Agile Marketing — Tips

Agile Strategy is used for Sales and Marketing quite successfully

Many Organizations have adopted Agile Practices in their day to day work. Marketing is always customer-centric trying to map end-users emotions and preferences. The marketing team needs to keep a watch on market trends, changes, and exploit it as an opportunity.

1. Align with the Organization Objectives: The Marketing campaigns need to be aligned with Short term objectives with Long term Goals.
2. Work as an Organization: — separate or in collaboration based on the value we need to create.
3. Agile Architecture: coupling and decoupling components and processes of marketing to have better control in case of any changes are required.
4. Agile Team: Agile Teams and mindset need to be cultivated across organizations. It’s never the responsibility of either the Business team or Technical/Engineering team. It involves all teams and acts as important stakeholders to impact the outcome, progress, and activities. Leaders need to ensure they bring everyone on the platform and make the Goals, Objectives clear to all. All departments like Engineering, Production, Support, Legal, HR, Sales. Each team can have 5–11 members and they together make a bigger team. This is Team and agile teams.
5. Built-in Quality: — each team member does his work with Quality. Output works as an input to other team members, with built-in Quality the further work can be done. There is no scope of low quality work in Agile execution. In the case of low quality, reskilling and training need to be implemented. Many times business processes or systems need to be modified or re-engineered to ensure built-in quality. We can include necessary and minimal workflows in the process. Where-ever possible we can use automation to avoid human errors.
6. Agile Market Testing: Combination of quick and fast testing with strategic & research-based testing. Understand the need for business, impact on cost and efforts, and decide the Market Testing model.
7. Keep Looking for Spikes — in the overall process, look for the opportunity or campaigns which can bring in Spikes from time to time. It could be opportunity generated by a change in environment (e.g. COVID19 gave spike to various Healthcare related Industries) or it could be events or occasions like Diwali, Christmas, Black-Friday, New year etc.
8. Collective Ownership: The ownership to respond to change is not of only Business or Leadership, its collective ownership of all teams — Engineering, Business, Support & Leadership. So while building Marketing Strategy, everyone has to contribute to ensuring its relevance to time and market change.
9. Peer Review: Cross-functional teams plays a big role in building lean and agile teams. Each comes with their expertise in the functional domain. Peer review helps in getting to know issues and challenges early before going into the market. Each feedback can be utilized constructively for improving the quality of your strategy and plan.
10. Organization as a team of Agile Teams: the objective or goal acts as a destination to all members whether they are part of the same team of different teams. Each member has tasks and activities to be performed as part of the overall objective. Each member work in the same direction to achieve the target. Many times they work individually or as part of a team but ensure to have built-in quality so that there is minimal waste of time and effort.

This article is originally published on http://www.smmentors.com/blog/agile-marketing-tips/