Why you should embrace Agile Marketing?
Agile, commonly mentioned in a software development context, is an iterative approach to planning and managing project processes. It advocates early delivery, continuous improvement while it encourages rapid and flexible response to change. Marketers could adopt this agile approach to develop and deliver marketing campaigns since it promotes a more responsive way to execute marketing initiatives in this dynamic, digital age.
Why should marketers use Agile ?
Marketers are constantly seeking ways to be nimble, especially now that the digital marketing technology has changed the way they have traditionally gone to market. The days of executing static campaigns planned months in advance are gone. Hence, they require a process that allows them to run experiments, work collaboratively with clients and use data to create more relevant marketing campaigns. In today’s world of constant customer feedback, marketers must be able to adjust their plans based on what’s trending in digital and social media. Adopting an Agile model of continuous iteration allows your marketing team to quickly test new messaging or campaigns, react faster to product updates, and set expectations with stakeholders who request work from your team. That is why agile marketing and frameworks, such as scrum and kanban, are here to stay.
What will change if you adopt Agile?
You will respond to change over following a plan: Instead of writing a 10-20 page marketing plan, you will write a one-page plan that specifies your goals, bringing all of your team members on the same page. Things change so fast in marketing nowadays. We know, for instance, that Google is changing the PageRank algorithm frequently hence we need to be able to adapt to that change quickly and accurately.
Rapid iterations over huge, time consuming campaigns: Instead of planning and executing a huge marketing campaign that you have no idea if it will be successful or not, you will take an iterative approach. Brainstorm with your team what do you think might work. Then figure out how to test it. Measure the results and document the learning. If something doesn't work, you have the data to prove it and you can try something else next time, increasing your efficiency.
Accountability: Most of the marketing teams struggle to know who the ultimate owner of a project is. Who is the person directly responsible for the success of a deliverable or who sets measurable outcomes for a task that the team can align with? To prevent this, you will have to assign a problem owner to every project. In that way, one team member is responsible for the quality of the project and the rest of the team is getting involved with brainstorming a solution and implementing a fix.
Focus on problems, not on deliverables: You will start thinking about your work as a set of problems to solve, instead of a set of deliverables with a fixed deadline. Stakeholders don’t always know what they want, thus problem-solving helps foster collaboration for better outcomes. Start every project with a problem statement that is clear to everyone, without including any solution initially. The solution will be found during the brainstorming session with your team members.
Learn to prioritize instead of pretending you could get it all done: Without a shared sense of priority, you have no idea where to focus your time. Hence, you resort to saying yes to everything. As consequence, you find yourself in a stressful period with a lot of half-finished deliverables. Many Agile teams use estimation to prioritize work and increase velocity as a team. They approximate the amount of effort a project will require or discuss how many hours it may take for individuals to complete their tasks. Over time, many Agile teams arrive at a sense of average output per sprint, which helps them plan new tasks.
Improved communications: Having regular (and short) stand ups will help your team stay focused on solving problems and getting stuff done. Of course, side conversations with smaller groups will still happen to go deeper into problems, but agile marketing will help you optimize everyone’s time. Everybody can see exactly what marketing is working on and where the team focus next. One of the key things in many organizations is that different silos of the organization don't seem to talk to each other. Maybe marketing isn't talking to sales, or the senior management has no clue about the marketing activities. Adopting agile marketing means that you will put some processes in place to make sure that all of those groups are collaborating.
Bringing it all together, Agile is the ability to create and respond to change in order to succeed in an uncertain and turbulent environment. Traditional agile can be categorized into two leading schools of thought, or frameworks, called scrum and Kanban. While scrum is focused on fixed-length iterations, Kanban is focused on continuous releases. When a project in Kanban is complete, it is launched and the team moves on to the next one. I personally recommend Kanban for Marketers and I will further describe it as a framework in my next article.
Stay tuned!
