🎛️ Why your agile marketing team should be sticky

Teams that stick together like glue have a huge advantage in how well they perform. It’s not about what work they do or the skills they have that give them the awesome sauce—it’s about how they learn to work together over time. Most marketing departments assign “resources” to a project, then disband the project team when the project gets completed. When this happens, teams may start to form, but before they ever get to performing, we disband them.

In agile marketing, the model needs to be flipped. Teams that stick together get more work done, period. They develop their own efficiencies and understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses and can compensate accordingly. Speed comes to the team because they know the work and they know each other.

The ideal team size is four to six people, but absolutely no more than 10. The small team is able to get to performing a lot quicker than a large team just because there are fewer communication hoops to jump through, and a small group just gets more done than a large group.

A common solution to getting more work done is to put more people on the team. However, there’s an interruption that happens when we do that and it throws off the current team dynamic, so unless it’s to solve a long-term problem, throwing more people on a project won’t make it get done faster.

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Some have dared say email is a thing of the past. But results from this channel show that email isn’t going anywhere.

From the marketing mix, this channel brings the highest return on investment and — with the right strategy — can be the most powerful tactic in your marketing toolbox. Sendinblue’s latest email marketing eBook dedicated to the software industry reveals this is particularly the case for SaaS and digital solutions.

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Physical and digital out-of-home advertising company Outfront Media has launched a campaign to highlight food insecurity. The campaign is a partnership with The Farmlink Project, formed at the start of the pandemic to connect unused farm produce with food banks nationwide.

Direct messages like “One-third of all food is wasted” are on display in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and Houston. The initiative follows Outfront polling its employees on the causes that meant the most to them: racial and social injustice and food insecurity topped the list.

Why we care. We care about hunger and especially child hunger, something significantly worsened by the pandemic. We also care about companies that have a considered and year-round plan to highlight important social issues. Back in February, Outfront highlighted Black history makers for Black History Month. We’re looking forward to seeing what it presents next to its enormous outdoor audience.

The pressure on marketers to justify their expenditures is stronger than ever, in part because technology has made it possible to tie spending to revenues in many cases. MarTech”s”Enterprise Marketing Attribution and Predictive Analytics” examines the market for these tools and the considerations involved in implementation. The 29-page report looks at the market forces impacting marketing attribution and predictive analytics solutions, describes the vendor landscape, examines the feature sets marketers can expect when evaluating such tools, and advises on how to move your decision-making forward.

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We’re excited to see our colleagues at Search Engine Land launch the Search Engine Land Mentorship Program, in partnership with SEO mainstay Eric Enge (who will mentor one lucky applicant, too). Inspired by other successful programs in the space (big shoutout to Women in Tech SEO), this Mentorship Program is open to applicants in both SEO and PPC.

Along with the opportunity to be mentored by experts in SEO and PPC, mentees will receive tickets to attend SMX Next. And mentors will be able to join in a panel discussion at the event on how to be a coach/mentor in search marketing.

More details and how to apply here.

Some 82% of Millennials and Gen Z consumers say privacy is a right, not a privilege, according to Facebook’s “Industry Perspective: The Evolving Customer Experience” report. In the U.S., 44% of consumers say they’re more likely to buy from businesses that offer personalized recommendations. Are these contradictory notions? Nearly three-quarters of U.S. marketers don’t think so — 74% agreed that relevant personalization and user privacy protection are not mutually exclusive.

Why we care. Sure, Google has delayed blocking third-party cookies in Chrome until 2023, but the growing emphasis on consumer privacy may mean that your marketing strategy should incorporate other ways, like first-party data or contextual ads, to reach your target audience. Customers want the best of both worlds — privacy and personalization — and the brands that can deliver both stand to gain.

Join us online — August 17 — at SMX Convert, an all-new two-track program from the Search Engine Land experts that explores fresh, reliable tactics in organic and paid search conversion optimization. Book now for best rates!

Register for just $99 »

This week’s Marketoon takes a hard look at the veracity of claims made by our modern-day pitch-people, the influencers.

Fishburne’s take: “Influencer marketing is a large and growing part of this widespread pursuit by brands to appear more authentic. This makes the fakery that is endemic to so much of influencer marketing even more striking. A study by HypeAuditor found that 55% of Instagram influencers were involved in some sort of social media fraud and fakery in 2020 and that 45% of Instagram accounts are not even real people. Yet they predict the Instagram influencer market will grow by 15% this year.”

Why we care: Performance-based relationships with influencers, and a fraud solution to ensure that measurement is accurate, help marketers determine the value of an influencer campaign. Broader questions of authenticity should be directed to the influencer’s audience, which ideally is also your brand’s audience. Understanding why an influencer is successful in engaging this audience will help marketers communicate more effectively to customers.