The A To Z Of Agile Marketing Every Business Should Know In 2021

Marketing is no longer linear. It's not straightforward or simple either. It's a maze that requires constant pushing to reach the other end of it – where leads and conversions happen. With rapidly changing consumer behavior and market volatility, marketeers today are poised with challenges that were unknown to experts even a couple of years back. 

That’s why as far as new-age marketers are concerned, skills like creativity, empathy, the ability to think out of the box are no longer stand-out points but essentials that every aspiring marketeer is expected to possess or master by default.

There is an increase in the influx of tools, processes, strategies, channels, and mediums, and more, and marketers are expected to work based on data-driven strategies to come up with solutions to plaguing business and operational concerns. 

Assumptions and gut instincts are obsolete. A Forbes study also revealed that 88% of the companies out there make use of data to understand their individual consumers better. With pressure pouring in from all directions, a marketeer can rely on nothing but agile marketing.

What Is Agile Marketing?

Agile methodology is a popular framework in the software development cycle that speeds up the product development process through continuous iterations, implementations, and fixes. Considering the effort involved in promoting a product and taking it to the masses, the concept is being applied in the marketing space as well, where agile marketing is seen as a tactical approach to solving marketing challenges.

Today, a marketing department is no longer considered a silo but a hub of micro-departments or modules working in tandem with each other. There are writers, designers, social media experts, SEO specialists, conventional marketing professionals, paid and organic marketing divisions, and more. Processes in each are not conventional as well. 

Every module has an ecosystem of tools (that are based on Big Data, analytics, collaborative tools, and more), workflows, and processes that contribute to the collective goal of the department and the company.

Agile marketing is all about streamlining departments and teams, being rapid in ideation, and executing processes through the deployment of sprints. Sprints are short sessions that pave way for integrated development of marketing initiatives, lead acquisition strategies, conversion and engagement tactics, and more. For those of you wondering about the effectiveness and impact it can bring into your organization, realize that some of the biggest market players have adopted an agile methodology. Take, for example, companies like Dell, Mozilla, Teradata, IBM, SEMRush, and more.

Besides, several small and medium-sized businesses have transitioned from their current standings to bigger organizations by deploying an agile culture.

This is the fundamental concept of agile marketing you need to understand. However, to give you a better idea, we have come up with an extensive post on what agile marketing is and how you could build an agile team and tech for the growth of your business.

Let's get started.

A Practical Guide On Agile Marketing Process

1. How To Accelerate Digitally

For your marketing team to be agile, you primarily need to define your goals with the methodology. Getting on the agile bandwagon because it sounds fancy or because your competitors are doing it will only pull your efforts down. 

So, first, start by identifying your goals and then aligning that with the digital infrastructure you have at hand. By digital infrastructure, we mean your tech stack, associated tools, subscriptions, processes and workflows, and even the talent pool that is about to work with all these. Digital acceleration involves streamlining all these.

To help you understand the tech aspects of agile marketing better, here are some essential factors you need to consider.

2. Consider The Tech At Your Disposal

As far as agile marketing is concerned, it all boils down to tracking, monitoring, and reporting. This involves a bit of Big Data and analytics to get insights from the performance of your campaigns, copies, emails, wireframes or website designs, and more. 

Insights from these will tell you where you are going wrong with your promotional and targeting strategies, competitor edge, approach to understanding consumer behavior, and other similar aspects. So, subscribe to the right marketing tools and enable data-driven decision-making in your business.

For instance, if your email open rates continue to decline, don't assume poor headlines or images but deploy the right tools to understand if your score is adequate enough to reach your recipient's inbox. Tools will empower you with such information.

Also, upgrade your tech stack to the latest infrastructure to complement your rapid growth phase and ambitions.

3. Explore Ways To Automate Tasks

As we mentioned, agile involves rapid planning and execution. In conventional marketing strategies, there are tons of redundant tasks that need to be carried out on a daily basis. Such tasks seep into the time your talent pool could use to function better and focus on things that matter more. That's why the next step is to find out ways to automate redundant tasks.

For instance, you could automate your social media postings, email marketing campaigns, outreach programs, and more. Spending time on brainstorming and analytics is recommended than the time spent on executing tasks.

4. Bring IT Team Members On The Same Page

Apart from an effective framework, agile is also a mindset. It is a culture that eliminates authority, rigidity, and private ownership of ideas. To achieve collective goals, it is essential to bring every team member on the same page with respect to understanding an agile culture. 

One rigid resource could influence the dynamics of your team and that's why you need to nurture skills and traits that involve immediate pivoting of ideas, rapid fixes of loopholes, constant testing, focusing on emotional intelligence, ability to visualize data for insights, and more. An agile team is a compilation of members who are individually agile.

5. Make Use Of AI In Social Media

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can fix a lot of loopholes, optimize your marketing strategies, and fast-track the performance of your campaigns. With the right AI tools, you can almost immediately zero in on your intended target audience, its demographics, likes and dislikes, preferences and more so you could tailor your campaign around them. 

With customized copies and content (including images) for diverse regions, you can make your social presence more meaningful and rewarding. With AI, you could also manage your online reputation more effectively. AI definitely brings in a sense of agility into your team.

6. Analyze Data To Identify New Opportunities

Data analytics could surface information about your business, target audience, market segment or simply operations that you didn't know existed. Tons of anomalies could be identified by analyzing data from perfectly defined data touchpoints, processes could be optimized, strengths could be leveraged on and a clear vision for a set duration in the future could be fixed beforehand.

For instance, accurate analysis of your user data could probably make you understand that the language and tone you were using in your ad copies were ambiguous or irrelevant. Or the fact that your product positioning was wrong or out of place and more.

7. Plan Effective Campaigns

This is an extension of the previous point. When you have airtight insights about your audience or market segment, you are in a better position to run more effective campaigns. Thanks to data-driven strategies, you now know the specific portion of your target audience to tap into, the right medium or channel to reach them, the ideal time to automate email campaigns, write resonating copies, execute SEO tactics, and more. The more time you spend on data, the more impactful your campaigns.

8. Leverage The Potential Of Split Testing

In a competitive environment, you cannot wait to run one campaign after another to merely gauge what works for your marketing campaigns and what doesn't. You have to be swift in an agile environment. That's where split testing comes in.

With split testing, you can execute one single campaign with multiple test elements and evaluate the performance of one over the other. For instance, you could send an email to two segmented groups with two headlines to deduce open and click-through rates. For social campaigns, you can test carousel images, copies, narrowed down a target audience, budget, time of visibility, and more.

With enough sample set, split testing offers you a clear-cut winner of an element you are testing so you could deploy that for your major campaign that involves bigger budgets and reach.

Deploy The Right Agile Tools For Your System

There is a myriad of agile tools available in the market today. As beginners, it is easy to get carried away by the sheer number of options available. That’s why here’s our pick of some of the most proven agile tools:

●       Blossom

●       JIRA

●       Kanbanchi

●       Taiga

●       And Planview Leankit

Stay Agile, Always

These are the Kickstarter points to set up an agile marketing workspace in your organization. As we mentioned, the change and transition begin with the mindset and then to tools and workflows. Start from scratch, be rapid and steer ahead of your competition, who are probably still working with obsolete methodologies and strategies.

In a non-agile world, stay perpetually agile.

Good luck!

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