In the past few years, Agile Marketing has entered the lexicon of online business in a major way—and with good cause. After all, agility means speed and responsiveness, values which are more important in business today than ever. If your firm is using marketing automation software, you already understand the importance of these values.
Being able to speed up the deployment of campaigns and update them rapidly as test results come in is ever more important, and with modern tools it is ever more practical. Furthermore, customers buying online expect speed in everything from website loading times to responses from customer service reps.
But at your firm, you find yourself asking what exactly is Agile Marketing and why should I be doing it in my business? Today we’re going to demystify Agile Marketing and explain why your firm should take its lessons to heart.
Agile Marketing has the air of a buzzword, but the package of principles which it espouses are essentially best-practices to reduce rigidity and increase responsiveness and action. The buzzwordiness of Agile Marketing is enhanced by the fact that it’s associated with a project management methology called Scrum—meant to bring to mind how a rugby team follows quick, collaborative decision-making with explosive action.
This usage of the word goes back decades in the world of software design. It refers to a holistic approach to product development in which a team works together towards a goal while maximizing their flexibility towards unknown and unpredictable challenges. In essence, a team establishes the parameters for the end product up front and works towards that goal, while incorporating the fact that customers can (and will) change their minds constantly along the way.
It is from the world of software development that we have received Agile Marketing, but as we said at the beginning, the principles are more universal. For instance, the fields of public relations crisis management and modern political campaigns pre-date consumer software by numerous decades, and the same principles apply there.
In a political campaign, for instance, a small team has an end goal in mind (getting a party or candidate elected) and a process for achieving that goal (promoting messages, running ads, polling the electorate, etc.). However, between the campaign launch and the election, the team must also respond with the utmost haste to unforeseen challenges and unwanted developments, and generally expect the unexpected. These are some of the main principles of Agile Marketing.
Agile Marketing as a unique approach to development will involve a workflow along these lines:
One 2016 survey, only 11% of firms polled were using Agile processes. However, according to Forbes magazine, as of 2014, 87% of CMOs surveyed claimed that Agile had made their teams more productive.
This is quite a lot of potential productivity being sacrificed. If you’re reading this, it means your firm has already asked “what is Agile Marketing”? If your firm is serious about getting agile, a great next step it to talk to us!