The term “agile marketing” is used to describe an environment in which new marketing initiatives are conceived, tested, tweaked, executed, and analyzed with blazing speed and maximum flexibility. The name is taken from “agile software development,” and the practice is gaining popularity as a way to manage the fast pace of marketing operations today.
The need for agile marketing has evolved out of the growing use and adoption of mobile and social, the new speed of business, the multiplication of communication channels, and the transparency and share-ability social media fosters. Traditional marketing methods such as direct mail and other mass media still work, but take time to create and deploy, are capital-intense, and don’t scale for a lot of today’s fast-growing businesses. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is measurable, effective, can be quickly created and deployed, and can be cost-efficient. Digital’s strengths include enabling businesses to find and join relevant conversations in real-time with their target audiences. It’s a personalized, responsive one-to-one model, as opposed to mass marketing’s one-to-many.
Agile is about being able to be at the right place at the right time – and then being there. How many of these five signs apply to you?
- You find that working to an annual marketing plan doesn’t suit the speed at which you do business. You’re willing to change the game plan by responding to and accounting for adjustment, and prefer that over following a static plan.
- You experiment, add variety, incorporate resources, and make revisions to your marketing activities. Instead of one big-bang campaign, you prefer an integrated approach that touches multiple channels with the same consistent message.
- You use big data and analytics gleaned from your experiments to trial, test and refine marketing campaigns, instead of using employee opinion and company conventions.
- Your department understands the power of social media and the changing buyer’s journey, and that individuals and interactions are more important than target markets these days because your marketing target is always moving.
- Your department fosters collaboration and team unity over silos and hierarchy, and understands the benefit of having multiple minds sharing and collaborating, over an individual working alone to accomplish the same goal.
Are you an agile marketer? Does your company foster an agile marketing department? Join @ActOnSoftware and @DrNatalie for the #MktgActionChat on Tuesday, April 30th at 6:00pm PT to share your experiences or to learn how your business can leverage agile marketing to run its programs more fluidly.