If you had a great marketing plan for 2020 and in March last year you realised you can simply throw it into a bin, then you need to start thinking if agile marketing is for you. Or perhaps, if you can afford not to be agile?
Does agile marketing evoke mixed feelings in your company? I am not surprised! On the one hand, we are moving away from the typical marketing approach of planning every move well in advance to dynamic change, real-time adaptation to market and customer needs.
This relentless evolution seems like a necessity and the only way forward but… and there is always a “ but” focusing on the “here and now”, constant attentiveness and coupling of action and reaction seem to be an unimaginable challenge.
Over the years, brands’ behaviour during recessions has remained largely unchanged: either pull back, focus on cost-cutting and recover from the downturn at the right time, or act to gain new market share. But the current pandemic recession is unique as it has forced a huge and rapid shift in consumer behaviour like a retreat from stationary stores and a shift toward digital channels. This trend is very likely to stay, as it also has another unique ingredient – convenience.
So… what is agile marketing?
“Agility is the ability to create and respond to change in order to succeed in an uncertain and changing environment.”
First of all, agile marketing rejects the rigid rules governing large projects in favour of dividing tasks into small projects and the possibility of their continuous modification during their duration. The most important thing is to constantly test solutions, conduct simple, low-cost research, the quick results of which can be immediately included in the currently running project and immediately affect its modification.
The agile approach enables the company to operate in a constantly changing environment, to interact with customers constantly and to upgrade and improve its offerings. In this way, the customer shapes the product to meet his needs, guaranteeing the company sales.
Agile is not just marketing – it is primarily a programming concept, but Agile methodology is applicable in marketing, as in many ways it resembles the process of software development or is directly connected to IT projects.
In an increasingly volatile digital world, many marketers are realizing that they should be able to move quickly. Given the rapid changes in customer engagement expectations, coupled with the increased recognition and dependence of customers on digital, it is now more important than ever to get up to speed.
The agile strategy is based on four postulates that indicate priorities:
– People and interactions over processes and tools
– Working software over extensive documentation
– Customer collaboration over formal agreements
– Responding to change over following a plan
In theory, these guidelines – dialogue with the customer, readiness for change, action rather than planning – form the blueprint for ideal marketing. The big question for many organisation is how it should be organized, so a clear action plan is in place and it brings measurable results.
I believe these 3 elements are the key to run successful agile marketing.
- Know / Listen to your customers
- Like the change
- Test, measure, improve
Know/Listen to your customers
The basis of agile marketing is information. Therefore it is crucial to gather as much as possible information about customers – demographics, behaviours and preferences and offer the best customer experience possible. The source of competitive advantage is the ability to retain regular customers by building the right relationship with them. This is possible through an individual approach to each of them, based on the acquired knowledge about them. To start, organizations should develop or adopt a platform that combines data from different channels, such as e-commerce and social media, across devices such as laptops, cell phones and tablets, platforms such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, customer path mapping systems or marketing automation. This is how you can create a more holistic customer experience.
Like the change
Flexibility is the key to be agile and understanding that change is the only constant allows the companies to quickly respond to changing markets or customer buying behaviours. Being flexible means that you are ready to take immediate action or introduce the change if only customer feedback indicates that it is necessary.
One way marketing teams can gain flexibility and respond nimbly to market changes is through iterations. Iterations are short, looped periods during which planned marketing activities are executed. It starts with a simple sketch, an outline of an idea that the marketing team thinks might work. In the days that follow, the main goal is to make every effort to create something worthwhile, but not perfect. Refining the design will come in the next iteration.
Test, measure, improve
This is the result of the first two: listening to your customers and constantly adapting. But to do it in an efficient way you need to be able to test and measure and even more importantly be able to understand the trends and predict behaviours. If we use analytics to confirm what we already did and what we know but we cannot use that data to drive change or improvement, then we are not really moving forward. Today, metrics are used to measure the effectiveness of marketing activities, which at the same time creates the possibility of continuous improvement of current solutions, giving the answer in what direction to make changes.
Agile has also a different approach to testing than previous techniques: instead of large consumer surveys, it suggests quick, short, and cheap tests that can be done frequently, without serious processing and analysis. Data mining serves to stimulate creativity, so important in marketing, by discovering interesting patterns of consumer behaviour.
Implementing agile methodologies in marketing sounds like a huge change and it’s definitely not the kind of task that can be put on a to-do list and ticked off after a few days. It’s more than a set of best practices and ready-made solutions that work for other companies. It is first and foremost a mindset based on challenging the status quo. In real and mature agile teams there is no place for resting on laurels and saying that something is “good enough”. There is always room for improvement, change and simplification.
While Agile is not a universal remedy for all ills, it certainly allows you to maintain a healthy balance between strategic assumptions and effectiveness and realistic expectations of the target group.
Any thoughts on Agile Marketing? Let me know in the comments box below… would love to hear from you!
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