What is Agile Marketing?

With the fast-moving world today, marketing and business have seen their peak of competition. And whichever company has its hold over the best technology is the one that would succeed in the market. Companies that can execute and adapt to the current trends with precision are the ones that would enjoy the benefits of being the best and earning high profits. Whereas those that still follow the old-school marketing techniques risk becoming irrelevant to the customers' current needs. The answer to keeping up with the present technologies is Agile Marketing, which helps organizations to plan, execute, and measure projects with faster iterations and closely analyze decision-making. Agile Marketing helps work faster, better, and cost-effectively, which is bound to produce effective results in increasing the organisation's business value. But the real question is what exactly is Agile Marketing? What are the Agile marketing processes and steps must every business follow to grow in the market efficiently?

What is Agile Marketing?

Agile marketing is an approach in marketing where companies recognize high-value projects and try to maximize their efforts in building those projects. Sprints, which are short periods of work, are used to complete these high-valued projects. After every Sprint is completed, the marketing team measures the value of the project and later adds increments to enhance its value gradually. If a project is not valuable, the team discards the project and notes down to not repeat them in the future. This is still considered a success as Agile believes that failure is a part of project development, as it teaches the lessons that could be applied in potentially highly valuable future projects. 

Agile Marketing could be thought of as a project management framework that follows the principles used in Agile software development. These principles enable the team to predict the dates within the budget consistently. Marketing teams use the tactics of streamlining the structure, process, workflows, and communication of the team such that productivity and efficiency are maximized with the quality of the project being compromised. This framework helps marketing teams to perform tasks rapidly and helps them be punctual and miss fewer deadlines. Teams can easily respond to changes and work way more successfully. 

History of Agile Marketing

In the mid-1900s, the Toyota Production system discovered a method of producing cars that concentrated on removing waste. Modem Agile processes also adopted the same basic principles from this company. They designed a project management framework that removed all the unnecessary steps incurred during production pipelines which visualize workflows from beginning to end. A similar technique is also used in a Kanban board, which visualizes the workflow going from left to right. This idea was the groundwork for the software development framework in the 1990s, which grew further in the 2001s. In the later years, a group of developers designed the Agile manifesto which summarised the methods of working that suited the needs of the technology industry. 

Steps in Agile Marketing

Agile Marketing involves using Agile Methodology while marketing the products to the customers. It is a step-by-step process that consists of constant iterations where the assumptions from the developers are tested in short periods called Sprints. Here are six steps of using Agile Marketing that would boost up the identity and brand of your product. 

1. Select the best Indicator

The best metrics show that you are heading in the right direction and that your progress is achieving the desired results. Here are three ways you can improve your metrics.

The marketing team should implement an analytical system to help the team collect and analyze data. 

If you have a particular step that would make your product unique, you should focus on that feature and add an element to this process. This means that you should add a particular metric only to measure it. 

Activation could be one of the most difficult metric measures as it all depends on when the team finds that specific element that led it to succeed. To find out what your activation for your product is, you have to understand the patterns which made your visitors come back to your service or product. 

2. Speed and Goals should be defined

Any project is driven forward with a particular goal in mind. If you do not have a specific direction to move forward, your project is certain to fail. Also, if you have a lot of things to achieve in a short period, it would lead to the failure of the project. You should have a maximum of two goals that you can focus on at a time and use the metrics to measure the progress of the goal. Once you have fixed your quarterly goal, you should plan your Sprints where you conduct certain experiments and tasks that would make you achieve your Sprint Goal. 

3. Create a Growth Backlog

The next step is to create a backlog of all the hypotheses you and your team want to test. Use the data from the metrics to analyze the best hypotheses and add them to the growing backlog. 

4. Use Impact, Confident, and Easiness (ICE) Framework

The ICE Score framework is a method of assessing the hypotheses of the team members before the team starts to build and test it and start investing its effort. These are the three questions that your team should answer such that the hypotheses qualifies for building and testing:

If this hypothesis works, what may be its impact on the product on a scale of 1 to 5?

How confident are you that this hypothesis may work on a scale of 1 to 5?

On a scale of 1 to 5, how much easier is it to implement and build this product where 1 being the hardest and 5 being the easiest?

Impact, Confidence, and Easiness (ICE) measurements should be calculated and all the hypotheses should be arranged from the highest ICE scores to the lowest. 

5. Test and Analyze

Testing is a crucial step in Agile marketing as it collects the data from several sources and puts them on a single board to which everyone has access. This helps the entire team to find out new solutions of which here are some tools effective for testing and analysis:

• Analytics- Amplitude, Google Analytics
• A/B testing- Google website optimizer
• Real user testing- CrazyEgg, User testing
• Visualization, discussion, test planning- Miro
• Visual Monitoring- Inspectlet

6. Cycle Repetition

A retrospective at the end of the Sprint would be the best way to end the Sprint as it would answer questions such as what did not work for the team and what actions the team could implement to keep the process going further. 

Points to Know Before Implementing Agile in Your Business

The above steps are one way to implement Agile in your business. However, you have to know certain points so that Agile marketing proves to be successful. Your team should practice the following values so that it becomes productive and the marketing project becomes efficient. 

1. Knowing the fundamentals of Agile

The fundamentals of Agile should be the first thing that the entire team has to understand very clearly. You can discuss what your team will achieve from Agile marketing and make sure what everyone is getting into. Adopting Agile may seem challenging as there is a new way of working that requires hard work, team collaboration, and much more focus and attention than traditional software methods. 

2. Collaborating in Sprints

Divide the project work into multiple Sprints and keep the Sprint length as 1 week for Agile marketing. Sprints make your team more effective and help them work towards generating a better output. Educate everyone about how Sprints work and motivate everyone to give the best performance during the Sprint.

3. Track the progress of your project

You have to know where your project is heading towards as it gives a better picture of the project. This process is called visualization which can be done using different tools such as sticky notes and online kanban boards. This would help in making correct decisions for the next step for marketing your product or service.

4. Working together

Team Collaboration is the most important factor in a project's success. Team members should create synergy and communicate properly so that everyone knows what the other person is working on. Using the best communication tools and staying on the same page will make the team more productive. 

5. Scrum Meetings

Meetings are the best way to communicate any impediments or to plan the Sprint ahead. Organizing Scrum meetings on a periodic basis where team members can express their ideas and give innovative ways to proceed. This could exponentially speed up the project development process. 

Why should you use Agile Marketing?

Agile Marketing has many benefits that all businesses should be aware of. Here are few advantages that would make you use Agile marketing in your business:

1. Internal communication becomes effective

The communication within the marketing team becomes transparent which makes it easier for the entire team to be on the same page. This way the entire team can resolve any impediment that comes their way and move on to building the project. 

2. Productivity is maximized

Here productivity is the number of user stories, projects completed, and points scored. The points are the value points assigned by the team members for a particular difficulty level of a task. Bounce rate, sales, trials, return visitors, visitors to the site, etc are also indicators that help to measure productivity. Agile marketing aims to increase all these metrics, thus, enhancing productivity. 

3. Competition is imbibed

As competition increases, businesses develop customer-centric products and enhance customer satisfaction. Faster time-to-market and better ROI are results of competitiveness among businesses, which contributes to exponential business growth.

4. Agile Marketing is cost-effective

The company's marketing costs are significantly reduced, and the effects of Agile marketing are aimed at the long term. Hence, companies reach a bigger audience and generate more customers without investing heavily in marketing. 

5. Employee Satisfaction

Many Agile marketers find the work management approach very satisfying, which has led to better productivity. This happens because Agile marketers have the freedom to prioritize their tasks and increase the rate of project delivery. Improved communication and coordination also play an important role in employee satisfaction. 

6. Results can be measured easily

Accountability and measurement of results are crucial in Agile marketing. Marketers measure results and execute tests to devise better strategies that enhance the product. This helps them avoid spending time on strategies that may not work. Also, these data can help marketers communicate with management and communicate their contribution to the organization. 

Conclusion

Agile Marketing is the use of Agile methodology in marketing which is a powerful tool for every company to progress in the market. Agile Marketing helps organizations grow in their business and shows improvements and steps they must follow to gain more business value. Rather than companies making random moves in marketing their services and products, Agile marketing helps the company break down the process of marketing into specific steps which would save much of their finances and also show great results. These steps of Agile Marketing are just an example of how you can implement Agile in marketing. You can use your metrics to devise your steps to achieve your goals and help your company succeed. Simpliaxis offers a range of Agile courses designed to equip professionals with the knowledge and skills needed to implement Agile methodologies in various domains. Agile Marketing, a key focus of these courses, utilizes Agile principles to create structured, efficient marketing strategies.