Agile marketing is on fire and gaining lots of attention in articles, blogs, conferences, and other publications, but there is often confusion about what exactly it means.
So, let me take some time to clear up the confusion. Agile Marketing is a well-planned marketing approach in which teams determine and focus their unified efforts on high value projects, complete those projects cooperatively, measure their impact, and then continuously improve the results over time. Marketing companies that are truly agile enjoy accelerated, continuous growth, have more satisfied employees, and adapt promptly to external changes. Teams will use short periods of intense work to complete their projects, and after each period they measure impact and then keep improving over time.
Agile marketer embrace their failures, as long as they come with lessons and can produce future potentially powerful projects. If something doesn’t work, they can pivot at a moments notice and change it up. They use these small sprints of quickly developed content to catch their customers’ moods at just the right time in order to capitalize on new trends.
Here are some things that agile marketers focus on:
- Responding to change instead of sticking to one plan
- Rapid changes over big campaigns
- Testing and data over opinions
- Numerous small experiments over a few big bets
- Individuals and interactions over large markets
- Collaboration over individuals and hierarchy
Each group of agile marketers will usually find a specific format to follow that works best for them, but they will usually all feature some of these things:
- Sprints: A sprint is an amount of time you give your teams to complete their current projects. Usually these range from 2-6 weeks. If the initiative is too big, you might have to break it up into smaller sprints.
- Stand-Up Meetings: Every day your teams needs to get together and have a short check-in. These are usually around 15 minutes. Each team member goes over their progress and tells you what they are planning to accomplish that day. Any struggles should be addressed right away.
- Progress Tracking: You need a way to track your sprint that everyone can look at.
- Teamwork: While an individual may own a project, the success or failure of the spring rests on all of the team members. Everyone has to be prepared to collaborate and assist.
Agile marketing will allow companies to respong quickly to changes in their markets. They will be able to produce fast campaigns that will be tested and optimized over time. It’s normal to try a lot of things, and repeat the ones that succeed. The goals are to improve speed, predictability, transparency, and adaptability to change.
When done right, agile marketing has huge advantages. It can lead to greater productivity, more relevant marketing communications and campaigns, better results, happier employees, and content bosses.
So, what do you think? Are you ready to get Agile?
STAP Brand Blog 