Agile marketing is a fairly new concept and wasn’t introduced until 2012. It’s a strategy that prioritizes high-value projects and concentrates all resources on them. The team(s) then work in short, intense bursts to complete goals, assess their impacts, and work toward getting better results next time. At the core of this method, its values are:
· Reacting to change instead of following a plan
· Rapid repetitions over larger campaigns
· Testing data and validated learning instead of “rules”
· People and interactions over large audiences
· Customer-focused instead of hierarchy
According to the 2022 State of Agile Marketing Report, “555 of agile marketing teams can release things fast, and 48% can change gears quickly when feedback demands it.” Research from McKinsey also found that “agile marketing increases revenue by 20-40%.” You can see the benefits of this method already, so how does one go about implementing it?
1. Planning: This is a sprint kickoff meeting to determine the priorities of the project. The project will be divided into tasks that are given deadlines, and assigned to team members. It’s important to show that the customer is most important above all else and emphasize speed, collaboration, data, and accountability.
2. Sprints: Short burst from 2-6 weeks to finish a project.
3. Stand-up meetings: Every day all team members should meet to go over what each has completed the previous day so that everyone is on the same page moving forward. This is an important step for problem-solving as well.
4. Board to track progress: Whiteboards, software shared doc, etc. Whatever means necessary to keep everyone on track in the same place.
5. Teamwork: This goes for any team in any department. Teamwork makes the dream work!
6. Retrospective: Run by the scrum master for the scrum team. This is where everyone shares what went well and what didn’t. This meeting is for improving on future sprints.
Now that we know the methodology, let’s look at the individuals who make up the agile marketing teams.
Scrum Method:
1. Scrum: Responsible for keeping the team on track. They facilitate meetings, solve problems, and ensure collaboration and communication between all members.
2. Product owner: They’re in charge of the why behind the work and ensuring that tasks are being completed promptly. They’re in charge of understanding the audience of the brand the most to provide them value.
3. Developer: All others in the team are developers. They contribute unique skill sets from different departments that your project falls under.
Kanban Method
1. Visualization: This method uses visuals to track progress. A board is used and divided into columns for each stage of work. In simple terms; to-do, doing, and done columns. Whatever the task at hand is will determine how many columns to create to track.
2. WIP limits: These are boundaries to outline how team members work on the tasks within each column. This places a limit on how many tasks one person can work on or how much time each task has to be completed. This keeps people focused on one job until it’s completed and moving on to the next.
3. Meeting cadences: Similar to scrub, planning meetings, daily stand-ups, and retrospective meetings will occur to make sure everyone and everything is on track. The delivery meeting is absent since Kanban doesn’t work on timelines.
Agile marketing can be a great way for marketing departments to react quickly to changes in the market. They can also try a lot of new things in short campaigns to see what will work for your brand and what won’t. But, how do you know if agile marketing is right for your brand? Is your company seeing high turnover rates? Are your employees folding under pressure from immense workloads? These both might be good reasons to try an agile marketing effort. If your team is willing to change and give it a try it’s worth the trial run. A good example would be a trend or challenge happening on the internet. We can help you gather those moments. The truth is your brand won’t know if it works unless you test it out.
