Agile Marketing

As software developers, we understand the importance of change and being agile. After all, software development is all about being agile. Technology changes at a pace that quickly overwhelms traditional marketing methods and why there has been a shift to being agile. No longer does traditional marketing work.

Those that do traditional marketing you will see scrambling and deeply concerned when small changes happen. Think of every search engine or Facebook algorithm change. Those that are focused on traditional marketing scramble to figure out how to adapt to the change. Those that are in the agile marketing space look at the changes, adapt and evolve with no sign of panic as panic creates bad results.

You can no longer create a campaign for months, release, and wait six or more months for results. Results happen quickly. With agile marketing, you make iterations and changes on a monthly basis. Marketing campaigns are shorter, highly targeted, require cross-functional collaboration, and helps businesses evolve at a faster pace.

When it comes to being agile when it comes to marketing everything is within a continuous circle of evolution where traditional marketing has a beginning, middle, and end. Usually, during the middle of the traditional process, another campaign is started. The results from the past campaign aren’t used and you are one or two adoptions from what is currently being used. This is often called the waterfall marketing approach.

Teams are more collaborative, share information more often, and make decisions without going through countless meetings. By eliminating meetings, continuously pushing forward, looking at the current results on a monthly, sometimes weekly basis, you can adapt to changes in the market at a more rapid pace.

Part of being agile that scares many companies is the test methodology of being agile. You do a lot of experimental things that might never be done in the traditional “safe” approach to marketing. You push yourself outside of your comfort zone with every agile iteration you put on the market.

The typical agile company will test, learn, iterate, and execute at a much faster pace than their competitors. This faster pace allows you to adapt and move ahead of your competitors at a pace that blows their mind. Often people ask how we change so quickly. The reason is we lead by example with agile adaptions to our marketing, our products, and our services on a monthly basis based on the current market needs.

Agile marketing focuses on doing the right work, at the right time, and with the right people so that you get the best results for what is being promoted. By focusing on results that make the most impact for your business you are able to drop what isn’t working, continue what is working, and test new ideas that might otherwise never be tried.

Being agile will allow you to:

• Shift your digital marketing channels quickly based on where your customers are
• Try new marketing techniques to see what works at a rapid pace
• Empowers the entire company to collaborate and contribute rather than a handful of individuals
• Have fewer meetings and focus on results
• Produces rapid learning cycles to produce higher performing results and products go to market faster
• Your marketing becomes more integrated into your day-to-day operations rather than just being functional
• You look at results more often and change based on those results
• You get more done in a shorter period of time
• You look at your marketing metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) more often
• Fewer meetings and layers of marketing approval
• Increased overall company transparency on marketing spend
• Increased accountability across marketing
• Failure is no longer failure but part of your KPIs and increases your overall quality
• Your companies message reaches your customers in a more clear and concise way
• Customer satisfaction is higher due to honesty and clear information
• Your competitiveness in your industry is so fast your competition won’t be able to adjust as quickly as you do
• Quality of work actually increases
• Work is split more evenly among team members
• Identify roadblocks and problems faster
• Improved teamwork and morale within your company
• Marketing projects are completed more on-time
• Marketing becomes more measurable

If your business doesn’t do anything online we encourage you to not even consider being agile. It will be an ultimate failure. If you are trying to stay in contact with your customers online, reach new customers at a faster pace, and spend less than agile is a great solution. When we market to our clients we typically do 10-20% traditional and then 80-90% agile so that we can quickly adapt while still doing the tried and true marketing methods. Last year that resulted in an overall 20% growth for our clients that used agile marketing techniques.