Agile marketing is one of the most popular trends in the business world. When utilized to its best, this trend can help you address the ever-changing market demands, unlock business opportunities, and maximize profits quickly and efficiently. But one cannot deny the fact that it also stands amongst the most mistaken and poorly implemented concepts. To put it simply, this concept has become a buzzword across the marketing industry, which has led to several misconceptions and mixed opinions around it.
That’s why we bring you this in-depth guide that will clear all your doubts in a hassle-free way. We’ll help you walk through the basics of Agile marketing, its key benefits and characteristics, how to implement it successfully, and much more. So, without further ado, let’s start by understanding what Agile marketing exactly means.
The modern concept or a framework that helps cross-functional marketing teams in satisfying their software development and programming requirements without compromising on quality is known as Agile marketing. It is a marketing approach that helps marketing professionals collectively identify and concentrate on workflows and projects that deliver value to the end-user.
Basically, Agile marketing is all about using analytics and data to seek potential opportunities and address pain points in real-time. It outlines the deployment of tests, evaluation of results, and rapid iteration to achieve the desired results. This means that the collective team efforts are driven by short ‘sprints’ of incremental building blocks to ensure better project management and high-quality delivery.
The Agile marketing manifesto is a set of principles and values created at Sprint Zero in 2012 to support marketing efforts. It is a well-defined way to market products and services in accordance with the current market trends.
Here’re the 7 principles of the Agile marketing manifesto to give you a better idea.
It states that measuring marketing activities is necessary to acquire knowledge and grow. It aims to reduce the impact of conventional thoughts and popular opinions. Altogether, this Agile marketing principle suggests experimentation and data validation before jumping to conclusions.
Instead of making isolated decisions or formalizing concepts based on a chain of command, companies need to focus on what the users actually want, need, and expect in order to achieve success. It means that cross-functional team collaborations should be driven by a customer-centric approach.
The principle motivates teams to work on adaptive campaigns that are easy to launch and track. It asks them to consider iterative campaigns as the key to gathering detailed insights into failures and success. It allows the teams to make amendments and modifications to meet user demands.
The principle focuses on defining user personas and what they want precisely. It suggests constant research and analysis, to identify the goals of the end-user without making any kinds of predictions or speculations. It wants the teams to learn about their users’ – pain points, preferences, buying habits, etc., with regular interactions.
The principle explains the importance of flexibility while managing projects, campaigns, and related stuff. Indeed, planning is the key to making a perfect roadmap but this planning should be flexible enough to change with the changing circumstances as and when required. Practically, it should be driven by the pivoting business interests, user expectations, and market demands.
It is imperative to follow a plan but not blindly. This principle suggests the same – marketing teams need to adapt and learn from insights whenever they follow a plan to avoid possible failures and drawbacks. They should always address changes with evidence-based responses.
The favorable outcomes of this principle completely depend on measurement. The ultimate goal is to perform smaller experiments with limited risk factors rather than launching large-scale strategies that have a high risk of failure. Besides, smaller experiments help in rolling out various approaches (A/B testing).
The above-mentioned principles drive the Agile marketing characteristics. And these characteristics further describe how to operate an organization in an agile manner and what your concerned team should prioritize.
#1. Customer Satisfaction: The most important characteristic of Agile marketing is to fulfill customer requirements by addressing their pain points. This way, your traditional marketing team can concentrate on your lead goals, while your Agile marketing team can focus on what customers require.
#2. Change Management: Agile marketing teams are ready for change. They plan for change beforehand. Their ability to respond to an emergency quickly and efficiently gives them the needed competitive edge to create a niche. Basically, these teams tend to welcome change with ease.
#3. Persistent Delivery: Agile marketing is designed to render smaller iterative marketing programs frequently and efficiently alongside making advancements and modifications when required. It focuses on delivering quality and quantity within a shorter timescale.
#4. Complete Collaboration: Agile marketing teams work in close coordination and planning. Instead of working in silos, they prioritize transparency and communication on a regular basis to keep every team member on the same page.
#5. Team Motivation: Agile marketing programs are backed by motivated team members. This team creates an environment that provides all the required support to achieve the desired results. They continuously strive to make this transition seamless.
#6. Learn about the Feedback Loop: Delivering, tracking, measuring, and a learning feedback loop is another essential characteristic of Agile marketing. While traditional marketing generates results based on long-term campaigns, Agile empowers teams to gather data, learn, and evolve quickly.
#7. Consistent Workflow: Agile marketing helps in maintaining consistency by pushing teams to work around at a steady pace. It follows a sustainable approach to observing an uninterrupted operational workflow that has enough stability and flexibility.
#8. Learn from Failure: Traditional marketing campaigns require a good amount of investment and impose an array of risks. On the contrary, Agile campaigns offer enough room for experimentation within budget. They possess lesser risks and guide the teams to learn from their failures.
#9. Focus on Basics of Marketing: With Agile marketing, you will be able to outline the basics of marketing in a better manner. No need to neglect the necessary measures and best practices. You just need to pay attention to small experiments and concentrate on the fundamentals.
#10. Facilitate Simplicity: When it comes to conventional marketing strategies, you need to go through a complex process to meet the desired outcomes. But Agile marketing helps you work the smart way and fulfills expected goals with utmost simplicity.
Most marketers worldwide don’t use a specific framework to implement Agile marketing. In fact, they practice a hybrid approach where the abilities of multiple Agile frameworks are combined to find out solutions for unique challenges.
The three most preferred frameworks that marketers use readily are Scrum, Kanban, and Scrumban. Let’s take a look at them one by one.
The three most preferred frameworks that marketers use readily are Scrum, Kanban, and Scrumban. Let’s take a look at them one by one.
It is an important methodology that helps to execute Agile marketing. It follows timeboxing to inspect, adapt, and focus on a subdivision of the business-critical workflow. The framework hosts two key components namely roles and ceremonies (events).
The ceremonies include Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum (Daily Standup), Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective. Their ultimate goal is to create a sophisticated pattern for various types of communication within the Agile marketing team.
The roles are backed by Marketing Owner and Scrum Master who are responsible for Scrum implementation, backlog and process regulation, and much more. Many a time, these roles are driven by a single person – the team lead.
As compared to Scrum, this Lean-Agile framework was introduced to the business world much later. Concretely, Kanban is a process management methodology used by marketers to stick to continuous improvements and quick pivoting.
This framework requires Agile teams to envision all stages of the marketing process including even the smallest of components. It helps them in limiting the number of projects, improving efficiency, and managing the overall process.
In a nutshell, Kanban Agile framework is supported by six essential practices that include workflow visualization, work-in-progress (WIP) limitation, workflow management, feedback loop establishment, continuous improvisation, and explicit policymaking.
It is the most popular hybrid Agile marketing approach that represents an even mix of both Scrum and Kanban. This framework can be easily customized to satisfy key organizational goals and business objectives.
Srumban can be used to its full extent only when the teams have prior experience in Agile marketing and its basic concepts. Also, good command over Scrum and Kanban practices, ceremonies, and roles is of paramount importance.
Primarily, Srumban is all about collating the pull-based characteristics of Kanban and structural elements of Scrum to offer quality products and services. But it totally depends on how your teams implement and monitor it.
Deploying the same Agile Marketing team structure as your competitors is not a good idea. Because the structure that has worked for them may not work for your company. There are various templates available across the market that suggest different team variations. But you need to choose the one that suits your requirements and budget.
For instance, McKinsey suggests a War-Room Team that comprises of two subdivisions Core Team and Extended Team. The Core Team consists of team leads and outsourced or in-house professionals with hands-on expertise in marketing. The Extended Team is driven by the personnel who play a key role in achieving business objectives.
The major take here is to deploy a tiered system, which can help in assigning roles and responsibilities. Of course, your Agile marketing team structure may look much different from the aforementioned but there are a few factors that you should keep in mind while making one.
Now that you know how an Agile marketing team structure should be, let’s move forward to understanding what this marketing team does to help you gain a competitive edge.
The team works with the leaders and all the other stakeholders to keep everything in line. They focus on continuous collaboration to meet project goals by all means. The ultimate aim is to keep customers at the forefront of every decision.
The team develops insights based on targeted analytics. They make sure that only data-driven prospects, issues, anomalies, pain points, etc., are considered to identify growth opportunities. Pending, ongoing, and accomplished milestones are also analyzed while doing so.
After identifying the opportunities, the team consistently works on the ideas to improve the experience alongside strategizing ways to test those ideas. They come up with a testing method and define KPIs for each concept to generate a list of tests for prioritized ideas.
The team runs tests to determine the effectiveness of each concept. These tests are run in seven to fourteen-day sprints so that the team gets ample time to validate whether the suggested concepts can deliver what the customers seek.
The team performs review sessions based on the test findings. Decisions are made on how to scale the tests that generate expected results. Feedback is taken into consideration and inappropriate tests are dumped immediately. Priorities are reset to work in parallel with the undealt opportunities concerning the next sprint.
Although the Agile marketing methodology wants you to pay close attention to its Sprints, Burndown Charts, Standups, and much more. But it is not necessary to include every part in your marketing strategy. Yes, each marketing department is unique, but there are some practices that every team should consider while implementing Agile marketing.
Make a Checklist: You need to make a checklist that should outline all the priorities and how they are dealt with. This to-do list should be kept up to date by determining what the team is working on and what are the upcoming tasks.
Visualize the Workflow: You need to know where your work comes from. You need to have a clear idea of how the work is being handled by the team, what are its possible outcomes, and where will it go after the tasks are completed. For instance, you can use a Kanban board to visualize the workflow.
Set WIP Limits: You need to keep experimenting with your assigned tasks. Understand the amount of work done at different stages of the workflow within any designated timeline. Later, you can set and follow the WIP limits accordingly.
Define Sprints Precisely: Give your team a good amount of time to complete their existing tasks by properly defining sprints. Keep in mind that big tasks are not going to fit in one single sprint. That’s why you need to break them down into smaller tasks and analyze them one sprint at a time.
Promote Collaboration: Make sure that everyone in your team is ready to collaborate while setting up the Agile marketing framework irrespective of their locations and time zones. This will help you establish a strong review process and minimize the frequency of errors.
Host Weekly Retrospectives and Daily Standups: You need to strictly initiate a continuous improvement process. This process should gather every team member and discuss individual progress. Additionally, performing weekly retrospectives and supplementary conversations are also necessary to assist various process-based experiments.
Track Overall Progress: Whether your team is using a Kanban board, a paper-written checklist, a whiteboard with sticky notes, or any other unique software, make sure that you have a centralized setting where every team member can track the overall progress of your sprint.
The right implementation of the Agile marketing methodology will help you reap several benefits in the long run. Let’s take a look at some of these benefits in detail.
#1. Better Speed to Market: If your company is unable to sell an idea, your competitor will. But when you have Agile techniques in place, your chances of getting ahead increase. You will be able to foster a rapid movement from product ideation to delivery.
#2. Quick Adaptability and Responsiveness: Agile marketing heavily concentrates on real-world feedback and suggestions that help you quickly adapt to changes and market demands. Agile teams have the ability to respond to user requests at a faster rate.
#3. Improved Productivity: With Agile marketing, teams get a crystal-clear idea of the tasks that are most important at a particular time. Rather than relying on lengthy campaigning plans, teams get the privilege to divide tasks and enhance overall productivity.
#4. Manage Priorities Effectively: Agile marketing helps the team to focus on the tasks that have the highest priority. It makes reviewing the backlog of tasks much easier thereby enabling the team members to adjust priorities. This leads to better marketing results.
#5. Design Customer-centric Deliverables: Whether your customer is an internal stakeholder or an external client, Agile techniques make sure that your marketing teams work in tandem with your customer requirements. These techniques push them to deliver products and services that are of great value to your customers.
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Agile marketing methodology is designed to help your teams operate more competently and proficiently. If something that you implemented is not helping you progress, take immediate steps to change it. Because Agile marketing is all about execution, performing tests, gathering feedback, analyzing data, improving, and making better decisions. You need to develop the habit of making continuous yet steady improvements. This will not only augment your processes but also trigger successful outcomes.
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