Todd Bloom: Use an Agile Approach to Execute Campaigns at Scale

In Todd Bloom’s view, an agile approach can help marketing leaders ensure that campaigns stay on track and achieve their goals. “We’ve implemented an agile working environment in which we conduct a bi-weekly retrospective that includes all team members from all disciplines. We also do a daily stand up that has the main participants attend where go through the stories, status of action items, and blockers. The meetings keep everybody on topic and on time, and they make sure that what they’re working on is being fulfilled. If there are any blockers, we need to handle them immediately. “But really, the top thing from my perspective is understanding how long it takes to get a good campaign to market, knowing what each team member’s role is, and understanding how those team members are working toward executing on their particular tasks. From there, it’s about working backward from the time we need to be in-market to get it done,” he says.

This holistic approach delivers better results in the long run, but it does require a fair amount of upfront work, especially when it comes to collaborating effectively with stakeholders spanning several professional disciplines. “In my company, many different disciplines are involved: product marketing, content, RLM, our executive team, operations, paid media, offering management — there’s a whole slew of people,” he explains. Making sure that all these subject matter experts are on the same page requires considerable time, especially in a high pressure environment that involves multiple campaigns and compact schedules. “We have messaging tools within the company that really help with that. We can ask questions on the fly through messaging tools and get answers right away versus having to get on a call and really talk through it,” he says.

This is an excerpt from 7 Experts on Flawless Campaign Execution. The eBook was generously sponsored by Workfront.