Have you ever heard of Agile Marketing? If not, you have come to the right place. Today, we will discuss everything about Agile Marketing.
What is Agile Marketing?
Agile Marketing is the deliberate, long-term application of a specific Agile methodology to manage and improve the way a marketing team gets work done. It requires a strategic vision, as well as short-, medium-, and long-term marketing plans.
The goals of Agile Marketing are to improve the speed, predictability, transparency, and adaptability to change of the marketing function. Agile marketers also support a set of principles.
It differs from traditional marketing by focusing on frequent releases, deliberate experimentation, and a commitment to audience satisfaction.
What is the Agile Approach to Marketing?
Every Agile Marketing implementation will look a little different, but they will share some key characteristics.
Mindset Shift
Your mindset must include respect, collaboration, improvement and learning cycles, pride in ownership, focus on delivering value, and the ability to adapt to change
Experimentation, Iteration, and Small Releases
You should see lots of small experiments being released frequently, then you apply those results to the next round of work.
Commitment to the Agile Manifesto
The values and principles of the Agile manifesto should be the final arbiter for most decisions on an Agile Marketing team.
Servant Leadership
Managers and directors are focused on helping the team succeed, not on hitting numbers.
Teamwork and Collaboration
You are always looking for ways to join forces to do better work in a more efficient way.
Data-driven Marketing
Agile teams are truly data-driven. They make sure all their work can be measured.
Every agile team looks, works, and acts differently, but that is why Agile Marketing is different.
Improving Your Agile Marketing Process Over Time
The Agile mindset calls for continuous refinement and improvement, meaning that there’s always something that could be a little bit better. This is one of many reasons why retrospective meetings are so important. There are two complementary approaches, incremental and iterative improvement, and you may find one fits your team better.
Iterative Improvement
Iteration involves revisiting the same item and making small adjustments.
It starts with a vague sketch, an idea that you think might work. In the case of a new Agile Marketing team, that might be your very first backlog. You get together with your stakeholders and put a basic first draft together, doing your best to create something viable, but not stressing about making it perfect.
As the team starts using the backlog to manage their work, they’ll identify things that work and things that need adjusting. Each improvement may be small, but over time they add detail, functionality, and clarity to the product.
Your iterations don’t necessarily stop because something is perfect. They stop because improvements become so small that they only deliver tiny benefits.
Incremental Improvement
Improving your Agile Marketing process using increments is less like creating a painting and more like doing a puzzle. As time goes on, you add in additional components to produce a more complete process.
If we’re using increments to adopt Agile Marketing on our team, we might first create a backlog, then visualize our workflow, then add WIP (Work in Process) limits, then start having retrospective meetings, and so on until we’ve eventually put all the pieces of our Agile process together.
The danger of an incremental approach is that it often assumes that you know what the final picture should look like.
Companies That Use Agile Marketing
There are many companies that use Agile Marketing in their marketing department. Following are two (2) examples:
Dell
With nearly 200 people in their marketing department, the senior director had a ton of ground to cover, and everyone was doing things a little bit different. The senior director implemented Agile Marketing to reorganize its department. In 7 months, they created a worldwide team that follows the agile formation and operates quickly. Size and complexity does not matter as long as leadership is committed.
General Mills
General Mills initiated Agility in the right place: with their customers and their needs. They’ve then taken three steps to create Agility:
- Embrace mobile as the device of choice.
- Build a standard set of components that can be deployed across any site.
- Invest in “always on” teams.
Agile Marketing can be difficult but can also be very beneficial to a company. If you are looking to learn more about Agile Marketing, check out this 2022 Agile Marketing Report.
