“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
When it comes to marketing, I’d paraphrase the immortal Ferris Bueller as follows: “Your customers move pretty fast. If you stop to draft a massive document, you could miss them.”
Rather than stopping to create an in depth, cumbersome marketing plan, you may be better off taking a cue from Mr. Bueller and devoting a single day to drafting its speedier cousin, the agile marketing plan.
Marketing Plan Evolution: From Elephant to Hummingbird
Historically, marketing plans have been massive, elephantine documents, sometimes running to dozens and dozens of pages and taking hundreds of hours to complete. The marketing department has to research, write, and edit the document, and then interested parties from other departments have to sign off. Both halves of this equation can take weeks, if not longer, because the final document will form the guiding principles (and budget) of Marketing (capital “M”) for a year or more.
Consider how many opportunities may have flown past while such a behemoth was under construction.
But whatever the drawbacks of traditional marketing plans, the fact remains that marketers need something to guide their efforts. Marketing plans are an easily recognizable document for upper management to review, and they generally remain the go-to option in most organizations.
Enter the hummingbird, also known as an agile marketing plan.
Compared to the plodding, methodical marketing plans that span a year’s worth of marketing efforts, agile marketing plans really are like hummingbirds. They are lean, pared down, super speedy iterations that can empower marketing departments to create strategies that will actively respond to changing market forces, emerging markets and evolving customer needs.
That may sound good, but how do the two plans really compare?
Traditional vs. Agile Marketing Plan Templates
Marketing plans have historically been designed to guide the efforts of a marketing department over at least a few quarters, if not longer. They involve big goals, big bets, and big investments of both time and money, none of which is likely to make their creators open to changing them easily.
General wisdom recommends drafting a new plan yearly and including some ideas for the very long term (3-5 years).
A traditional marketing plan is a static document, and it’s usually written as if the market will be static too.
Agile marketing plans, on the other hand, are designed to be adaptive. The length of time each one is used varies from organization to organization, but typically they are re-evaluated every 4-6 weeks. This length of time is appropriately labeled a “sprint,” and each sprint includes a short planning meeting, as well as a recap meeting once it’s over.
In agile marketing, the focus is on creating a living model that interacts with customers and the market to bring back actionable, measurable data in the short term. Its success or failure can be evaluated in a few weeks, not after a year. If new competitors arise, the next sprint can include strategies to address them. If new software is released that could streamline current strategies, it can be tested right away as part of a holistic approach instead of trying to wedge it into an already full marketing strategy.
Here’s a general comparison of the two types of marketing plans:
Traditional Marketing Plan
Agile Marketing Plan
Very long term document; usually 1 per year
Short term document; multiple iterations per quarter
Big goals, big bets, big investments; people may feel attached to goals/methods
Many small experiments; test, determine success/failure, move on
Not flexible; static document for static market
Designed to be changed, updated as conditions change
Requires high level sign off at the beginning, then minimal involvement
Established team involved in every sprint
Time and effort intensive planning up front to create goals and action items
Create new hypotheses, goals, actions for each sprint
May not encourage innovation; stick to the plan!
Permission to fail within a sprint, allows for testing new options and ideas
Traditional Marketing Plan Template
There isn’t a single marketing plan template that all marketers use, but as a whole they include most of the following elements:
Executive Summary: A high-level overview of the entire document. Usually as far as most readers will get.
Customer Analysis: Who are the target customers? What do they love/need/hate? Demographic data, and sometimes market segmentation, are often presented here.
Unique Selling Proposition and/or Product Strategy: Details on why this company/product/service is the best in its space, and why customers should choose it.
Target Market Analysis: May include details on current and projected market share, as well as competitors.
Marketing Strategies: Usually the meat of the document, and often broken down into lots of subcategories, like:
Product Strategies
Marketing Materials
Conversion Strategy
Promotions Strategy
Online Marketing Strategy
Advertising and Promotions Strategy
Distribution Strategy
Pricing Strategy
Overwhelmed yet? Me too.
Forecasts or Projections: Here’s where things tend to get sticky. The document tries to predict how the market will look in the future, and how the above strategies will be able to impact it. So it may include things like current conversion rates on the company website vs. where the marketing department hopes they will be in six months after a certain number of strategies are in place. Or it might predict how the customer retention rate will change after a new email campaign is completed.
Agile Marketing Model, Not Plan
Like traditional plans there isn’t a set format or template, but agile plans generally include the following items. Remember, these are revised for each sprint, but there is still typically an overarching product story/strategy in place as well.
Offer: Includes the solution being offered and unique value proposition for the product/company/service.
Go-To Market: What channels or partners will be used for distribution and customer interaction?
Customer: Like traditional marketing plans, this section includes information about the customer, often in the form of personas and/or customer segments.
Money & Measurements: Here’s where the primary difference from the above marketing plan template comes in. Agile marketing plans are all about testable hypotheses, and in order for something to be testable it has to be measurable. Each plan incorporates small goals or targets that can be tracked and measured in the allotted time frame, with either success or failure determined by the selected metric(s). The team can then build on either success or failure when crafting future iterations.
What is Success? Predictions vs. Measurements
One thing I want to emphasize from the above comparison is the final piece of each plan’s template: forecasts or projections, versus money and measurement.
In my opinion, the certainty of constant data flow is where the real value of an agile marketing plan lies.
An agile marketing plan has several small, testable hypotheses driving it. You can begin crafting these by asking some of the following questions, but they are just a starting point (taken from “Getting Started with Agile Marketing” by Jim Ewel).
Where did you spend your marketing dollars over the last twelve months? If you were to start over constructing a marketing budget, how would you allocate the dollars? Which spends are leading to the greatest returns?
Are there additional customer segments that you could target?
Are there other potential revenue streams available to you?
Which channels/partners are most effective? Would allocating expenditures differently among different channels have an impact?
Which customer touch points are working well? Which aren’t? Where should we put more focus?
The success or failure of these theories is measured by key metrics, which can, but certainly don’t have to be, taken from Dave McClure’s “Startup Metrics for Pirates” (so named for the acronym AARRR):
Acquisition: users come to the site from various channels
Activation: users enjoy first visit: “happy” user experience
Retention: users come back, visit site multiple times
Referral: users like product enough to refer others
Revenue: users conduct some monetization behavior
The last “R” is the one that really drives a business, but there are metrics throughout the funnel that can and should be tracked. Just make sure they are hard pieces of data and not soft metrics like mind share.
At the end of every sprint you have produced metrics that can be objectively evaluated and acted upon.
At the end of a traditional marketing plan, however, you get forecasts or projections. I live in Colorado, where weather forecasts for the next twelve hours are notoriously mistrusted. So if you tried to convince someone to invest their entire marketing budget for the year based on a forecast for three, six or nine months from now, it probably wouldn’t go over well.
Granted, weather forecasts and marketing forecasts are significantly different animals, but they aren’t both called “forecasts” for nothing. There is an inherent level of uncertainty in each one, an instability that traditional marketing plans just aren’t equipped to deal with.
The best, most well-informed, marketers in the world are not psychics. They can have their fingers on the pulse of their customers, and may seem to anticipate their needs with each email campaign, advertisement or white paper. But even those outstanding folks couldn’t anticipate some of the most significant changes of the past 10 years, much less respond to them in a meaningful way if shackled by a huge marketing plan that was designed to meet forecasted goals set up to operate in a world without change.
Consider that Google alone regularly throws marketers curve balls that nobody can prepare for, and that’s just one piece of the enormous marketing puzzle.
When the next big (or small, or medium) marketing obstacle shows up, would you rather be struggling to turn an elephant, or bobbing and weaving on a hummingbird?
Note: This is the first in an ongoing series on Agile Marketing. Sign up to get an update when the next post in the series, “Is Agile Marketing Right for Your Industry?”, goes live.