🎛️ 6 key elements of a great agile marketing backlog

“Having a great agile marketing backlog can make an impactful difference for teams,” writes agile coach Stacey Ackerman. The definition and purpose of a backlog is simply an agile team’s prioritized list of future work. It’s created so that a team understands the most important work, avoids working on unimportant side projects, has a shared understanding of what’s being asked of their team and has a flexible method to add, delete and shift work as they learn new information.

Ackerman goes on to list the six elements which make up a healthy agile backlog: Everybody contributes; items are ordered by priority; they consist of “bite-sized slices of value”; they are focused on the benefit to the customer; there are clear “acceptance criteria”; and the size of each piece of work is understood.

“The marketing backlog evolves as new information is learned,” writes Stacey. “So by getting in a regular rhythm of refining your team’s backlog, you can maintain great backlog health.”

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When the U.S. Soccer Federation needed to revamp its antiquated digital infrastructure, including an outdated website, lack of mobile app and plenty of tedious, manual tasks to keep track of customer data, the organization invested in Treasure Data’s CDP solution.

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“We’re in the middle of a massive change in the data privacy landscape that is forcing companies to rethink how they work,” said Priscilla Debar, Acoustic’s Associate General Counsel, at our recent MarTech conference. “Is your brand keeping pace with these changes?”

Marketers have to work closely with their company’s legal advisors in order to maintain trust with customers when so many people are concerned with the way their data is being used by brands. “The game ultimately is about fostering the relationship between your brand and your customers that is built on trust,” Debar said.

With campaigns deploying across so many digital channels, marketers are aggregating more and more data, which means they have to also stay on top of privacy compliance.

Privacy laws in Europe and in some U.S. states (the EU’s GDPR, California’s CCPA) are making data sharing and usage more regulated. California is also creating the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA), which will be in force in 2023 and actively audit and fine non-compliant businesses. A bill for a federal Safe Data Act was filed in the U.S. Senate in July.

“The goal is to give consumers control over their personal data that is collected and processed by U.S. businesses,” said Debar. “The bill requires companies to publish privacy policies, designate privacy and data security officers, and provide correct data or delete consumer data within 90 days of their requests to do so.”

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Coveo, the relevance cloud, has announced the acquisition of London-based Qubit, the commerce-focused personalization engine. The acquisition brings together two well-known players in the AI-driven commerce space. The cost of the acquisition was not announced.

Coveo’s offering is based around a self-teaching relevant search engine, which crunches data on user behavior to automatically generate next-best-content and recommendations. Qubit seeks to generate models based on individual shopper journeys to conjure personalized digital experiences.

The acquisition should also support Coveo’s move into European markets.

Why we care. The Coveo and Qubit offerings are similar but not the same, and if well integrated could deliver better outcomes to businesses seeking to steer shoppers through the best journey to conversion. The move comes against the background, of course, of an increased emphasis on digital commerce, and it’s notable in the release that Coveo is seeking to serve a range of channels, including chatbots and mobile.

More and more, the key to solving critical marketing and marketing ops challenges is marketing technology. But with 7,000+ solutions on the market, finding the right one for your needs can be overwhelming. MarTech makes it easy. Discover dozens of time-saving, profit-boosting solutions and the actionable tactics to effectively leverage them… all in one place, all without leaving your desk, and all for free.

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This week, Yahoo announced In-Flight Sales Analysis for digital out-of-home ads. This allows advertisers to measure sales lift from DOOH campaigns, including online and in-store sales, which in turn can help marketers in optimizing DOOH campaigns, and potentially omnichannel campaigns that include DOOH, in near real-time.

The new capabilities come from integrations with Epsilon, Catalina, IRI and NCSolutions.

Yahoo already offers In-Flight Sales Analysis for video, display, CTV, audio and other channels. To provide the same level of offline and digital sales measurement from DOOH ads, Yahoo uses mobile location data to predict exposed devices. Data providers’ purchase data is then matched with the exposed devices to show a customer’s journey from ad to purchase.

Why we care. The Yahoo DSP (formerly Verizon Media) has demonstrated the advantage of a large network for marketers looking to control and optimize omnichannel campaign performance in near real-time. This move leverages DOOH, which has undergone a digital transformation over the last two years. Performance, in this case, means lower-funnel activation for DOOH ads, which has been previously hard to measure.

Using sales data from IRI, for instance, CPG brands will be able to see if a bus shelter ad sends shoppers to a grocery store for their product. Integrating this into an omnichannel campaign will engage consumers who look up from their phone screens to navigate roads and sidewalks.

“Most B2B marketers only need a limited number of martech apps: CRM (integrated with sales), analytics (Google is fine), a CMS to run their sites (WordPress is good) and some form of marketing automation (Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot etc). The rest is garnish.” Steve Nakata, Chief Architect, The Pedowitz Group.