Sprints for marketing
Franco Falconi
?? Strategies to Boost Performance & Growth → Business Development → Brand & Marketing Management → Worldwide Partnerships Co-Creation
Brands like 23andme and Slack have adopted the Google Venture design sprint because it works. For businesses aligned with the whole “lean startup”movement, the sprint offers a formula to quickly build, launch, and test products before committing too much time and effort to something that might not resonate in the market.
It can be easily applied to marketing because it’s built around making data-driven, research-backed decisions, which are critical to creating winning campaigns.
And even though Jake Knapp explicitly advises not to adapt the Sprint—I’ve done it anyway. Over the years, I’ve made small tweaks to suit the specific goals and needs of a marketing team and marketing campaigns.?
Here’s what my sprint looks like:
Sprints traditionally happen during a five-day timeframe, when product teams set aside everything else they’re working on.?
In my world, I don’t do that. Sometimes, our team will spend one week on a marketing sprint; other times it might take six. That’s the nature of shipping marketing campaigns—the sprint is a framework, not a mandate, for guiding our work.
Marketing sprint phases and goals:
Although I’ve adapted the framework and timeframe, the goals during each phase of the sprint remain true to the process:
Now let’s look at what’s done in each phase to achieve those goals.
Phase 1: Map
The Map phase is all about research, collecting data, and understanding the problem to set clear, measurable, marketing targets.?
The first thing you need to know is your objective.?
Is this a lead-gen campaign or a campaign to push a new affiliate program?
?Is it a nurture track to convert leads into paying customers or a brand play to increase awareness?
Once you understand the goal, you can move on to the research—how you’ll achieve it and the specific targets and metrics that indicate “success.”
There are so many ways you can collect data and do research. (In fact, the Speero agency has their own rigorous research process.) As a guide, I’d recommend a mix of primary and secondary research to inform how you set your targets, such as:
For example, for a recent campaign to launch new pricing at CXL Institute, we conducted a series of industry interviews with pricing experts, ran an average revenue per user (ARPU) projection analysis for new plans, and went through a suite of usability tests on pricing mockup designs and copy.
One piece of feedback from usability tests was that users were confused by the “Pay once” option in our pricing. Users didn’t understand if it was an annual payment or if they would keep the product for life.
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The feedback triggered us to add a small disclaimer to our pricing block that made it clear that they would keep the course forever:
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Phase 2: Sketch
Once you’ve collected all your research and set your targets, you’re ready to jump into the Sketch phase. This is where you put all your creative marketing ideas to work.
The first portion of this phase analyzes the research and comes prepped to an “ideation” pitch meeting with a fully baked campaign plan. Channels, content, messaging—it should all be there (or at least a skeleton of it).
A fully baked campaign prevents the meeting from turning into a mishmash of half-baked ideas that sound cool but might not make sense for the project. Often, asking for a full campaign plan leads team members to think of more complex, interesting ways of solving the problem.
It also helps marketers think more about connecting the dots across channels and assets since they’ve had to plan for it upfront. Here’s an example of what a campaign ideation pitch looks like, from a campaign I ran in my previous role at Unbounce:
Each person explains their campaign to the team, and each person votes on individual ideas, concepts, or tactics from each campaign.
I usually give people three votes and one “super vote” (worth two votes). After voting, you’re ready to move into Phase 3.
Phase 3: Decide
In this phase, you collect all the top-voted ideas, organize them, and come up with your campaign plan.
Here’s where a decision-making framework like DACI comes in handy. In the DACI framework, you assign specific roles:
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In this phase, the DACI framework is especially handy because you need one person—the Approver—to decide how all the voted ideas come together into a plan.?
The Approver then comes back to the team and presents the plan to move forward, assigns roles to the Drivers, and pushes the campaign into the next phase.
Phase 4: Prototype
If you remember one thing about the Prototype phase, it should be this:?
Build just enough. Knapp outlines a four-step list of what he calls the “Prototype Mindset” in his book, and it goes as follows:
As a (self-aware) perfectionist, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in the Prototype phase and wanted to just spend a little extra time polishing a landing page, ad, or email. Resist the urge.
The whole point of this phase is to build only what you need to get an authentic answer from a potential user in the next phase: Test.
Your aim is to move through the Prototype phase quickly so that you can actually learn (and improve) based on real feedback. Plus, the more time you waste making something perfect, the more frustrating it’s going to be if when you have to change it later.
Phase 5: Test
Congrats! You’ve made it to the final phase—where the real magic happens. During the test phase, you get user feedback on the prototypes you’ve built.
First, conduct a series of interviews (ideally with your customers). According to Knapp, conducting at least five interviews during a sprint is enough to get real insight. Any less and you might be operating on false information.
Ask all interviewees the same questions. You’re looking to discover:
After you conduct interviews, transform feedback into “How might we” statements. Originally an idea defined by Procter and Gamble in the 1970s, the basis of “How might we” is to rephrase every piece of feedback (positive, negative, neutral) into a question that incites action.
For example, say you’re testing an email in a nurture campaign to convert leads into customers. A piece of feedback you might receive is: “Get to the point faster, I skim emails.”
Your role is to transform that feedback into a question: “How might we accommodate people who skim emails?”
The benefit of this technique is that it doesn’t immediately present a solution, empowering you and your team to come up with the best answer. For example, you could solve for skim readers in a few ways:
Once you’ve transformed your feedback into action items, you need to prioritize. Often, you’ll get a ton of feedback, and you need to decide which feedback to put into action. Sometimes, you might not have enough time to do it all, and that’s okay.?
Prioritizing feedback should be based on:
From there, you’re armed and ready with a tested campaign that you can remix, fix, and—most importantly—launch!?
Conclusion
Sprints are an effective and helpful project management process that you can apply to any and every marketing campaign. They ensure your work is data-driven and research-backed.
Ideally, sprints aren’t a one-and-done experience, either. A sprint lets you observe a campaign in the wild and, if it’s not hitting your targets, make tweaks and changes until it does.
If you want to learn more project management tools, techniques, and processes, check out my course at CXL Institute on project management for marketers. I cover the sprint process further, PLUS I walk you through how to iterate from annual to quarterly, monthly, and weekly planning so that your marketing team is set up for success.