Gone are the days when Agile was only used in software development. Nowadays, Agile is applied to marketing teams to deliver value in iterations continuously. By adopting this mindset, marketing teams can quickly adapt to changing market conditions and customer needs, making Agile an indispensable skill for marketers striving to remain relevant in today’s fast-paced business landscape.
This post will discuss agile marketing, what it is and is not, and what it is today.
Let’s get started!
Agile for beginners
If you’re new to agile concepts, it can be challenging to know where to start. I suggest taking a stab at reading the Agile Manifesto and the 12 Principles behind it. Don’t worry if you find the concepts cryptic at this time. What I need you to understand for now is that Agile is a mindset, not a methodology. It is a common misconception in the community. You may come across Agile methodology being thrown around in meetings. That’s not it, okay? They’re most probably referring to Scrum, Kanban, or Extreme Programming (XP), which are all methodologies built around the concept of being agile.
Agile is the ability to create and respond to change. It is a way of dealing with and succeeding in an uncertain and turbulent environment.
Agile Alliance
What is agile marketing?
Agile marketing is an approach in which agile principles are used to manage how marketing teams work to get things done. Being agile enables teams to focus on delivering work items on a shorter timeline and quickly respond to change.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations have been compelled to rethink their operational strategies. In agile marketing, this could mean transitioning from traditional ways of promoting products and services to fully utilizing the power of the Internet to reach your target audience. This abrupt change encouraged more organizations to adapt and embrace the digital way of doing things.
What is the difference between traditional marketing and agile marketing?
Traditional marketing usually takes several months to years of rigorous planning before campaign execution. Agile marketing significantly reduces the time it takes to plan and execute campaigns to 2-4 weeks at maximum.
However, it is important to mention that being agile is not all about speed. It would be best if you didn’t get the impression that Agile focuses on delivering quantity over quality. While it’s evident that Agile marketing helps organizations produce output more frequently than traditional marketing, marketing teams still benefit from the continuous feedback tied to adopting an agile approach.
Agile marketing steers teams to continuously improve over time instead of getting everything right before campaign execution.
Agile marketing is customer-centric
Agile focuses on delivering value, usually in a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), over a series of sprints or iterations. Stakeholders or customers provide feedback at the end of every sprint, allowing teams to improve the MVP and release more features more sustainably rather than working on perfecting a product and launching it after a year, only to find out that a thing or two are not working as expected, or worst, your customers have moved on to another vendor or service provider.
In Agile marketing, this could mean analyzing the performance metrics and insights of a particular campaign executed by the end of the sprint. From blog posts to social media campaigns, marketing teams can quickly evaluate what worked and what can be improved, putting your audience or customers at the forefront of what you’re doing.
Agile marketing is digital
Implementing agile marketing requires you to be digitally equipped with digital tools to collaborate with your team and your audience or customers. Without using the right tools, you’ll most probably end up rummaging for files from different sources or looking up e-mails and reading through conversation threads just to find the evidence that you need to present by the end of the sprint.
Think of agile marketing as project management, where you oversee the completion of deliverables end-to-end. You can use project management tools with Kanban board features to easily see what you or your team are working on at a glance. For marketing teams working closely with product development teams, I suggest using the same project management tools they’re using, such as JIRA and Azure DevOps.
Agile marketing is a mindset
At its core, Agile Marketing is a mindset that empowers marketers to remain adaptable, deliver value more efficiently, and consistently put the customer at the center of every marketing effort. It’s about staying flexible, working together, and adapting quickly to changes so teams can create meaningful, customer-focused results.