Last updated - February 7, 2022
Agile marketing is a term that’s gaining plenty of traction in the business world and in global marketing communities. A massive percentage of inbound marketing agencies and team leaders now use agile practices to meet their clients’ and stakeholders’ needs.
In a marketing context, agile approaches create flexible marketing campaigns in which products and services can be rapidly adjusted to satisfy customers’ needs. Cohesive data analysis and customized marketing strategies influence these adjustments and form the basis for any changes.
The quicker an agile campaign launches, the quicker a consumer response is achieved, measured, and quantified. These responses are the keys to developing more effective targeted customer campaigns as rapidly as possible. This, in turn, generates new business opportunities and the ability for teams to solve problems in real time.
What is Agile Marketing?
Simply put, agile marketing is a strategic marketing approach where teams collectively assess and identify the highest-value projects on which to focus their attention.
Agile marketing teams use short periods of intensive work known as sprints to complete their marketing projects quickly and efficiently. After each sprint is complete, they also measure the impacts of each of the projects they’ve launched. These measurements provide valuable insights that allow them to continuously improve the results of these projects over time.
When an agile team discovers that a project or approach was not effective, this information is still valuable to the business they work for. Agile marketing considers failures to be just as informative as successes. It encourages agile teams to learn lessons from their failures in order to design better, more impactful projects in the future.
Agile marketing focuses on these core values:
- Responding rapidly to change as opposed to following a rigid plan
- Rapid iterations of marketing campaigns as opposed to infrequent, large-scale campaigns
- Testing and data over conventions and unproven opinions
- Multiple small experiments over major, risky decisions
- Individuals and meaningful interactions over broader markets
- Team collaboration over corporate hierarchy
The History of the Agile Approach
In June 2012, a group of thought leaders gathered to create a document that would steer the future of modern marketing practices. This two-day gathering of marketing experts is known as Sprint Zero, and it focused on the emerging Agile marketing approach.
The experts’ collective goal was to brainstorm a set of core principles and values that would form the Agile Marketing Manifesto. This Manifesto is a consolidation of numerous previous ideas that revolutionized marketing practices at the time.
The Agile Marketing Manifesto was the primary document developed during the Sprint Zero gathering. However, the conference also inspired dozens of other blog posts and articles. These spurred on the concept of evolving marketing into an Agile pursuit.
How to Implement Agile Marketing Techniques
Agile marketing has a unique language all of its own. It includes terms like Sprints, Scrums, User Stories, Epics, Pigs, Chickens, and Burndown Charts.
It’s up to every individual marketing team to find the applications for Agile that will best suit their workflows. With that said, all agile marketing implementations will include these four key features in some way:
- Sprints. Each sprint is the length of a time a team gets to complete a specific project. These periods range in length from two to six weeks. Some larger projects may need spreading over multiple sprints, and dividing into smaller tasks, to make them easier to tackle.
- Stand-up meetings. Agile teams should get together every day, in person or virtually, for a quick check-in that does not last longer than 15 minutes. Every team member should mention what they did the day before, what their plans are for today, and any challenges they have encountered. Problems should get addressed immediately.
- Kanban boards. Your team can use Kanban boards, whiteboards, sticky notes, or even digital note-taking tools to track project progress. However you choose to do this, you need a convenient and centralized way to track each sprint as it progresses.
- Team collaboration. The failure or success of an agile sprint rests in the hands of every single member of your marketing team. Everyone needs to collaborate consistently and meaningfully to effectively harness the power of agile tactics.
The Benefits of the Agile Approach for Marketing Operations
1. The Ability to Complete More Work in Shorter Time Frames
The whole point of agile marketing is to allow teams to get significantly more work done in far less time. This leads to quicker turnarounds for projects that may otherwise have taken far longer than is optimal. Agile marketing techniques eliminate distractions, boosting teams’ efficiency and allowing employees to focus during sprints.
The key to achieving quicker work turnaround times is to let your team members focus and deliver on the tasks you agreed upon. If you continuously interrupt your team members with meetings and unexpected requests to complete tasks outside of the specified project, you may set them back and end up having to delay your deadlines. However, let them focus on the task at hand and eliminate other distractions and their ability to produce excellent work will increase drastically.
2. A Prioritization Framework Based on Producing Results
One of the biggest issues with modern inbound marketing is the challenge of prioritizing which tasks to tackle first. If you work on the wrong projects first, your campaigns may not generate the results you wanted. Agile marketing provides a method of prioritizing tasks consistently in a way that helps teams to navigate long lists of work.
Scrum instructs you to start with the tasks that will produce the largest boosts in results for the least amount of effort. This approach encourages your team to tackle these tasks first. Then to fill other jobs in around those low-effort, high-benefit tasks.
3. Shorter Term Planning Based on Real Performance Data
30-day planning cycles are the new annual marketing plans. Your team should meet with your clients once a month. In this meeting they must supply a list of recommendations that will produce the results they need to reach their goals—in line with their budgets, of course. The planning process is often centered on goal setting, and clients’ investment levels must align with these goals.
By planning ahead for each month of the year, you foster the ability to design sprints that deliver client work that produces results rapidly and efficiently. You can plan for longer time frames as well to create an even more comprehensive marketing strategy.
4. A Focus on Data-Driven Marketing
Many businesses find that their marketing strategies fail if they’re based on opinions, assumptions, and attitudes instead of facts. Instead of allowing CEOs and managers to dictate how marketing plans are laid out, agile marketing allows customer and website visitor data to take the reins and guide marketing teams’ efforts with measurable data.
It’s possible to gather data on virtually every aspect of modern marketing operations today. From popular landing pages, heat map data and scrolling habits to link click-through, email, blog view, page ranking and bounce rate data. All of this data is useful in creating informed, strategic marketing efforts based on concrete data as opposed to estimations.
5. Happier, More Productive Marketing Teams
One of the core tenets of Scrum in agile marketing is that it empowers marketing teams. It gives teams and team members the tools, processes, and methodology they need to deliver on key objectives and direct themselves towards success. Plus, it provides teams with satisfying levels of control over their own work. This allows them to set their own estimates, commit willingly to tasks, and work together to deliver good results on time.
After every cycle, your marketing team will gather and evaluate which parts of the print went well, which could have gone better, and how best to tackle challenges. This is highly empowering, and reduces voluntary team turnover and the associated costs as a result. In short, the agile approach can produce happier, more autonomous team members and a more satisfied workforce overall.
6. More Effective Campaigns After Every Sprint
Inbound marketing is a self-directed and flexible method of marketing. However, you won’t fully realize its benefits until you have processes in place to correct its course, put the right people in place to implement these requirements, plan to do things differently, and then track the results of those course corrections.
Your marketing team should be constantly learning which approaches are working and which aren’t. Inbound marketing encourages teams to use data to improve marketing performances, and Scrum encourages them to use data to enhance their own efficiency.
7. Optimized Budgets and Improved Budget Adherence
Using Scrum gives your team the opportunity to work with your clients to reallocate their budgets every month based on their individual goals. Inbound marketing is a complex strategy, and its delivery is even more so.
Multiple tactics need implementing every day, week, and month to ensure success. Accounting software is incredibly useful here, as it provides a real-time overview of the current financial position, cash flow, and available marketing budget. This helps stakeholders review the situation and work within the required parameters.
Agile marketing’s focus on prioritizing tasks, collating ideas, and using data to drive marketing efforts supports the ongoing, successful delivery of inbound marketing campaigns. Using this method regularly reduces and minimizes much of the risk associated with inbound strategies, and improves teams’ budget adherence over time.
8. Improved Transparency and Communication
Agile marketing relies on transparent, honest communication with clients and stakeholders on the progress of their projects. Agile teams should involve their clients in the prioritization of tasks and deliverables, as well as in the planning of campaign launches through functional tests.
Transparency is a key value of any agile approach. It can help marketers to make strategic decisions in line with clients’ needs and expectations.
9. More Customer Satisfaction Overall
As businesses and their marketing teams search for better ways to improve their workflows, these efforts will produce higher rates of customer satisfaction.
Companies that actively work towards improving their offerings will improve the quality of their products, the delivery turnaround times of their projects, and their customers’ satisfaction as a result.
10. Increased ROI on Projects
The strategic distribution of resources and assets to projects that agile marketing encourages increases the return on investment of those projects. This ensures that resources get used as efficiently as possible and that time and financial wastage is minimized.
Choosing an Agile Team
It’s simple enough to choose to implement agile marketing methodologies. However, it’s the people on your team who will either make it work, or sink the ship that is your business’s marketing department.
Remain realistic about the marketers you’re working with. It’s essential to make informed choices about your agile transformation based on the capabilities of the team you have. Rather than on idealized but unrealistic expectations and scenarios.
It’s important to evaluate your team’s willingness to change agile tactics. If your team is already firmly settled in the status quo and unwilling to implement alternatives, it might be difficult to convince them to try agile. You can still encourage the change by implementing lightweight methods like Kanban to try to assuage their reluctance.
Ultimately, while the ability to adapt is important, your team’s cross-functionality is almost as vital as their openness to trying new marketing tools and approaches.
Adapting To Agile
Learning the nuances of an agile marketing system can take time, and your first sprint may be fraught with challenges, and potential delays. In the long run, however, agile marketing can assist marketing departments to improve their efficiency, better meet the needs of their customers, and streamline their workflows in a way that aligns with the business as a whole.
Agile marketing is rapidly gaining respect in marketing sectors across the globe thanks to its superior flexibility and ability to reduce time wastage and maximize marketing teams’ productivity.
Will your business be the next one to join the revolution?
Also read Useful Tips to Improve Your Conversational Marketing Strategy.
