What to expect:
- A brief look at the 80-20 rule for prioritization
- ICE prioritization tool for prioritizing marketing and growth experiments
- How to prioritize marketing ideas and campaigns with Foxly
How do you identify which marketing efforts and ideas to focus on when trying to achieve marketing goals? Especially now, with all of the new trends that keep popping up out of nowhere, or algorithms that are constantly changing; how do you prioritize what to implement next in your strategy if everything feels like a priority? How do you keep track of things?
Well, for us at Jexo, we use Foxly - our very own Jira backlog prioritization tool; it helps us analyze and make decisions with respect to which ideas could give us the best marketing results.
What is the Pareto Principle?
Fundamentally, the Pareto Principle (or 80-20 rule), is about figuring out what your best assets are, then using them to bring you maximum value. And so when you’re looking to prioritize, you can forget about the 80 and focus on the 20% which are sure to produce results!
But for that, you need to know which 20% will get you closest to the results you’re aiming for.
There are many prioritization methods you can work with to get to your top 20%, or which ICE, RICE, WSJF, Value vs. Effort, and so on; for more on these backlog prioritization methods, here's a good article.
ICE and how it applies to marketing and growth experiments
Now for our marketing priorities case here, we’ll use the ICE prioritization method, given it’s a less complex prioritization method which does not require you to have access to customer behavior or product usage data. It works great when you’re trying to identify your highest priorities, without the data to support you.
What does ICE stand for?
ICE stands for Impact, Confidence and Ease.
Impact in ICE
How much does your marketing priority contribute to your goal, keeping in mind what you’re trying to achieve as a strategy? For example, whether you’re looking to increase brand awareness, acquire customers, or increase the authority ranking of your website.
You can choose any of the above options to define the impact of your Jira issue.
Confidence in ICE
How confident are you that pursuing your idea will work? Here, you can use what others have tried already to back your own data.
Ease in ICE
How hard is this idea to implement? Think about everyone involved and consider the task as a whole. alongside all of the stages it would require. For example, when we decided to improve our YouTube channel JexoApps, we knew we needed to create tons of new content. And that would inevitably involve the entire marketing team, from writing, to recording, editing, design, distribution, building LPs and so on.
Now, the higher your ICE score (which could be anywhere between 1 and 1000), the higher the priority.
What about other prioritization methods?
Once you’ve gathered enough data to support you, you can move onto other, more complex prioritization methods such as RICE for example. Metrics for the RICE method are very similar to ICE, but with an exception: reach. And reach will allow you to bring actual product data and learnings into your scoring process by connecting every priority to the number of users it actually impacts.
Foxly saves you time and energy
Prioritization sounds complicated but it truly doesn’t have to be; the key is to prioritize ideas based on strategy before you waste valuable resources on a project or idea.
Priority matrix for quick wins
Suppose you have a lot of marketing ideas and activities, in which case you’d need a quick prioritization process to score them. Instead of doing things manually, let Foxly prioritize your ideas and growth experiments for you. With a single click, you get access to a Priority matrix that instantly highlights your quick wins by categorizing your priorities into 4 quadrants for a quick overview of what needs your attention.
Ready-made templates
Foxly allows you to use ready-made prioritization technique templates that fully integrate with your current Jira backlog, which means you don’t ever need to do anything from scratch again! You can use any predefined template, based on how fast you need things done (ICE, RICE, WSJF, Value vs. Effort).
Pre-defined and customized prioritization methods
You can also fully customize your own set of metrics and score equation, with ratings, colors and even numbers. Basically, you get to pick whichever format you and your team are comfortable to work with, and you’re good to go!
Scores are in real-time
Priority scores give a new dimension to your Jira backlog! Foxly has a priority score function that incorporates variables like time urgency, the impact an idea will deliver, and the size of the task at hand. And if you’re looking to save time, then you’ll be happy to know that the score updates in real-time, which means you’ll never go back and forth to update anything.
Score is available in Jira issue
Also, Foxly’s great if you want to make your data available and easy to use; your issue score is always visible in your Jira issue.
Planning poker to prioritize with your team
When it comes to prioritizing with your team, Foxly has an amazing feature called Priority planning poker. It gives everyone on your team the ability to vote on issue metrics, and removes bias from the results.
For more on what Priority planning poker can do for your team, here’s a good article.
As you know, creative teams tend to get excited about a lot of things; but Foxly will help you find your priorities so that your team can focus their energies on worthwhile projects and eliminate distractions.
And the best way to use your resources wisely is by understanding which campaigns or strategies will have the biggest impact. If you’re having trouble evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing and creative ideas before diving into them, consider using a prioritization system like Foxly.
And you’d think this would take hours of setting up every week, but with Foxly, it takes minutes... so use your time wisely!