What is Agile Marketing?

There is no doubt about it, we live in a fast-paced world. Trying to get, and keep, the attention of potential customers and clients can seem like an uphill battle. What worked yesterday may seem like it’s not working today and what worked today may not work tomorrow. In some cases, you need to change your approach to continue to get the results you’re looking for, and you need to do this more quickly than a typical marketing plan cycle. One way to accomplish this is through the concept of agile marketing.

First, let’s define what agile marketing is. Agile marketing is an approach to marketing that uses a set of core principles that put flexibility, adaptability and continuous improvement at the forefront. It involves close collaboration to quickly make headway and implement methodical improvements based on real-time data and results. It allows for and welcomes continuous optimizations to marketing plans to constantly increase effectiveness. This all sounds great, but how does it work?

How Agile Marketing Works

The concept of agile marketing can be executed in many ways and can take on many forms. What works well for one company may not work the best for another. Many factors are involved including business type, structure, industry and climate as well as internal and company-specific staff, processes and administrative functions. To keep it simple, the basic concept of agile marketing revolves around consistent evaluation and continual optimization.

Basic Process for Agile Marketing

• Meet regularly with your marketing team and key staff members (biweekly, monthly or quarterly – whichever works best for your organization.)
• Analyze analytics and real-time data to evaluate marketing performance.
• Discuss new business developments that may impact marketing objectives, strategies and tactics.
• Use data analysis and insights to set short term focuses, or sprints, to work towards accomplishing long term goals.
• Execute the work outlined in the sprints.
• Repeat.

For example, in one of your marketing meetings you may zero in on your website performance. You decide a focus on SEO is needed and dedicate a sprint to improving SEO. During the SEO sprint, you uncover some critical issues with your website that will require the development and launch of a new site to fully address the issues. From there, you shift focus from SEO to building your new site. Once the site is complete, you refocus your next sprint back on SEO. Agile marketing can help you make the greatest possible impact with the resources you have available.

The process of agile marketing can also work well for the management and scheduling of larger projects like building websites. In the first sprint, the basics of a site can be built and launched. More advanced features can be developed and added in future sprints. After that, additional content can be developed and optimized and continuous improvements can be consistently made. This is a good model for the nature of website development and management because as you know, there are always improvements and optimizations that can be made.

Why Use Agile Marketing?

There are several benefits to agile marketing. First, it is a plan for your business that gives you the flexibility to change with new developments and practices. Agile marketing allows you to decide what is most important to you right now and gives you the flexibility to focus on that. The shorter time frames associated with agile marketing allow you to give frequent feedback, and be completely transparent about what is working and what needs to change. This concept can also be good for morale, as smaller blocks of work are frequently being “checked off the list.” You’ll be able to clearly see the progress you are making on an ongoing basis.

However, with agile marketing, the work is never really done, but it can help you better keep up with the ever-changing world of marketing, especially on the digital side. The principles of agile marketing match the needs of modern businesses. Do you think the concept of agile marketing could work for you?