The Agile methodology originated in software development, but organizations such as TD Bank Group are using it to make marketing more efficient, effective, and strategic.

Until recently, TD Bank Group created marketing campaigns the way many companies do, following a linear process in which the work product flows from one team to the next through set phases of development. While this Waterfall project management approach had worked well enough in the past—and, in some cases, still does—it didn’t allow TD to optimize the performance of its digital campaigns in today’s always-on marketing environment.

“That disconnect was a critical one,” says Theresa McLaughlin, Global CMO and EVP of marketing, citizenship, and customer experience at TD, given the increasing importance of digital channels in the company’s overall marketing strategy. In recent years, TD has shifted marketing investment from traditional media to online channels to more effectively leverage data, deliver more personalized messaging in real time, and prove marketing’s ROI. “We’re seeking to mobilize the marketing function around the customer and deliver engaging experiences wherever that customer is,” McLaughlin says.

The company assessed its capabilities across its entire marketing ecosystem and determined that, overall, it had the right digital marketing technology stack in place and the right talent on board to achieve its goal. “However, our operating model was not conducive to digital marketing, and certainly not to always-on digital marketing,” says Devin Sawyer, VP of digital, social, and content marketing at TD.

Enter agile marketing

To tackle this challenge, TD began exploring Agile marketing. The Agile approach to project management, which originated in software development, focuses on developing a minimum viable product, iterating rapidly, and continually responding to changing conditions such as customer behaviors. Consistent with Agile philosophy, TD isn’t undertaking a wholesale shift in its marketing operations. Instead, it is testing the ways the methodology can create business value by deploying “pods” in different areas of the marketing organization.

Pods within the digital marketing team, for example, are focused on improving campaign execution. These cross-functional teams bring together subject matter experts from various marketing disciplines such as creative development, search engine optimization, email marketing, social media, display advertising, and data analytics to develop and execute a campaign for a TD line of business. Pods also include marketing strategists who represent the needs of the business. Rather than handing off a campaign from one department to the next in a linear fashion, each pod’s representatives work closely throughout the project’s creation, deployment, and optimization. Importantly, the campaign execution pods also collaborate closely with other teams that influence the customer experience for that business line, such as the website team.

“As teams generate ideas and tie them back to their KPIs, they can pass ideas that may be out of their scope over to another pod,” says Shaunna Conway, a partner at Deloitte Canada. For example, if a marketing pod discovers an opportunity to optimize a particular website function, the team will refer the finding to the website pod. “Over time, leaders gain a very transparent view of all the work that’s happening across the line of business. It enables a deeper understanding of the entire customer experience, not just from the customer’s perspective, but also in terms of ROI.”

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