Did you know that as of 2021, 51% of marketers have already implemented agile marketing?
Today, Agile is no longer just a buzzword. Instead, it is a tried, tested, and proven methodology for many industries, especially IT. Software development teams around the world have successfully implemented various agile practices to develop their products and services. And this has encouraged other industries to implement agile as well.
Thanks to the internet and social media, the marketing channels keep changing, and marketers need to adapt their strategies accordingly. As agile is all about adapting to the changes, it’s befitting that agile marketing is implemented for their marketing strategies.
In this article, you can learn all about agile marketing.
Table of Contents
What Is Agile Marketing?
Let’s start with the basic definition. Agile Marketing is a marketing approach where self-organizing and cross-functional teams utilize agile practices and work in frequent iterations with continuous feedback. Like an agile product development team, even an agile marketing team implements sprints (short, finite periods completing a task) to complete their marketing projects.
According to the Agile Marketing Manifesto, Agile marketing values validated learning, customer-focused collaboration, adaptive marketing campaigns, customer discovery process, responding to change, and conducting many small experiments. It doesn’t follow the old methods like hierarchy, rigid planning, old conventions, and opinions. Instead, it takes an iterative and incremental approach to planning.
Implementing an agile approach in marketing projects increases the team’s speed, flexibility, accuracy, effectiveness, and adaptability. First, however, like any other agile team, even the agile marketing team needs to understand agile basics.
How To Establish The Foundations for Agile Marketing?
Even though the basic principles of agile remain the same for both product development and marketing teams, the difference lies in the implementation. Here’s how you can establish the foundations for agile marketing:
Understand the basics
The first and foremost thing to do before implementing agile is to understand the basics. Ensure that you and your marketing department undergo basic training to understand the agile methodology and its practices. Then, convey the importance of shifting to agile so that they don’t resist the change in work culture. Instead, they welcome it.
Work in Sprints
Sprint is a short, finite time allocated to work on a task. Divide your project into multiple sprints. The length of these sprints can range between a week or six. Sprint length depends on the type of project and your team’s capacity. Don’t forget to consult your team before planning these sprints to make sure they are practical.
Track project progress
Dividing the project into sprints might help you to get the individual tasks done. But if you don’t track the entire project’s progress, you won’t achieve the desired result in the end. So instead, you can use the old-fashioned whiteboards, sticky notes, or other digital kanban boards and project management tools.
Teamwork and collaboration
Even if you assign each specific task, the success or failure of the entire project depends on the whole team. Hence, teamwork and genuine collaboration between each member is a must. To achieve this, establish proper communication channels and tools, conduct meetings, welcome discussions and set common goals and objectives.
Conduct standup meetings
Quick standup meetings daily or weekly are valuable to keep the team organized and members on the same page. These meetings discuss everyone’s tasks, problems, issues, solutions, and ideas. These daily 15 or 20-minute check-ins not only keep everyone in the loop but speed up the project progress.
The Agile Marketing Frameworks
Even though there are quite a few frameworks for agile marketing, Scrum, Kanban, and their hybrid are most popular.
ScrumÂ
Scrum is one of the most popular agile frameworks whose focus is on recurring incremental delivery through sprints. These short bursts of focused work remove distractions, prioritize tasks, finish backlogs to deliver valuable marketing services and campaigns.
Daily standup meetings where the whole team analyzes the ongoing tasks, issues, and solutions, are a core feature of Scrum. These meetings allow better coordination for testing an idea in a rapid iteration. Every team has a Scrum Master who facilitates the daily standups, sprint planning, sprint review, and sprint retrospective meetings. However, when it comes to marketing teams, usually both the roles of scrum master and the product owner is fulfilled by the team lead itself.
Kanban
Kanban board is a popular visualization tool where the focus is on the status of each task. The board has vertical columns representing the stages like ‘to do,’ ‘doing,’ and ‘done.’ Depending on your project, you can have more steps. You can either use a digital kanban tool or just a whiteboard and sticky notes.
Due to its visual nature, you can always know the number of work-in-progress tasks. This visual representation is of tremendous help to the marketing teams to limit the number of running projects, prioritize campaigns, manage the flow and improve their efficiency.
Hybrid – Scrumban
Even though Scrum and kanban have their advantages, most marketers prefer a hybrid of both called Scrumban that combines practices from both frameworks. For this approach, you and your team should have some experience with agile and must be aware of both Scrum and kanban.
The Scrumban approach doesn’t have any set of strict rules. Depending on your project, team, and preferences, you can customize it. You can experiment with different variations to know which combination suits your team.
Best Practices for Agile Marketing
Agile is not just another project management approach that has some pre-defined steps to follow. Instead, it is a set of practices that gives you the flexibility to adapt to your needs. Here are some best practices for agile marketing that will improve your efficiency.
- Have daily standup meetings for about 15 minutes in the morning. They provide proper guidance to keep the whole team on track.
- Document your work as user stories. It helps you to make strategic, tactical, and internal decisions by keeping the end-user in mind.
- You should conduct retrospective meetings at the end of each sprint to discuss and analyze your processes. It helps you to understand what went right and what didn’t.
- You can apply frequent releases to marketing as well. For example, the team can have smaller marketing campaigns every week or two, whether these campaigns are individual initiatives or build up to a more extensive campaign.
- Become a self-organizing team. It helps you to work faster with better performance.
- Use digital kanban boards and other software that allow you to implement various agile practices.
- Be adaptable and flexible when it comes to changing your marketing strategies. Welcoming change is the core principle of agile.
Case Studies
No matter how good a system is in theory, it becomes difficult to believe in it without practical examples. So here are some case studies.
Dell
Dell is a well-known multinational company that sells computers and other accessories. With multiple product lines having different marketing approaches, it had become challenging to collaborate and reduce redundancies. To overcome this, Dell reorganized the global marketing team and implemented agile marketing. In 7 months, Dell formed a worldwide group for all product lines that operated in 1-month sprints.
Teradata
Teradata’s database and analytics service provider had been slow in communication and responsiveness, negatively affecting its projects. However, once they implemented agile marketing, the marketing team automated workflows and approval processes within nine months. This automation enabled the team to run quick micro-campaigns and improve their customer services.
Coca-Cola
The world-famous drink needs no introduction. Even though known for its brand, the enterprise struggled to get better at engaging with its customers. However, thanks to agile marketing, the marketing team found ways to collaborate with their consumers, which resulted in the #ImOnThe Flag campaign during the 2014 FIFA World Cup.
As you can see from the above case studies, Dell sells hardware products, Teradata is a software company, and Coca-cola sells beverages. So it’s clear that irrespective of your industry, you can implement agile marketing.
The Weaknesses/Shortcomings of Agile Marketing Approach
Agile principles are new for marketing but have many success stories for agile marketers. But it is not devoid of any drawbacks or challenges.
- Agile marketing does look good in theory. But it can be disastrous if not implemented properly. Also, each member of the traditional marketing team should have a proper understanding of the agile methodology.
- Many marketers try to implement hybrid approaches by mixing agile practices with old waterfall marketing practices. Unfortunately, such hybrid strategies will lead to a disaster if you don’t implement them for the right reasons to avoid the rigors of a well-structured framework.
- Sprints are great. However, the focus on the sprints might cause you to lose track of the overall project and its desired result.
Conclusion
Agile marketing will take your marketing programs & campaigns to a whole new level for sure, but for the entire department to become agile, it takes time. You need first to understand the basics. And mastering them is not enough. It would be best if you experimented to know which framework suits your team the best. Since agile is all about continuous improvement and flexibility, you can achieve success with time.
