Businesses evolve quickly, and no matter your speed, the competition and potential customers always seem to be evolving faster. To keep up with customers’ changing needs, marketers need a process that will allow them to run experiments, work collaboratively with clients and use data to create more relevant marketing campaigns. Agile marketing promotes the responsiveness, transparency and adaptability needed to improve marketing functions.

WHAT IS AGILE MARKETING

Agile marketing isn’t a new idea. It’s a development approach built on the idea that business requirements and solutions evolve through continuous collaboration between leadership, cross-functional teams, and customers. The focus is on adaptive planning and execution that encourages innovation, improved delivery times, consistent improvements, and keeps projects flexible to adapt to changes quickly. It translates to an iterative approach to campaigns where we test new ideas, track our results and learn quickly from what does and doesn’t work, and adjust course as necessary.

Here are the top 5 reasons why we believe agile marketing is the way to go:

Customer is King. Now and Always. 

The agile marketing interpretation of customer collaboration requires working with customers, rather than merely trying to sell something to them. By tuning into the voice of the customer through data and testing and listening to what they say through feedback channels you can quickly develop campaigns and constantly improve them. After all, why wait for an entire email blast to finish before you A/B test a variation of your email subject line on a small percentage of your list?

Produce campaigns quickly that can be tested and optimized over time

This means creating cross-functional teams with shorter work cycles. It leads to improved communication and more coordinated and informed teamwork throughout the organization. In agile marketing, everyone focuses on hitting reasonable, short-term project goals as a unified team. When each campaign is laid out marketers outline key resources, prioritize and keep the marketing messages on point, and clearly understand what needs to happen next in the process to stay aligned with deadlines. Taking the burden off of building streamlined workflows, it keeps efforts agile and consistent.

Faster response to change

Developing an accurate marketing plan 12 months ahead is hard - your company’s priorities might change, a competitor might come out with a major new product, or your consumers might just be looking for something new. The business world is constantly changing and in marketing, adaptability is key. With a traditional approach, the marketing department would be in chaos, but with the agile marketing approach a detailed plan would have been created for a span of 30 to 60 days, and then based on the results the learnings would be incorporated into the next plan. It allows marketers to quickly pivot when, for example, Google updates its search algorithm or a new consumer privacy law is passed.

Real results with continuous testing and data

In agile marketing, importance is given to using testing and data to drive decisions in marketing. It focuses on gaining and leveraging insight from real customer behavior instead of the gut instinct of a small number of executives, thus resulting in real improvements to the business. The data gathered helps measure the effectiveness of marketing activities, analyze performance, uncover new opportunities, and to dynamically tailor customer experiences.

The Best Teams are Cross-Functional

Typically, companies are divided into a variety of departments that are separate from one another. Agile marketing, however, levels company hierarchy and bridges compartmental divides. For example, the social media team needs to know what's going on with the print advertising and product development teams. Agile marketing methodologies encourage teams to come together on projects quickly and easily and to dynamically reconfigure as needed from cycle to cycle. Jumping on consumer trends and providing quick responses is important; therefore the more interconnected a company is internally, the greater its advantage in agile marketing.

For many organizations, adopting these principles will mean adjustments in culture as much as the implementation of specific management techniques. However, in our rapidly changing marketing environment, it’s not hard to see that the single most valuable marketing capability today is agility. Marketing presents challenges that range from designing websites that cut down on shopping cart abandonment to reaching customers by having to cut through the noise of the Internet. By learning to focus on the needs of customers and responding to those needs quickly, agile marketing teams are positioned to succeed at a time when the speed of marketing's response can be the difference between you and your competition.

Overwhelmed? Contact the experts today to get your marketing team to perform at its best.