Each new campaign brings about significant advancements in technology, engagement strategies, and consumer preferences. To stay competitive, businesses require responsiveness and nimbleness to communicate, collaborate, adapt, and adjust rapidly to change customer and industry expectations. While we often frame agility in terms of software, agile development is critical for your digital marketing strategies to ensure a successful future.
Agile marketing is a technique for planning, managing, and assessing market activities based on the concepts’ agile work methodology. Nowadays, most business folks accept the value of ‘agile’. Check out this resource on what is to learn more about the fundamentals.
Meanwhile, here’s a guide to how successful businesses develop the people, procedures, and marketing techniques necessary to scale agile marketing.
Applying agile development to marketing
1. Build your team
Assemble a group of talented employees capable of completing specific tasks quickly and cooperatively. Before you begin implementing this technique in your digital marketing department, ensure that everyone is on board. Ascertain that all team members are aware of the overarching goals and objectives needed for business success.
To execute agile methodology effectively, the team must have a firm grasp on the goals they wish to accomplish, such as the precise customer journey they want to improve or the target market they want to reach. From the start, establish clear expectations and identify key metrics you’ll use to assess performance toward your goals. Prepare your team members emotionally and mentally for the months of teamwork and hard work ahead.
Additionally, it’s critical to ensure that management supports the transition to agile digital marketing techniques by gaining buy-in from team members. Before you can begin, your team must agree on the necessary marketing tools, site analytics, and general IT infrastructure you need to reach your goals. With buy-in, the team works more effectively and cohesively.
2. Establish a platform for agile development
After your marketing team decides on their new agile team structure, you can begin deploying the platform and processes that will power agile development of your marketing function.
Almost always, teams use a project management platform in conjunction with agile marketing. Project management lays the groundwork for delegating duties to team members, tracking progress toward goals, and collaborating on projects. The platform should enable all three phases of agile marketing: development, measurement, and learning.
Additionally, most agile digital marketing teams leverage technology to assist with the agile cycle’s data-intensive measurement and learning stages. Media monitoring tools, that help identify real-time public relations possibilities, and SEO tools, that track website search performance, are two often used examples. Due to the agile methodology’s flexibility, each digital marketing team should select a customized tool mix to its specific plan.
3. Start the first sprint
A sprint is when team members are free to operate independently of their managers and are fully accountable for their performance. It’s the stage at which each team member is allowed creative freedom to develop their perfect process.
When you first begin your sprints, it’s a good idea to use a board that shows your workflow, such as the one below. Among other things, create columns for your backlog, to-do list, busy work, rejected items, and completed items. Notify your colleagues and provide any pertinent comments or remarks as you move through each step of the sprint.
While some teams prefer to communicate through a whiteboard, productivity tools make information regarding sprints much more accessible. Team members can work remotely and upload critical information while passing sprints to other team members using online productivity tools.
4. Confirm the findings of the data
It’s long past time to abandon the traditional waterfall approach of marketing development, which is a time-consuming, sequential process. Because the test results for this strategy are out of date by the time you receive them, it’s hard to stay agile.
Fortunately, large-scale trials are not necessary to demonstrate the effectiveness of every digital marketing strategy or tactic. Rather than doing that, recruit a diverse data analysis and reaction team to conduct small experiments every few weeks in response to data discoveries. Before scaling an idea, these analytics verify its validity.
5. Maintain a record of what works and what doesn’t
After each sprint, the team leader must review the outcomes and establish new targets and goals. Rapid and precise analysis distinguishes creativity from chaos, which is why tracking is critical.
The more extensive the tracking methods used by your team, the sooner and more precisely the team leader determines which strategies are effective and which the team should abandon, the better. Whether or not a test is successful adds to the pool of data, influencing the team’s next set of objectives and possibilities.
6. Conduct a post-sprint review and observation
In agile development, the sprint review and retrospective are two special meetings. The sprint review brings together the same individuals who meticulously designed the sprints to determine their success, identifying which sprint objectives the team achieved and which they didn’t. These are only a few of the concerns addressed during the sprint review.
On the other side, sprint planners and team members responsible for the sprints should attend a sprint retrospective. Rather than debating specific sprints, the teams scrutinize the entire process to see what worked and identify needed improvements.
To ensure a more consistent approach and workflow, the outcomes of both meetings are incorporated subsequently incorporated into the subsequent sprint planning session.
7. Know the right time to scale
If you scale too quickly, multiple teams must learn the same lessons at the same time, complicating your agile transition far more than necessary. When you’re ready to expand your pilot agile marketing project to further teams and projects, you’ll notice several things:
Never forget to communicate the team’s output, results, and technique to the rest of your organization’s digital marketing department.
On your first project, you’re less likely to encounter resistance from nervous employees; avoiding issues that arise when businesses compel employees who are less enthusiastic about change to adapt. Utilize your pilot team to train and coach other groups and to guarantee the availability of additional training and support during the rollout period.
8. Consider strategies to improve the efficiency of your work
You must abolish inefficient processes and hierarchies. Before assigning responsibilities to the team, determine which area significantly impacts market performance and help obtain desired performance to meet objectives. Following that, give and prioritize tasks.
The agile development methodology is a fantastic and powerful tool in the hands of a marketing leader because it enables you to build a growth process and see actual results. With the proper steps, you can achieve maximum growth rather than taking a random approach and spending money on things that may or may not work, never allowing you to maximize your potential growth.
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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.
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