Transform Marketing Organizations with an Agile Marketing Approach

As marketers, we have always found ways to capture, understand, and adapt to the dynamics of consumer behavior, demand, and supply, changing regulations, and evolving technology. But now we need to push out relevant messages to capture the micro-moments, be proactive while responding to the customers, and tweak campaigns in real-time to optimize ROI. And for that, we need agile marketing.

What Is Agile Marketing?

Agile marketing is a strategic approach to marketing, where all stakeholders collaborate on projects and get the products to the market fast. This is done by

• identify smaller goals to achieve short- and long-term targets
• plan and act the cycle
• make quick data-driven decisions with fast approval processes
• measure the impact of each cycle
• and improve the processes and results over time.

There are various methodologies to an agile approach like SCRUM, KANBAN, SAFe, LeSS, or hybrid models. The framework you chose depends on your organization type, your team members, and the type of campaigns you run.

Let’s now take a look at how the industry is going agile.

• 42 % of respondents have completed their agile transformation – Agile SherpasOpens a new window
• 95% of non-agile respondents plan to start with agile transformation this year – Agile SherpasOpens a new window
• 98% of organizations report success with agile – State of Agile ReportOpens a new window
• Key drivers of agility are – faster product delivery (68%), increased flexibility (45%), elimination of silos between business and IT(45%), and fast and continuous improvement of customer satisfaction (42%) – KPMG Global Agile SurveyOpens a new window

Learn More: Using Agile Methodology Can Improve Your Marketing Team’s PerformanceOpens a new window

Benefits of Agile Marketing

Before you start thinking Agile, let us first understand, how an Agile approach to marketing could benefit your marketing goals.

• It enables teams to communicate, collaborate, and react faster in the ‘moments that matter’
• When cross-functional teams like marketing, sales, and technical interact with each other, it brings them to identify and work towards a common organizational goal.
• It brings you closer to the tech-enabled, digitally savvy customers, and interact with them in near real-time, consistently across channels and platforms.
• Going Agile with your marketing strategy can help you create if-then scenarios to tweak your marketing campaigns based on performance and customers’ responses

This means your go-to-market (GTM) strategy is implemented fast, is effective, and all your teams: marketing, sales, business, technical are in sync with GTM.

Sanjay Sahay,Opens a new window AVP and global digital marketing head at InfosysOpens a new window , said that the company initiated the agile journey a year ago by overhauling processes, team structures, and deploying AI & ML based digital brain to enable their teams orchestrate online and offline interactions. “Essentially, agile is helping with rapid, insight-based decision making, leading to reduced execution cycle times and experimentation,” he added.

“We have launched campaigns and interventions in days, instead of weeks…Insights and reporting are now in real time, cutting down cycle time from days and weeks to hours. This drives planning, touchpoint orchestration, campaign optimization and content generation,” Sahay said.

But, Why Now?

An agile approach to marketing can amp up your marketing efforts to

• proactively understand customers’ needs
• react to market volatility
• and be resilient to uncertainty

Som PuangladdaOpens a new window , VP of global marketing, GumGumOpens a new window , shares with us her insights on why agile marketing is approach is crucial now. “The pandemic has eliminated numerous marketing channels. With every in-person contact-based program (events, conferences, meetings, etc.) off the table, our most successful campaigns in the COVID-19 era have emerged from our ability to quickly shift content and messaging planned for in-person channels to virtual and digital channels. We have seen how that kind of radical channel change can still deliver the ROI we expect, so our agility in this strange time has actually given us a proof-of-concept for how we succeed in new ways going forward. Not only did our agile marketing approach allow us to transition seamlessly to a reality without in-person contact, but it also unearthed a lot of value that was right under our noses. That value is enabling us to do more with much less. All in all, I think our tactics are probably changed forever,” she says.

Let us now share with you a quick guide to an Agile approach to marketing.

Learn More: No Company Is Too Big to Embrace Agile — Just Ask MicrosoftOpens a new window

Getting Started With The Agile Marketing Approach

The key to a successful agile transformation is:

• an agile mindset
• customer focus
• breaking the silos
• maintaining pace and pipeline
• and a tight feedback loop

Here is how you could launch your agile transformation:

1. Define the What 

The first step is to identify your goals. You can have as many goals as per your organization needs that can be further broken down into manageable pieces.

Pro Tip: Don’t go agile for everything at once. Divide your objective into smaller, manageable goals, split them across your teams, and conquer them.

For instance, if your objective is to create valuable customer experiences, you could further break them into customer interactions across touchpoints (social, web, devices, etc.), product usage and experiences, customer service, and get the relevant teams to act.

2. Focus on How

After goal setting, we plan on how to achieve them. That includes your intended marketing strategy – your plan on present marketing conditions and an emergent marketing strategy – the way you react to change.

You could follow an if-then (else) approach and change course in real-time.

For instance, Amazon responded to the growing COVID-19 crisis by bringing in Amazon Care (their medical unit for employees) to Opens a new window itle=”Opens a new window” target=”_blank”>team up with Seattle’s King CountyOpens a new window where they picked up and delivered COVID-19 test kits from patients’ homes.

Learn More: How Design Thinking and Agile Models are Transforming Marketing Strategies: The CA WayOpens a new window

3. Collaboration, Culture, and Continuous Improvement

The 3C’s are of tremendous importance for a successful Agile approach.

• Collaboration Among Team Members: Collaborating across the teams, and hierarchies can help everyone react better to emerging situations and tweak the strategy well in time. You also would need the right tools to help break the silosOpens a new window .

• Culture of Flexibility: Communication and creating exceptional customer experiences is the core of a successful agile marketing environment. Train and hire your staff so that they can align with your company culture.

“We have doubled in size and being agile was essential for both integrating new team members and assimilating the growing sales and marketing tech stack that were required to execute and deliver the same value on a far greater scale. While our agile approach made that possible, when bringing on new people and tools I had to ensure that they were agile themselves, and when it comes to people and technology, you need to get it right the first time,”shared Puangladda.

 

 

• Continuous Improvement: It is important to be consistent with your efforts, keep working on culture, communicate with all stakeholders such as management, employees, and customers to understand pain points, and work on them. A feedback loop that tracks what went wrong and what turned out well can help you replicate success and eliminate failures. Sahay stressed on alignment, data and insights, and technology for a successful agile approach. “Getting the teams aligned to new ways of working, collaborating, experimenting, and letting go of established assumptions and processes. The second one is around data and insights, freeing up from silos, making them democratized and available on demand. Third and final, integrating technology-enabled processes to allow real-time sense and response.”

4. Test Your Plan

Test your plans in a controlled manner to determine what messages resonate well with your customers. Run numerous small experiments and try more concepts. This can give you a glimpse of how your ideas are performing and enable you to take measured risks.

For example, many brands have made their stand clear on #BlackLivesMatter. While brands participating and raising their voice have not been uncommon, but there is always a risk of negative reactions, and with testing, you can gauge the customer sentiment before diving too deep.

5. Identify Measures and Metrics 

Data, measures, and metrics can help you uncover opportunities and weaknesses to tailor your marketing strategy to best fit your customers’ expectations and measure how your campaigns performed in the present cycle.

For instance, if you want to measure ROI of your current campaign: What would you want to measure: number of impressions, organic reach, sales, and so on? What is the threshold when you need to change the sales? You will need to identify these values before you launch campaigns and react to the emerging scenario.

6. Adapt and Iterate

At the end of each cycle, evaluate what worked and what did not. You would need to interact with everyone on the team to analyze and keep the feedback loop open and plan for the next cycle. Adapt to the present conditions and iterate. With short cycles, a data-driven, test-based approach you can deliver highly targeted and relevant campaigns to your customers.

Agile Marketing Tools

You would need agile marketing tools to manage your teams, track progress, and measure success. With a lot of tools in the market, it is easy to be confused when you are starting out. Here are a few pointers that could help you decide, which tools to pick.

• If you are an enterprise with multiple projects, a lot of processes and workflows, you can use JIRAOpens a new window . Largely used for or SCRUM framework, you can create projects, track progress, customize project workflows for collaboration, visualize milestones and dependencies, and much more with JIRA.

• Startups or large scale organizations that adopt the KANBAN framework use KanbanchiOpens a new window . If you have in-house and remote workers Kanbanchi can help you manage KANBAN boards, plan and track projects, measure team progress. It is well suited for enterprises as well as startups. The most exciting feature is that integrates well with the Gsuite.

• Taiga.ioOpens a new window is a tool for multi-functional agile teams. It supports both SCRUM and KANBAN methodology. It can be a to-go tool for SMBs with its reasonable pricing and diverse feature set.

• If you want to try, test, and experiment and have limited budgets, Trello Opens a new window may be the answer. It is a freemium tool for the KANBAN approach. It offers a simple and neat interface to prioritize projects, track activities, and collaborate with your team. And there is a SOpens a new window cOpens a new window rum for Trello Google extensionOpens a new window too.

How to be Successful With Agile Marketing Transformation?

Agile Marketing is now more crucial, especially after COVID-19. An Agile approach can help you react faster and better in times of uncertainty. Considering unexpected scenarios, you need to identify what needs to be changed, how you can adapt at lightning speed.

Going Agile can not only help you deliver targeted, improved campaigns. But can also help achieve goals faster by eliminating bottlenecks and aligning stakeholders.

Summing Up

As we wrap up let us leave you with a few tips on agile marketing transformation:

• Successful agile transformation needs an agile mindset and customer focus.
• Identify goals and follow a divide and conquer strategy for a focused approach.
• Deliver frequently and have short cycles.
• Make data-driven decisions to decide on your next steps.
• Collaborate and communicate.
• Maintain backlogs to track and prioritize workflows.
• Accountability is key to success -make team members accountable for their contribution and reward them when they succeed.
• Measure and track to keep a tab on your success and failures.
• Have a tight feedback loop with inputs from all stakeholders, customers, teams, businesses, and sales teams.
• Accept failure, but do not repeat it.
• Evolve

Successful marketers have already been following agile approach, and now we have a name to it. Being agile is more of a culture and mindset, how you react and respond to change with a focus on customer satisfaction and marketing fundamentals

Do you have your own agile transformation story? We would like to hear it. Share it with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .