Agile Marketing – Where to start?

Agile Marketing – Where to start?

Branding & Marketing

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

Agile Marketing Values and 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!

Agile Marketing – Necessity or hype?

Agile Marketing – Necessity or hype?

Branding & Marketing

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.

  1. Know / Listen to your customers
  2. Like the change
  3. 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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How to run photography like a business – online presence for photographers

How to run photography like a business – online presence for photographers

Branding & Marketing

As a photographer you should be free to create your art, but charge like a business. Nowadays every business has to exist and be promoted online.

I had the pleasure of working with several photographers and got a unique insight into the way they build their online presence to show and promote their work.

Today I want to share some tips every photographer should be aware of in order to gain exposure online to drive their business.
Many photographers consider themselves artists and want to project an image of such, however, photography is just a hobby unless you are paid or sell your photos.

Let’s start with the basics…

1. Name
Your name is your brand. Whether you use your real name, artist name or studio name, make sure it is unique, so it can be easily recognized and is easy to find in search engines.

2. Logo
Every brand has its own logo, so should you. A logo is a graphic mark that should be on your website, photos (watermark), business card, promotional materials.
Make sure the logo carries the your name/business name, so if your photo gets shared on social media people can easily find out the author.

3. Online portfolio
Every brand has its own website and there is a reason for it. There is nothing wrong with using social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest to gain some exposure, but you are rarely in control of what happens on social media and you are not the one who benefits from having thousands of followers or visitors. You simply cannot capitalize on the traffic.
Have your own online portfolio, your own blog which is designed to best represent your style and aesthetics. Then integrate social media and use them to promote the content. Your website should be a central point of content distribution.

4. Social media
Do you need them? Yes! Simply because you must connect with your audience. Choose social media platforms that best help you promote your works. Use them to generate interest, traffic and always lead them to your portfolio. Choose 2-3 channels and make sure they are updated regularly. You need to keep your audience entertained and informed.

Don’t forget social media is called ‘social’ for a reason! Therefore, you need to engage with your audience. So follow up on comments, respond to questions or complements. The value of social media is in the engagement. If you have a monolog, then probably you are wasting your time.

5. Your audience
Define your audience. Who do you want to connect with? Magazines that may publish your work, models that want to work with you to add a photo to their portfolios, individuals who are interested in having professional photo sessions? Are you a corporate or wedding photographer? Who are you targeting? Do you want to promote yourself as someone to hire or do you run photo workshops with the main focus on teaching others?

6. Business plan
You may be an artist, but you run a business. Every business has to have a business plan and so should you, if you want to succeed. Every business plan has set goals to give directions and a defined portfolio of products and services.
The question is, do you have any?
What is your business goal for this year?
What do you want to achieve?
Set your goals and monitor them at regular intervals.

7. Portfolio of products and services
If photography is your business, you need to clearly define your products or services. If you target corporate clients, have 2-3 tailor made packages for them. If you are a wedding photographer, have a few packages that best suit a couple needs. If you run workshops for other photographers, bundle them into packages, list features and benefits and promote online like you would with any other product.
Make the packages clear, easy to understand and keep the choice limited. Once you define your services and prices, you can market them to your clients.

8. Promote!
Promotion is an indispensable element of the business. Even, if you are already an established photographer, you constantly have to work on keeping your reputation, otherwise your competition will overtake you. (Think Nokia)
You need to share your works, showcase published photos, re-post recommendations or endorsements and take part in photo challenges and competitions. Every piece of recognition is worth showcasing. It is not a question of bragging, it is about enhancing your credibility.

9. Outsource
You don’t want to be the one doing everything. Taking photos, retouching, running website and social media, own accountancy and dealing with clients, models and assistants. Start thinking about outsourcing some of the services and start thinking about automation of some of the activities. If you make money having more photo sessions or weddings, find a reliable service, that can retouch photos and watermark them for you. Go for online portfolio that has integrated social media, so your Instagram feed shows on the website and every post you add is automatically pushed to all social  media channels. Save yourself time managing it all and focus on what is your real passion – taking great photos and telling stories via your unique images.

10. Just do it!
Procrastination is common. You are so busy taking photos you don’t have time to think about strategy?
Again, check point 6 – business plan. Set yourself a goal and do it! Go for it and go for something big this year!

You are not taking photos, you are running a business!