe for success. So there's a lot of elements that need to sort of balance out. I think the key though is understanding what it is versus what it's not and then getting involved in understanding values and principles and how that fundamentally changes how we look at what we do and then approach the change to how we do it.

Mark Evans: Let's segue, given that, into what you and level c do. How do you work with organizations? Like, how do you help them embrace and be successful with agile marketing? Is it workshops? Is it one on one coaching? Is it seminars? What are the different ways that you can then work with a company to help them with this process?

Guest: The answer is yes to all the above. So Level C Digital is an accredited, has accredited courses with yeah, to teach agile marketing where those participants can get an agile marketing certificate. So that's sort of the back end of of where we go with the workshop. What I found along the way with delivering the workshops and and we've known each other for a long time, you are you know, I was teaching digital marketing strategy and management for quite a while. What I always found, Mark, was that, you know, you deliver the training and if there's no follow-up after, it really, you know, kinda hits with a thud that people are they they love what they learned, but they have no application for it. So where I take things is, you know, I will discuss with companies is it's right, but it's not right for everybody. That's the first step, is really talking with leadership and understanding the issues and problems and, you know, obstacles to overcome in their marketing. And and then look at, because it's not a one size fits all, how can agility help them? So we have those natural conversations. I will come in and do a training and workshop over several days to train the core execution team. I will then teach leadership what it means as part of this sort of package that I put together, teach leadership about how to think about agility, how they need to behave, and understand how they can either stop it in its tracks from being successful or help to reinforce its benefits and behave in different ways. And then I follow-up with ninety days of coaching. And the coaching comes into play where the team decides what they're gonna do and we pilot something. But it may take two weeks to set it up. It may take two days to set it up. This then becomes their work to do with coaching along the way that I will provide in an ongoing way. What we find is that we start slow and we build. We don't do everything at once. We sort of build in things that we we test and learn. We are being agile in our agile implementation of AgileMark. So that's what I that's what I bring. And it's really funny how how fast this stuff does break down. Right? We go back to old ways of working, and I have to I'm there to sort of remind people that this is called agility because we're supposed to be being agile with it. And it really changes the way that people think about about their work and about how they work together.

Mark Evans: One final question in terms of how companies are embracing agile market at a time when many people are still working from home. Has this whole work from home phenomena been a positive or negative influence on the adoption of agile marketing?

Guest: It's had its challenges, we you know, I like to say agile is not about the tools or the software, but they certainly help a lot in the online environment when we're working from home. These teams work really well when they're co located, when they're all sort of face to face. And hopefully we'll get back to that environment one day soon. But there are ways you can do it online. In fact, I had to take my whole course and build it for the online environment. There's a lot of learnings about how you can make it effective online. Some of the fundamental changes that agility brings to how a team operates really facilitates using the online space. But also one of the detractions in it's a true piece of agility is when we lose that human touch and that working side by side with people and looking over their shoulder, that's one of the pieces that I hope to get back. And I don't know that any software can help with that. That's where the mindset and and behaving with the values of how we work really steps into play. And a team can jump on Zoom for ten minutes as opposed to an hour, really, to solve a problem and then, you know, do what they need to do.

Mark Evans: Well, this has been great insight into agile marketing, a subject that I didn't know much about before we touch base. So thank you for that. Where can people learn more about you and Level C Digital?

Guest: People can learn more about Level C Digital @levelcdigital.com. I have a a newsletter that I also send out called the digital digital digest that comes out weekly. And, actually, you were the inspiration for that newsletter. And then you changed your whole way of doing newsletters and stuff. I was like, I'm not gonna I'm just gonna stick with my knitting on it.

Mark Evans: Well, I was trying to be agile with my with my newsletter.

Guest: Well, that's that's great. And hopefully, you're measuring and validating your learnings, and it's it's continuously improving for you. So you can find me at my at my website. I also teach at University of Toronto. I'm also taking on a role at Seneca where I'm teaching there as well. So I got a lot of sort of irony inspired, but the core, corporation on my website and my blog.

Mark Evans: Well, if you enjoyed this conversation, leave a review. Subscribe by iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more about how I help b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and coach, send an email to Mark@MarketingSpark.co, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you next time.