We all heard a lot of ‘’agile’’ in software development, but one thing I realized how agile marketing is not really inside discussions of most companies. Agile as a concept is more than just software development, it is the culture of taking quick actions based on data and metrics with continuous optimizations on the process from the never-ending feedback loop.
I do believe agile as a movement is not something you can not keep only for dev teams, it needs to be part of your whole team’s culture whether it’s engineers, marketers, or sales.
Most global companies like to define themselves as agile, but when you look deep inside it’s actually not that much of agile when it comes to marketing executions. Most of these companies don’t have proper cross-functional teams that work together to launch campaigns, optimize and take action accordingly.
It is a massive problem for the ones that are competing in this era. Everything is measured and there is a tool for every problem, what’s your company’s excuse for not measuring things or not taking fast actions based on your data? I observed many leaders afraid of getting lost inside this speed tunnel but, that’s where the world is going, you either jump in and swim with the wave or try the other way and get lost.
For the ones that want to jump into the agile marketing tunnel, let’s have a look at 5 principles of the Agile Manifesto
1- Focusing on customer value and business outcomes over activity and outputs
Always prioritize the customer and your business needs to create more targeted and relevant marketing campaigns. Basically do the ‘’right’’ campaign not ‘’more’’ campaign’’
Many companies just create marketing activities for the sake of creating them without having the knowledge of what they need to achieve and how they will measure it. This creates an unbelievable amount of waste of resources.
2-Delivering value early and often over waiting for perfection
There is no perfect campaign ad or copy, start creating value now rather than waiting for the perfect creative or storyline, this applies to anything you create for any marketing activation. Start doing this now, measure the value you create, and look for ways to improve it.
Whatever you are proposing to the customer, the problem you solve will not be ending today or tomorrow, there is often much more potential customer you can win vs you can lose.
Never forget, if you wait for the perfect, you are actually losing the opportunity to learn from your customer’s feedback which is basically priceless for any marketing activation.
3-Learning through experiments and data over opinions and conventions
You have to approach every action as an experiment, there has to be a clear hypothesis, and data points to measure and actions based on your results. The most important thing is to collect this data and use it to design better marketing campaigns next time.
If you ignore experimenting and measuring result data you are probably closing your eyes to future revenue opportunities by improving your current activity which is the biggest mistake you can do.
The personal opinions of leadership teams are just personal opinions if they are not validated by the test-measure-learn feedback loop.
4-Cross-functional collaboration over silos and hierarchy
Teams are designed to collaborate cross-functionally on specific customer needs to generate much better results compared to teams working as silos.
Silos tend to lead gangs, and gangs start to fight with each other by eventually pointing out fingers at each other, trying to escape accountability.
5-Responding to changeover following a static plan
The world is running fast, whatever plan you have at the beginning will face a point of change. Don’t stand against this, it’s by far the worst mistake to stick to a plan that is not capable of bringing success or improvement in the long run.
Only the ones that can adapt to a new environment can survive. If you truly take ownership of agile marketing you should be already taking small actions, changes, and improvements based on the feedback loop and that means you should be always navigating through the darkness. If you stick to an old plan for too long, that means you are the Titanic about to hit an iceberg.
How you can start implementing Agile Marketing in your team?
Start discussing the Agile Manifesto and these 5 values with your team to understand where you are lacking most and start optimizing it to better efficiency by measuring your impact. Like the marketing campaigns, we will prepare with the agile process, the implementation of agile marketing is a subject of agile philosophy, there is no perfect location to start, just implement the test-measure-learn feedback to your team and start rolling