What is Agile Marketing?
In the past, software development was a long and drawn-out process. Agile methodologies helped to transform the way software is developed by breaking down work into small increments, gathering continuous feedback, and allowing for flexibility to adapt to changes. This approach has been so successful that other disciplines incorporated agile practices into their processes, including marketing.
Agile marketing is a concept that utilizes principles and practices of agile methodologies. This approach includes self-organizing, cross-functional teams doing work in frequent iterations with continuous feedback. It requires a strategic vision, as well as short-, medium-, and long-term planning.
Agile marketing is different than traditional marketing in several ways:
-Focus on frequent releases
-Deliberate experimentation
-Unrelenting commitment to audience satisfaction
Like the original Agile Framework that grew out of the Agile Manifesto, the Agile Marketing Manifesto was created in 2012 as a guide for teams looking to become more agile. The manifesto was created by a group who met to share ideas, successes, failures and consolidate ideas from other marketing manifestos. Since then it has helped guide teams looking to become more agile.
Agile marketing values, as outlined by the Agile Marketing Manifesto, include:
Focusing on customer value and business outcomes over activity and outputs
Delivering value early and often over waiting for perfection
Learning through experiments and data over opinions and conventions
Cross-functional collaboration over silos and hierarchies
Responding to change over following a static plan
Every agile marketing implementation looks a little different based on the organizational context in which it takes hold, but all versions of agile marketing share multiple key characteristics.
The Agile Marketing Manifesto outlines four important characteristics of every successful agile marketing team: agile-based teamwork, decisions based on data, rapid and iterative releases, and adherence to these guidelines.
Teamwork and collaboration
Agile marketing involves teams that tend to work together. Silos and hierarchies are replaced with free collaboration across a team. Every team member could be involved in each project in some way. Team-wide meetings and communication channels can be used to encourage collaboration.
Data-driven decision making
Agile marketers use data to predict, plan and improve their campaigns. Even though all modern marketers rely on data, teams that embrace agility are driven by it. Agile marketers constantly come up with new experiments for boosting the team’s performance and rely on data for measuring and adjusting their efforts.
Rapid, iterative releases
When you’re working on agile projects, sprints are short periods of time when a scrum team works to complete a set amount of work. The sprint cycle enables teams to tackle smaller amounts of work within the sprint timeframe and produce iterative releases of work. Because sprints are short, teams can adjust their plan of action every couple of weeks.
Adherence to the Agile Marketing Manifesto
Lastly, agile marketing teams stick to the values and principles listed in the Agile Marketing Manifesto. This document features five core values and ten principles that are crucial for achieving agility. These values and principles underpin all the practices that a team chooses to employ, such as standups, sprints, and kanban boards.
Conclusion
Agile has become the new "business as usual" for marketers. Since agile marketing was developed about a decade ago, marketers have made significant progress toward adapting its frameworks to meet modern-day marketing needs.
Marketing teams are often transformed to become agile. Agile marketing teams do several things: they release digital campaigns frequently, emphasize experimentation, and focus on the customer. The benefits far outweigh any challenges of transforming marketing teams, since they can see improved speed and productivity, process transparency, and flexibility. While there are several different approaches to making agile marketing happen, don’t rush into any one. Instead, start by building the agile marketing mindset first, layer the agile practices into your processes gradually, and test before you go all in. That’s what an agile team would do!
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