“It’s human nature to do work when we hear about a deadline,” writes agile coach Stacey Ackerman. “The idea behind the ‘sprint’ is to have a short time-boxed cycle for planning and executing work. A sprint helps your team create a sense of urgency and allows them to only plan in detail at the last responsible moment.”

We’ve probably all heard of agile sprints, but what does it mean to implement them for marketing teams? 

Watch an episode of MarTech Live featuring Stacey Ackerman here.

The starting-point is a prioritized list of work, with one owner (the Product Owner). The tasks on the list should be “sized” in order to gauge whether they can be completed within the sprint time box. (More on agile estimating here.)

The sprint needs a goal: the identification of the main focus of the sprint, not just a regurgitation of the tasks which need to get done. Teams need to commit to the work they believe they can accomplish in the time box, and the work needs to be broken down into its component parts. “If your team has struggled with completing work, taking the extra time to estimate the tasks in hours can be helpful for gauging time commitments,” writes Stacey.

Read her detailed advice here.

Claritas analyzed the results of over 158 podcast campaigns in multiple industries and found lift significantly exceeding those of other channels. This report provides detailed insight into industry-by-industry benchmarks and “best practices” that allow podcast advertisers to more accurately analyze the effectiveness of their podcast and other multichannel marketing campaigns.

Request your copy now »

LinkedIn has acknowledged it discovered two measurement errors that led to overreporting of video views and ad impressions on sponsored content campaigns. The issues persisted for more than two years and affected more than 418,000 advertisers, the company said. LinkedIn is issuing ad credits to advertisers who were overcharged. Most were overcharged by less than $25.
Why we care. This disclosure will remind advertisers of Facebook’s problems with inflating video ad views and numerous other measurement errors. LinkedIn said it is in talks with the Media Ratings Council to audit its ad measurement metrics and with Moat for viewability measurement.

Customer service software provider Zendesk has announced a strategic partnership with WhatsApp that allows companies to engage customers in the moment — both to distribute information and respond to questions — across WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and instagram.  

More than 175 million customers a day use WhatsApp to engage with brands, said Zendesk in a release. The partnership makes Zendesk one of WhatsApp’s first core solution providers, enabling brands to quickly and easily engage with customers, for example to assist with social commerce transactions and customer service issues.

Why we care.  Messaging channels are a key place for brands to meet their customers today. It’s appropriate that customer service vendors like Zendesk are involved in facilitating this.

We hear a lot about how to choose a solution for your martech stack, but less about what you do once you’ve made a decision. At the recent MarTech virtual event, one session took on that topic: “So, you have a new CDP… Now what?” 

“We chose a vendor, everything’s going to be awesome,” said Ben Thompson, director of e-commerce analytics and tag management for Bluestem Brands, the parent of Fingerhut. “But it doesn’t always go that smoothly, does it?”

Even after Bluestem committed to adopting Tealium’s Audience Stream CDP, Thompson described a situation in which key stakeholders were anything but enthusiastic about getting the technology into place. 

Read More>>

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Insightly, the CRM platform, this week announced new features for its marketing automation offering, Insightly Marketing. The enhancements are aimed at simplicity of management and alignment with sales teams.

The new features include:

• AI-powered prospect ranking;
• Advanced list segmentation based on digital activities (website interactions and downloads, webinar attendance, etc.;
• A drag-and-drop landing page designer;
• A/B and multivariate testing; and
• Enhanced analytics.

Why we care. We’re seeing innovation and upgrades here from one of the smaller players in the CRM/marketing automation space.