What is Agile Marketing and Why is it Important?

Agility by definition is the ability to move, think or understand quickly and with ease.[1] Similarly, the goals of Agile Marketing are to improve the speed, predictability, transparency and adaptability to change of a marketing function. The term itself takes its inspiration from Agile software development and it describes the speed at which marketing gets done and how it gets done. But what does this mean for your current B2B marketing strategy and how is it different?

 How is it different?

Agile Marketing focuses on smaller campaigns that are quick to create, test, launch and evaluate, therefore churning out data much faster, giving you the ability to make incremental changes faster and allowing you to see better results much faster. Often times an agile marketing strategy entails several little tasks given to several team members who work in unison toward the larger project as a whole rather than one team member that works on many different things for one project; that is how things fall through the cracks and become inefficient This ensures that if things change or if something goes wrong it is easier to catch, adapt and/or while simultaneously learning from the misstep.

Agile Marketing adheres to a process called Scrum, which is designed to improve communication within your organization and to match your business goals with those of your sales team, therefore, improving the responsiveness of your marketing. [2] Scrum adds layers of structure to your Agile Marketing principles. The Scrum Framework is as follows:

1. Sprint Planning
2. Sprint and Scrums
3. Sprint Review
4. Sprint Retrospective

The Scrum framework focuses on the sprint, which is the length of time in which you give your team to complete a specific project. Sprints typically range from 2-4 weeks, so for bigger initiatives you may need to break your project up into multiple sprints that you tackle one at a time.

Why it’s important

It’s Effective

There are hundreds of marketing tactics out there and an ever-changing marketplace. Having an agile marketing strategy allows you the flexibility to adapt to the changing marketplace and focus on your target. With modern software, everything is trackable and this data allows your team to make informed decisions on their marketing tactics and campaigns and whether they should be used again.

It’s Efficient

Efficiency is the backbone of an agile marketing strategy, it just allows marketing to get done a whole lot faster, mapping out implementing and evaluating campaigns at lightning speed. It is no secret that companies that market more have a lot more success. If you throw 100 darts at a dart board, not all of them will hit the bullseye, and some of them may miss the board all together but you will certainly get a lot of them on the board. But if you only throw 10 darts, your odds drop considerably.

Agility = $$$

As your agile marketing strategy allows your team to get more agile, it will save you more money. These strategies often utilize outsourcing as they streamline their best practices and get organized resulting in huge cost savings. 

Agile marketing is the future! So what kind of people should you have on your agile marketing team? What kinds of skills should they have? And finally, what should your agile marketing strategy be? Contact us to get started!

Sources:

[1] Dictionary.com| http://www.dictionary.com/browse/agility

[2] What is Agile Marketing | http://www.agilemarketing.net/what-is-agile-marketing/