The term ‘agile’ can sound intimidating to many, especially when considering a marketing strategy. Though we all want to speed up our processes and various operations, we often end up getting stuck somewhere. Achieving agility requires proper planning, defining details, clearly stating goals, prioritizing tasks and much more.
Are you feeling overwhelmed?
With the market constantly evolving and changing, marketing can be tough for brands and attaining an agile marketing strategy may seem like a daunting task.
The main factor differentiating a truly agile marketing strategy from a traditional marketing approach is the focus on business outcomes. Rather than just dealing with the monotonous marketing achievements and deliverables, agile marketing concentrates on the bigger picture and keeps customers at its center. Agile marketing is driven by testing ideas, comparing marketing data analytics, and continual refinement.
Here’s how you can form your agile marketing team and strategy:
Getting Leadership On Board
As most marketing professionals can attest, getting approval on concepts can often add a significant amount of time to the entire process. In order to move fast, try new things, and course correct as you go, you need a retooled approval process that is designed to react quickly. One of the most important things you can do to establish this process is getting leadership on board early especially if you're considering using any digital solutions or business process outsourcing.
With approval from key stakeholders, your team will have an easier time trying new, outside-the-box ideas, and reacting fast to developing trends and situations. Try out some unique strategies or tactics to prove to leadership that your team has the expertise and creativity to be given more leeway to try new things.
Selecting the Right People
Approvals may be the most frustrating time-consuming process, but streamlining the initial development of materials is just as important to creating an agile marketing strategy. In order to move fast and react quickly, you need a small, dedicated team where individuals can be responsible for specific tasks while also collaborating and offering fresh ideas. An agile team must be flexible, creative, and reliable in order to move quickly.
Clearly Defining Marketing Goals
While you may think of an agile marketing strategy as being fluid and adaptable, it’s still important to have clear and firm goals in place to keep the strategy grounded. Setting clear goals that are measurable, trackable, and achievable helps everyone stay on track, while still leaving room for the flexibility and creativity that an agile marketing strategy can bring. Using marketing data analytics, you can better define your initiatives and work them into your strategy. By defining the key, overarching goals for the quarter, any creative discussion can always be brought back to whether it serves the larger end goals.
Providing marketing data analytics while discussing your goals is also helpful in getting leadership on board with your agile marketing strategy. Ground any decisions firmly in achieving the goals you’ve set with your team and with leadership.
Frequent Check-Ins
Once you have your goals and team in place, you should call for daily catch ups with your team. These can be quick meetings to keep everyone on the same page. Set up the tasks for everyone, so all the efforts can be in sync. This also eliminates the need to have multiple time-consuming meetings throughout the day.
In addition, it helps to set up regular meetings with key stakeholders in leadership to inform them of your team’s strategies and successes. These meetings can be less frequent, but are a great way to assure leaders that you’re staying on track.
Testing and Marketing Data Analytics
For an agile strategy to work, you need to arrange regular idea testing and summarizing the results to make constant improvements. For example, you can test out the subject line for an upcoming product launch and finalize on what will work best with your customers.
The team must work on an effective tracking mechanism to capture results. The details must be captured accurately as it helps understand the flaws, areas of improvement, patterns, and other preferences. The factors/ideas that are not working can be quickly discarded.
Developing and maintaining an agile marketing strategy is no small task. Even with all the proper pieces in place, it requires a high degree of attention, time, and resources. That’s why many businesses opt to partner with an experienced marketing business. This option is quicker to implement, less costly, and gives you the immediate benefit of working with proven experts. Outsourcing marketing can help you reduce overall marketing spend while improving your brand positioning.
Exela's Marketing Execution Services (XME) have helped numerous businesses achieve their brand potential. Our years of experience, powerful marketing data analytics tools combined with domain expertise, can translate insights into actionable strategies - delivering the best results for you.
