Agile marketing: Does it make sense?
I did not have a clear answer when this story started to the question "makes sense or not", but I was intrigued by the idea.
It seems like only yesterday when I joined the Agile community to provide marketing support. To be honest, I was mostly interested in interacting with friendly people who seemed wise and knowledgeable.
As time progressed, we interacted and I observed how Agile have transformed how software is developed, which inspired me to think about how Agile can be applied to my day-to-day duties in marketing. With that and my customer advocacy, I jumped right in.
When I study Agile, I find that it is a fairly simplified and easy-to-understand approach. Let us look at one of the advantages of strategic agile planning: it fosters an atmosphere of ownership and accountability rooted in trust throughout the organisation.
Our approach to planning can be transformed from hierarchical and siloed to collaborative and cross-functional planning focused on customer needs.
Marketers who are agile tend to adapt as circumstances or information change, but many are reluctant to do so because it makes them appear indecisive or lacking in vision.
As tricky as this may be, I agree that to prevent that misconception from occurring, we should work to define success measures as early as possible, and encourage a culture that welcomes failure and thrives on it.
On the other hand, in practice, we see in many organisations that traditional marketing plans take quite a while to take off. On top of that, results can be biased and time-consuming, which can lead to a lengthy launch process.
To fully understand what being agile in marketing means, it is necessary to first understand the agile mindset. It allows marketing teams to focus upon identifying, prioritising and delivering the most value to our customers. Over time, it will be possible to see how that impacts the company as a whole, thus encouraging smarter decisions.
Adopting a new approach to strategic planning, however, requires organisation-wide buy-in, after all, one person cannot build an empire alone, can she or he?
So, I must ask: How do you obtain this approval? For simplifying the concept, three words come to mind: alignment, collaboration, and customer-centricity. Using agile planning will ensure that marketing and business outcomes are aligned.
And this is achievable because agile planning promotes continuous evaluation, feedback, and adaptation, which makes it easier to respond to changing business needs as they arise. With this approach, we can safely estimate that marketing plans won't be misaligned with business needs if market changes happened after their approval.
It sounds great, but, but, how do we know we are on the right track here? This is what I refer to as the "shortening reality-expectations gap".
Let me give you two words: clear and precise. A strong sense of reality requires keeping track of and reviewing feedback mechanisms at regular intervals, and I believe this will only occur when there is psychological safety and honest communication among people.
In doing so, I like being able to avoid being distracted by data points that relate to deliverables but not outcomes! However, we need to be aware that relying on people's opinions and outdated conventions is a costly and inefficient way to produce content that doesn't hit the mark. The content assets of your brand extend far beyond what you create such as a blog or video. They are all the things that reflect your brand equity.
Roadblocks must be identified and strategies devised to overcome them, but there will always be a silver lining if your roadblocks can be turned into actions that assist you in reaching your goals. Slowly but surely, success builds — if that doesn't yield stability and certainty, then I don't know what does.
While I continue with my findings, I still have a question: how do I define my priorities in order to stay focused? Easy! The best data available at the time defines "minimum" priorities, even though more data is continually collected and fed into subsequent iterations.
Through customer-centric thinking, you prioritise what's most valuable to them. With an Agile mindset, you establish a marketing backlog that clearly indicates priority, enabling your team to share an understanding and collaborate effectively.
To get things done in the here and now, one must decide what must be done right away, then lay out or map out or set up a concurrent course for the remaining tasks. Rather than being a hero, the concept of viability in planning outlines the fact that there is no need to do everything all at once.
By contrast, the viability concept focuses teams on the short-term execution of strategic initiatives, allowing them to gain feedback and refine their actions as they go. In the context of sprint planning, you break long, complex tasks into smaller, more manageable tasks, thereby allowing you to test ideas early and adjust them as necessary.
Unless we adapt our plans to meet the needs of our customers when a change exists, be it in the buyer, market, or international context, we risk underserving them. When done correctly, agile marketing is a big deal. Don't let fear of failure hold you back from learning, sharing, and applying what you learn!
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