Agile Marketing in the Age of the Customer
By: Anannya Sharma
Tags: Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Digital Marketing, Customer Experience, Business Strategy

Marketing never sleeps.

At any given moment, marketers have multiple channels and campaigns open alongside the daily grind of deliverables they need to get done within a day. On top of all that, why does everyone else seem to want to sit around and discuss Schitt’s Creek?

But it isn’t just marketers who are always connected — customers are too. They’re switching from screen to screen and device to device, with ever-decreasing attention spans. We can no longer afford to take three weeks to develop an emailing strategy, approve it, test run it, and finally put it out.

Now, businesses have to run with opportunities as they present themselves.

In a world where the hare now beats the tortoise, today’s marketers are agile. They’re reaching their audiences with the right message at the right time, on the most relevant platform.

In the constantly-changing digital scenario, a single Google update can pull the carpet out from under your feet and leave your traditional marketing methodology struggling with its focus on producers and sales cycles. Agile marketing helps businesses consider customers and their buying behaviour, in addition to traditional routes.

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Put simply, agile marketing is the use of data gathered to constantly improve your marketing campaigns throughout the process. In 2012, a group of marketers came together to create the Agile Manifesto, an agreed-upon set of values to guide marketers towards a more “agile” way of working.

It isn’t on-the-fly marketing. It means customer focus, constant change and collaboration, and continuous iteration, and focuses on these values:

Testing + data instead of assumption + opinions

Responding to change rather than just following a plan

Collaboration + transparency over hierarchy

Many smaller experiments rather than standalone bets

In agile marketing, teams apply collective efforts to complete projects under short and definitive time periods. Check out this great article to bust the common agile marketing myths.

Image Source AgileSherpa

Agile marketing as a part of business strategy

In B2B and B2C industries, successful marketing means increased customer satisfaction and sales. When marketers need to move quickly due to customer dissatisfaction, product recall or poor response on a social contest, agile marketing comes to the rescue. This is why you should use it.

Better Internal Communication

Sometimes, a business’s marketing and IT teams feel like oil and water. Adopting agile marketing improves communication not only within the marketing team, but between different departments. With regular, target-focused meetings, any challenge is immediately resolved and everyone knows what the other is doing.

Save On Cost

Companies can effectively save and get long-term results at the same time by reaching out to a larger audience through great work ethics and organisation, all without the extra cost of scrambling to find multiple alternative solutions.

Happier Employees

80.9 percent of agile marketers are satisfied with their work, as compared to 27 percent of ad hoc marketers, and 44.2 percent of traditional marketers. When your employees are better able to prioritise tasks, improve coordination and delivery, it boosts morale. Colleagues’ project visibility is another factor that helps quality of work shoot up.

Transparency

When marketers have a clear insight into the course of a project, sprint review meetings, and better feedback, this brings better results. Transparency isn’t just limited to the team, but means that a company’s marketing team can acknowledge the work of management, or work closely with customers to offer genuine services.

Life as a marketer is a series of sprints, where they need to constantly reinvent themselves and embrace new tactics that allow them to stay up-to-date with trends and what customers really want.

It’s time to sprint, because the time for walking is over.

Originally written for and published on Digital Odyssey.