Alan DraperThe agile methodology is widely used in project management and software development but is now quickly making its way to other areas of the enterprise, including marketing.
How does the agile framework impact marketing in today’s digital age? The ability to innovate and improve the customer experience relies on marketing teams who are able to move fast enough to keep up with the evolving demands of consumers. In a world where consumers have no desire to wait, organizations with slow marketing delivery run the risk of becoming irrelevant and outdated.
Related Video: Demystifying Agile Marketing
Source: McKinsey on Marketing & Sales
Digital Marketing Recruiters: Is Agile the Future of Digital Marketing?
Modern technology allows marketers to reach and engage with customers in ways that weren’t possible just a few years ago. In order for marketing departments to keep up with the brisk pace of technological change and push forward new ideas, products, services or campaigns, they must be innovative, break down silos and gets things done quickly.
Agile marketing aims to improve transparency, speed and the adaptability of the rapid marketing environment; using analytics and data to prove the validity of potential solutions through small experiments and quick campaigns.
As digital marketing recruiters, we see many organizations that are risk-averse fail to move quickly and adopt new ways of marketing. Becoming fully agile isn’t simple but there are many effective agile practices that can be integrated into your marketing team and organization to bring your marketing ahead and squeeze the most ROI out of your campaigns.
Success Today Isn’t Promised Tomorrow
Marketing programs that experience steady growth and meet business goals and metrics are less likely to try something new and may become stagnant. This complacency causes them to miss out on something that could possibly transform their marketing.
What have you tried out in the past 30, 60 or 90 days that you’ve never done before? If you haven’t tested any new marketing strategies out, why not? If you’re in a good place with your campaigns and seeing successful results, that’s great! However, nothing’s ever promised in the fast-paced world of marketing.
While you should continue to invest in and nurture marketing tactics and strategies that work and drive results, don’t disregard innovative ways to keep your brand above the noise. Your marketing should constantly be testing, learning, and evolving. If you’re in a good place with your campaigns, leverage the ability to dedicate some resources to new initiatives.
Playing it safe, moving at a slow pace, and avoiding new tactics will get you mediocre results, setting you behind the competition. The iterative approach in agile marketing allows you to push out different ideas, test them, and evaluate what worked and what didn’t in real-time. If an idea fails, you can move on and try something else much faster.
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Build a Fully Capable Team
Agile marketing isn’t possible without the proper leadership in place, and simply won’t work if it doesn’t have the right buy-in with management. Digital leaders must understand and accept agile to properly guide their marketing department in doing so as well. An adjustment in the culture is necessary, where leaders must accept the risk of moving faster.
Do you have the right marketing org chart in place? One of the biggest factors that lead to successful agile marketing is a team of talented marketers who can work up to speed. Before you start to assemble your agile team, you must ensure you have the right roles and talent onboard. You must allow your marketers to have the freedom and support to think of innovative ideas. Millennials, in particular, are incredibly digitally-inclined and have many cutting-edge ideas. Without top marketers in place, how do you expect to build assemble a team that’s expected to bring brilliant ideas forward?
The exact structure of your agile team will depend on your organization and the goals you’re trying to meet, but they should generally be small so responsibilities and tasks are managed easily, and everyone is held accountable. The team that is charged with implementing, testing, and measuring different ideas should work closely together in an “agile war room.”
These teams will have daily meetings where each member will report on what he or she accomplished the day before, and what their goals are for the day. The iterative process and continuous collaboration agile teams work under allow marketing to deliver quick solutions and rapid feedback. Leaders of the agile team should create a list of things to try out, and go through them in quick cycles.
Intelligent marketers who are given the support and bandwidth to build great marketing campaigns will get the job done. Once your agile team starts to build credibility and drive results, your organization can progressively add more teams that take control of different functions.
The marketing department’s head leaders will need to overlook the activities of the war room team and check up on their efforts every so often. While your war-room team certainly must be agile, encouraging a nimble mindset throughout your entire marketing department is equally important.
Reap the Benefits of Agile Marketing
By avoiding time spent on meetings, approvals, and feedback, the iterative and adaptive process of agile marketing enables teams to get more things done, quickly. It significantly boosts productivity, performance, and internal communication through close cross-functional collaboration and a break down in silos.
Agile teams run small tests, making it easier to measure results and gauge what truly works and doesn’t. Through well-established agile tactics and quicker response to changes, rapid iterations of different marketing ideas pave the way to incredibly innovative ideas and rewarding campaigns.
More importantly, the consumer is always at the center of every strategy and tactic, enhancing the customer experience.
Conclusion
By encouraging and pushing agile marketing, you can transform your efforts and drive growth faster than ever before. The success of an agile marketing strategy depends on the talent and leadership your marketing organization has at hand. With all of these working pieces put into place, your marketing will be able to deploy tests quickly, evaluate the results and improve your efforts at a pace that’s aligned with the rapid speed of marketing.
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Alan Draper.
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