Forget page visits, email open rates, and click-thru rates. There are clear methods for arriving at a solid return on investment for marketing time and spend, and it’s not about the above-mentioned lagging indicator metrics.
Instead, it’s about how you measure and understand input, throughput, output, and outcomes. Those are the four parts of a holistic framework for transforming from traditional marketing to Agile Marketing.
Agile as a Mindset
At the rate of change — daily, if not hourly — in Marketing, the needs have shifted away from producing ‘more stuff’ to creating value through omnichannel content marketing and influencer marketing. In order to facilitate this change, the marketer’s workflow has to change. The answer is in adopting Agile as a mindset and as a framework for measuring and understanding the value of work and the effectiveness of marketing’s deliverables.
INPUTS
Before content is created, emails are sent, and ads are placed, marketers work with stakeholders on capturing expectations and defining the scope of each project. Though every marketer uses an Editorial Calendar to track their deliverables and deadlines, the input goes a step before even this critical tool.
Inputs are the place where the projects are documented, scoped, and discussed. It’s the strategic work before the tactical work.
Capturing the Backlog of projects helps provide marketing with a visual compendium of work projects that have yet to be started. Far from being merely a collection bin of ideas and project requests, the Backlog represents the sheer volume of possible work that must be prioritized and doled out. Combined with the master Editorial Calendar, which includes upcoming due dates and key milestones for events, the Backlog helps both the marketing team and the stakeholders to visually comprehend the enormity of possible work that faces the marketing team.
While the Backlog of possible work is obviously helpful for the marketer, it also clues stakeholders from other business units into the bigger picture of how their project request must fit into the workflow of competing projects. This means the Backlog must be actually visible to those outside of marketing, something accomplished via physical boards or software such as Trello, AirTable, LeanKit, Jira, or WorkFront.
Measuring inputs means having a way to determine a holistic value for the total project. A Backlog shows the massive scope of possible work better than any other system.
THROUGHPUT
How much work did your team get done? To answer this question, one must know the timeframe for the team’s workload. In Agile, these metrics can be captured based the quantity of work completed or by capturing the flow of the work to show the tasks at each stage of a project over time.
There’s no magic number to attain when measuring throughput. It’s either about how much work the team got done compared to what they estimated they could do, or it’s about the cycle time required to move from one task to the next.
The point of both is to understand how a Work In Progress (WIP) limit can help the team improve, and not simply do ‘more.’
Agile Marketing makes much of throughput, and for good reason: if a team improves in not only doing work but in delivering better work, then KPIs are easier to track against progress and not merely completion.
OUTPUTS
Every marketer knows about measuring Outputs because they’re keenly focused on marketing deliverables. However, measuring the wrong kinds of outputs lead to false assumptions about the value of marketing’s efforts.
Examples abound in the marketing world of campaigns that failed miserably in spite of high email open rates, good click-through rates, solid landing page views, and plenty of social media engagement when all of those actions lead to poor conversion rates for Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Perhaps none are more infamous than so-called vanity metrics.
Lagging activity metrics focus on the idea that people paying attention or clicking are valuable in and of themselves instead of, for example, measuring the result of better leads for sales.
In the same way, if the volume of deliverables (more stuff created) is assumed to be more important than the actual viability of the deliverable, then a higher output is a false indicator of valuable work. More outputs do not equal marketing success, so it’s important to clearly define not only the number of outputs but the estimated value of each output, as not all deliverables are equal in value.
OUTCOMES
When a marketing deliverable and/or campaign is deemed ‘successful’, it should mean that the work done by marketing resulted in better MQLs and, ultimately, better Sales Qualified Leads(SQLs). The ultimate marketing conversion rate, then, is tied back to a business outcome and not a Marketing deliverable.
To measure an outcome means that marketing has aligned their team(s) and work to meet business objectives. A by-product of this are more/better deliverables.
Marketing exists to enable the organization to meet business objectives. Period. Along the way, there should be experimentation, prospect engagement, customer engagement, improved workflow, better project management, and improved value of deliverables. Those things should happen, but they are subservient to meeting a business objective and not simply a marketing metric.
What say you? How does your marketing organization achieve the ultimate Marketing conversion rate?