Thinking about transitioning to agile marketing, but not sure where to start? Here are 5 steps to begin with…
How to attract customers, how to grab their attention and meet their expectations in rapidly changing market conditions? Competition is fierce and marketing campaigns are becoming increasingly costly. Long term planning seems like a practice of the past and proves to be ineffective as it doesn’t keep up with ever-changing customer behaviour.
Agile marketing is designed to respond quickly to the changes and streamline and simplify processes. No surprise agile methodology is the leading one for the IT world and with the fast-growing number of successful start-up companies, the agile framework is also infiltrating the business world under various guises like Scrum, Lean or Kanban. Confused already? Here is the key difference…. While Scrum focuses on creative and adaptive teamwork to solve complex problems, Lean is based on continually eliminating unnecessary elements and activities from processes. Finally, Kanban focuses on reducing lead times and work in progress.
You may wonder how agile methodology used in software development can be adapted to marketing? While these two domains may look very different at first, certain principles are so fundamental and universal that they can be very quickly adopted in marketing management.
And here are 5 areas you may start with:
– Agile mindset
– Agile planning
– Iterations & testing
– Retrospections & learnings
– Daily standups
AGILE MINDSET
It all starts with an agile mindset. And while it is difficult to imagine a company turning agile from one day to another, a big change is simply a sum of smaller changes, and you may start with imperceptible initiatives and build on their success.
Best if you understand the 4 Agile Values and 12 Agile Principles
*Source: https://www.agilemarketing.net/what-is-agile-marketing/
AGILE PLANNING
If every project you start begins with a detailed plan, then perhaps you can take a cue from agile and instead of planning all activities and assigning strict budgets 12 months ahead, you draft a general outline first. While planning the whole year gives us a feeling of control, it doesn’t allow much flexibility to respond to the market change. If we plan only as much as we can predict up front, then we can filin the detailsls when it comes to scheduling marketing activities. We can also limit the amount of documentation necessary to be efficient and effective and meet any compliance we need to adhere to.
The agile approach accepts the change and welcomes it at any time. So if customer behaviour changes, marketing activities can be adjusted as well. If your company was planning product advertisement in an airline onboard magazine and assigned a budget for it, surely in the mid of 2020 pandemic, it became clear that perhaps it would be best to shift the advertising budget to a different channel.
Or, if you discovered that your audience shifted from using Facebook to using TikTok, perhaps it would be a good idea to split the advertising budget and test the performance of the ads on another channel.
Effective marketing always requires a broad vision and guiding principles. However, agile marketing implies reacting quickly and adapting to change rather than rigidly following a plan. Just because it is a predetermined and accepted plan. The main difference between agile and traditional planning is that the first one is iterative and adaptive, while the latter is set in stone.
ITERATIONS & TESTING
Marketing teams can gain flexibility and respond efficiently to market changes through iterations. Iterations are short, looped periods during which planned marketing activities are implemented.
All starts with a simple sketch that serves as an outline of an idea that the marketing team thinks might work. The effort is put into creating something worthwhile, but not perfect and refining the idea in the next iteration.
It also allows time for testing to see the results on a small scale and try it on various audiences or channels. This approach allows quick market research and finding the best solution in a time effective and cost-efficient manner.
FAIL FAST AND LEARN
Here is another agile principle, fail fast and fail often. Sounds counterintuitive, yet it works. You may not know what works well at first, but at least you know what doesn’t and you can move on.
Short iterations allow you to catch any mistake sooner rather than later, as well as reduce the risk of investing significant financial resources in products or campaigns that would not work.
Failure is part of the process and can be used as a lesson learnt. As long as we are learning from it we are moving. And sometimes we need to experiment to find a solution that may work. Moreover, teams that are not afraid to fail, are also not afraid to experiment and make bold decisions.
Many agile methodologies include retrospective meetings during which team members can share the experience and reflect on what went well and what didn’t work. Retrospectives are a great opportunity to identify problems and brainstorm solutions.
DAILY STANDUPS
Another team activity that can be adopted by marketing teams is daily stand-ups. Short focused morning meetings are designed to pass the most important information by each team member.
Usually, the format includes 3 questions:
– What did I do yesterday?
– What will I do today?
– Did I encounter any problems?
The answers help identify any blockers and share personal successes that contribute to achieving team goals.
Meetings are conducted standing up and each person has approximately 2 minutes to speak. These meetings main objective is to increase team communication. They are not designed for planning, they keep the team informed, aligned and connected. You can think about them like the sports team’s huddle.
Implementing agile methodologies in marketing may sound like an overwhelming task but surely it starts with adopting an agile mindset.
Some say that if you are not agile all the way, you are not agile at all. 😉
So, how agile are you?
Share your thoughts and comments below – I would love to hear from you!
