In this day and age, everyone wants to be agile, and being agile means being able to understand, adapt, and change quickly in an ever-evolving environment.
According to Wikipedia, agile marketing is an organizational effectiveness strategy that uses self-organizing, cross-functional teams doing work in frequent iterations. It aims to drive growth by focusing team efforts on those that deliver value to the end-customer.
This emerging practice in marketing applies selected principles of agile software development. Proponents argue this increases speed, quality, flexibility, and effectiveness of a marketing department.
In a nutshell, an agile approach can be described as a form of marketing that involves making high-scale evaluations and using various methods to ensure maximum outreach. Agile marketing is one of the most effective types of marketing ever created, and it has proven to be beneficial to all businesses. Now let’s delve deeper into the concept of agile projects.
What Is Agile Marketing?
According to Workfront, “Agile marketing is a tactical marketing approach that involves marketing teams who collectively identify high-value projects to focus their collective efforts. “
Coschedule’s definition of Agile Marketing: “Agile Marketing is a project management framework that borrows the principles of Agile software development and makes numerous applications or to a marketing context. “
McKinsey defines agile marketing as the use of data and analytics to ensure that opportunities and solutions are gotten in real-time and efficient intervals.
These various definitions revolve around marketing, researching, discovering problems/providing solutions, and generating ideas.
However, you shouldn’t confuse agile marketing for digital marketing; though they might seem alike, they are different. Agile marketing uses many techniques– including digital marketing– to ensure that each target is hit and ideas are generated. Digital marketing, on the other hand, focuses on the use of internet-related equipment only in increasing sales and ensuring efficiency.
Agile marketing is concerned with individual interactions across various platforms, responding to change, customer collaboration and much more. It is a seamless and unique form of product and project management that reduces stress levels and provides efficient results. With this understanding, let’s briefly differentiate between agile marketing and traditional marketing.
Difference Between Agile Marketing and Traditional Marketing
Irrespective of their different methods, both strategies have their trump card, and this trump card is essential in achieving the specified goals. Here are some of the differences between these two marketing techniques.
Goal Definition
Agile methodologies focus on setting goals that will positively affect the customer. The results obtained from agile marketing are customer-centric. This marketing system allows the marketing body to make decisive suggestions and take action when required.
On the other hand, traditional marketing focuses on setting goals and techniques that revolve around the business or product itself. Their goals focus on KPIs, scope, schedule and budgeting factors that could generate revenue for said business. In summary, agile marketing ensures continuous delivery while traditional methods only partially accept it.
Developing Strategic Themes
A properly developed theme will help or guide you and your team through the necessary steps to accomplish your marketing goals. Agile marketing allows you to set and develop these strategic themes, accomplish them, and reach the target audience by being more adaptable to the rapidly evolving needs of the market. In contrast, traditional marketing ties marketing initiatives to a specific audience or project and often takes longer to pivot or evolve if the market dynamics shift.
Understanding Your Customer’s Needs
Understanding your customer needs is one of many qualities that will influence how long your customer stays with you or your product. It influences trust, transparency, and the quality of your future products. Unlike agile marketing, traditional marketing focuses on capturing customers’ needs upfront by deploying marketing personnel to make inquiries.
The Agile marketing team will continually monitor the various channels and messages available to get the information needed from their target customers.
Building the Marketing Roadmap
Marketing is a continuous activity that involves time, patience, consistency, and a host of several other features. In short, effective marketing might take a long time to get the traffic it is worthy of, irrespective of the marketing technique (be it digital, agile or traditional).
A business that observes traditional marketing will continually have a long-term plan/commitment to their products. However, agile marketing only provides a plan for weekly, quarterly or daily cycles for easy adjustment.
Measuring Impact
Agile marketing allows companies to measure impact while growing to check for spaces where improvement is possible. Traditional marketing only allows a business to set and estimate the expected time required for a campaign. In summary, traditional marketing doesn’t give room for checking for errors and improvement (it is a one-way train that only starts and stops).
What Does an Agile Marketing Team Do?
You’re now acquainted with what agile marketing is, but do you know the functions of an agile marketing team? Can you implement them in your marketing and sales strategy? If you don’t, we have listed some of the functions here to help you better understand agile marketing teams’ roles. Let’s look through them!
Data Analysis
Analyzing the provided data is very important for a business that plans on growing into the future. First, the Agile marketing team starts by developing insights based on targeted analytics; these insights aim to identify irregularities, opportunities, or focus points involved in the target customer’s decision.
To illustrate this point, let’s walk through an example of how an agile framework works in practice. Each day, your agile team members give short reports on their accomplishments of the previous day and what they plan to accomplish for the day. Having their various opinions and goals will help you to plan further and ensure accountability within your team. It also improves the efficiency and critical thinking of each team member.
Test-Design and Analysis
Testing and analysis are also important in ensuring that your marketing programs and ideas are potent. For each opportunity that you investigate, you would need to develop ideas on how to test the development of these opportunities; such is the core principle of agile marketing. Since the tests would be similar to making hypotheses, your team would need to design testing methods and define specific key performance indicators (KPIs).
After generating a list of possible test types, you need to prioritize your selection based on potential business impact (or how the test would impact businesses and products once implemented) and the ease of implementation. Ease of implementation is concerned with how easy the test can be integrated without sacrificing efficiency.
Setting Team Expectation and Reporting to Office Heads
An agile marketing team requires result-oriented individuals capable of using critical thinking and resources at their disposal to ensure valuable results. Your agile marketing team should also be aware of the purpose of the team’s creation and align the stakeholders and leaders with the initiative’s long-term goals.
Specifying long-term goals the initiative is concerned with will help to boost the confidence of stakeholders, and it will also educate them on what to expect from each meeting brief.
How to Implement Agile Marketing
For the agile marketing process to be a part of your company’s strategy and traditional techniques, you would need to invest time in preparing your team for managing projects that have to do with agility. To effectively implement agile principles, here are some of the procedures you and your team would need to practice to ensure a smooth agile Marketing journey.
Understand the Fundamentals of Agile
Before you begin applying agile methods to your marketing strategies, you would need to learn its fundamentals. Learning the fundamentals would develop a clear understanding of what agile marketing entails, its basic principles, and how the process works.
Aside from that, discussing what you intend on achieving with agile will further improve your team’s view of the concept. Sharing and developing expectations with your members will ensure that each person in your team is prepared to adopt the new technique.
Use Sprints
A sprint can be described as a duration in which your team must complete each project that they have been assigned. A sprint might often range between two to six weeks (the typical length of a sprint for any agile project is two (2) weeks). Sprint planning will enable your team to execute their tasks faster with better output.
For an effective agile marketing team, each member should be aware of how sprint planning will work. A perfect understanding of sprints and sprint planning will ensure that they don’t take too much time on projects that aren’t value-based while shifting their focus to value-based performance. It also allows you to assess team performance and identify areas that might require improvement.
Check Project Progress and Track Tasks
Project tracking and management are important in ensuring that all plans are on schedule. You can use several tools to monitor your project progress since agile marketing approaches permit sophisticated tools. Using both automated and conventional methods will be helpful in accurately tracking both individual and larger tasks.
Ensure Team Collaboration
For an effective agile team, your team needs to be very collaborative, and for your team to be collaborative, there has to be healthy communication between each member.
Scrum
Stand-up meetings– or scrum– will help to build and organize an agile marketing team. Stand-up meetings would require all members of the scrum team to be present as it would cover problems that each member encountered and some innovative solutions for speedy development. Agile marketing and scrum implementation are very important for the growth of your team and company.
Benefits of Agile Marketing
When you work in the marketing industry, you need to be open to several intellectual, crazy, and mind-blowing ideas. Compared to other industries, the amount of ideas produced in the marketing industry is very large. Also, with the number of traditional marketers that plan to adopt the agile marketing methodology in the coming months, it is expected to skyrocket.
Here are some of the benefits of adopting Agile marketing strategies into your business.
Less Cost, Higher ROI
Traditional marketing, due to its slow pace of execution. the questionable validity of the information available to marketers, and the number of guesses that the teams are subjected to, often requires you to make many expenses that you might not have incurred if you attempted another type of marketing.
Although this cost is covered up by the overall profit made at the end of the campaign, it is still incurred—especially when the cost of production increases or the number of consumers is reduced. Agile marketing empowers marketing companies and teams to run various campaigns at once without losing the campaign’s effectiveness or potential.
Agile Marketing Allows You to Evolve Quickly to Align Offers with Changing Needs of Customers.
Focusing on the needs of your customer and the trends that they are following is an essential part of marketing. By observing the latest trends that your customers follow, you can make the right predictions for product trends. With an agile marketing campaign, your team is introduced to a new approach to marketing that offers continuous improvements and competitive advantage in the form of speed to market.
Increased Efficiency
Increasing efficiency is very important when running a business. Your customers determine the efficiency of your product or service, and understanding how your products affect them is a step toward increasing efficiency.
Agile marketing teams can execute more projects that will help your organization sell more faster. Rather than using up your time on irrelevant things, it helps to focus all efforts on the tasks that require more hands or urgency.
Enhanced Growth
Agile marketing focuses on enhancing the growth of your company and marketing team. As mentioned earlier, using a process that can’t scale means that such a process won’t move you forward, irrespective of the effort that you put in the process.
Remember, agile is designed for growth. If properly implemented, it will boost the growth of your business. Aside from that, agile techniques can help your marketing team to maintain the efficiency of your product or service provision while your team expands over time.
Agile Marketing benefits Innovation
Innovation is the child of efficient ideas, and when you use agile, your marketing team will quickly develop newer and more efficient insights. With more insights, your marketing efforts will be directed at what your customers need more accurately.
Agile Marketing FAQs
What is agile marketing?
Agile marketing is a form of marketing that involves the use of tactical methods in ensuring that high-value projects are effectively completed with the collective efforts of the marketing team.
What does agile mean?
Agile (adj) refers to being quick, assertive and very responsive in movement. In marketing, to be agile means to be responsive in making decisions that are aimed at ensuring optimum performance.
How effective is agile marketing?
As mentioned earlier, there are certain requirements that your team would need to meet for this form of marketing to be effective. First, they would need to be committed to your company’s long-term goals, as well as being goal-oriented in general and collaborative. Teamwork is very important for agile marketing since it requires the ideas and innovations of several members.
Is agile marketing important?
Yes! If you seek an even more efficient form of marketing then agile is the choice for you or your business. Depending on your priorities, having a marketing and sales strategy that ensures product or service scaling is essential for business growth and development. It is also important for creating product and brand awareness.
Is agile a good form of marketing?
Yes! Agile marketing ensures that your marketing efforts are very productive and revolve around producing valuable results. Compared to traditional marketing, agile marketing involves the use of sophisticated tools in ensuring project management and value-oriented results for both smaller and larger projects.
Can agile only be employed for marketing strategies?
Agile is concerned with adaptability and value-oriented results. Using agile marketing or agile methodologies is effective for marketing and other departments in your business. Ensuring that teamwork exists in your facility will provide room for growth, customer satisfaction, and improvement.
Conclusion
The business world is constantly changing, and it is taking its marketing strategies and consumer-centric ideals along with it. New technology and ideas are being introduced to ensure that consumer needs are met and companies are empowered. With technologies that offer data-driven insights and on-point analytics, your marketing strategies are also bound to change.
In short, each member of your marketing team has to be acquainted with several tools and the flow of progress. Although this process might be a little more tedious than checking the progress of traditional marketing, using agile marketing makes it easier. For effective project scaling and customer-centric or aims, choose agile marketing!