Before getting started with an Agile methodology for our marketing team, we had to make some decisions about how to prioritise our stories, sprints and workloads. The first step was to decide what was really important in terms of the actual marketing channels, the objectives for each channel and the metrics we cared about.
This led to the creation of our Marketing Priorities Venn (shown below). Three circles for our three primary areas of focus – content, inbound lead generation and research and CRM management.
Anything that didn’t fall into one of these circles or their overlapping areas was out – there would be no stories in our sprints that didn’t fit in our Marketing Venn. Although the Venn might seem quite all encompassing, it was an eye-opener to see what tasks we had undertaken in the past that didn’t fall under any of our key channels, often related to supporting other departments or doing unnecessary admin.
But it wasn’t enough just to know what we should be doing – we needed to have a clear picture of why we were doing it so that stories could support the overall objective of each channel and iteratively drive us towards reaching those goals. Therefore we added a second Marketing Venn to illustrate the objectives for each channel – allowing us to eliminate stories that matched a channel but didn’t support our key objectives.
Finally, we wanted a way to understand how well we were achieving our objectives and created a final layer to the Marketing Venn with a list of marketing metrics that were relevant to each channel. The metrics list we fully expected to change over time as we determined which metrics were most relevant in helping us recognise our objectives but as a first pass we wanted to be sure that there was a quantitative way to assess the success of our work.
I’ve found the Marketing Venns particularly useful in deciding what stories to write in our upcoming sprints – not only does a quick glance remind me of our priorities but it also helps to ensure we have an even balance of work across all parts of the business for which we as marketing are responsible.
Meaghan Fitzgerald is a marketer and entrepreneur building and growing consumer and gaming products and experiences. A Silicon Valley native, she started her first company, DormWise, in 2006 which she later sold in 2009. Meaghan spent 7 years in London in early stage consumer startups, two years at Xbox as a product marketer for Minecraft, and is currently the head of product marketing for VR experiences at Facebook and Oculus. Meaghan writes here about business, technology, gaming, and marketing. She has been named a top