Agile Marketing: agile management for your strategy
Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2024 8:50 am
More than focusing on a few buzzwords, Agile marketing should be about increasing the connection with customers and prospects, generating more value at a faster pace in alignment with the Brand's strategy.
Agile has become a normal part of corporate discourse. A number of companies, from large corporations to startups, have adopted it as a tool and framework to deal with uncertainty, changing consumer needs, and to defend themselves against competition.
Far from being a fad, Agile is a very effective method to improve and increase the production of teams, keep them more focused on the customer and break down silos to generate more value . Above all, Agile is a set of agile methodologies, organized by software developers, to change the way software is created.
The agile manifesto says that:
“ We are discovering better ways of developing software by doing it, and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Working software on comprehensive documentation.
Client collaboration on contract negotiation.
Responding to change rather than following a plan.
In other words, even though there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. ”
Source: Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Large and small companies use Agile, without distinction, everyone can use it. At Math Marketing , for example, we have adopted it since birth. As a subsidiary of an IT company, Agile is part of our DNA. In other words, adopting a more agile way of managing your marketing teams is essential.
Agile Marketing Strategy
Agile Marketing, Growth Ranking and Marketing Performance
The challenge of Agile marketing is to adapt a software development framework to a new context. Marketing is not the same as software. Different skills, goals and profiles make adaptation difficult, and blindly following the method without taking into account the differences will only create entropy.
Topics like Growth Ranking and Marketing Performance Growth Hacking , while inspired by Agile methodology, do not provide a comprehensive framework for large-scale marketing planning and execution. Unfortunately, these concepts are sometimes used interchangeably, almost as synonyms, even though they are not, which adds to the confusion.
Agile Marketing – It’s all about marketing
According to the American Marketing Association :
“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, partners and society at large.”
Therefore, Agile Marketing, as it is also known in Brazil, is a new method for delivering this code number of philippines exchange. It should, above all, focus on the relationship between the company and its customers. Trying new ways to facilitate the exchange between the parties. An analysis by McKinsey shows that moving towards Agile marketing can generate 5-15% more growth, while reducing 10-30% of costs.
What is Marketing Performance?
The Interactive Advertising Bureau defines Marketing Performance as:
“The intent of the campaign is to drive consumer action rather than raise awareness.
The cause and effect between the ad and consumer action can be clearly measured.
The buyer can optimize their purchase in real or near real time based on the measurement.
In many cases, payment is made based on consumer action (this is not necessary if the other three criteria are met)”
Growth ranking has a more fluid definition, but the original definition, by Sean Ellis :
“A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is examined for its potential impact on scalable growth. Does positioning matter? Only if it can be argued that it matters to drive sustainable growth.”
Agile Marketing should focus on:
Integrated and multidisciplinary teams:
This one is pretty straight out of the agile playbook. An agile team needs to have all the essential capabilities needed to create, launch, and measure communications.
If you are an e-commerce company, Creative, Analytics, CRM , Media Planning, SEO and CRO should be on your team. Maybe Pricing, if you plan to run multiple promotions, discounts or change your average ticket. If you are a B2B company, maybe Events and PR (Public Relations) should be part of your team.
The point is, teams must be able to fully develop all stages of a campaign in order to achieve the expected results.
Data-driven decisions :
Historically, much of marketing and communications has been about gut feelings, “creative genius” and conjecture. We are not advocating against intuition, in fact, the opposite; we believe that marketing intuition should be followed by data.
Marketing analysis should be the basis of an Agile marketing team , and analysis should be the framework for increasing its impact on business. Data can and should be the basis of this strategy. Use big data to your advantage!
Autonomy to decide, approve and launch :
To be agile, teams must have a high level of autonomy over the campaigns they create.
Lengthy approval processes and corporate bureaucracy can increasingly kill performance. This means that departments like legal must be involved in the process and sometimes even be a member of the team. The brand image should act as a strategic framework to help direct the decision-making process and provide guidelines within which teams can operate.
Customer Discovery and Testing:
Everything an Agile marketing team does should be based on testing. With today’s digital tools, it’s easy to test and improve at every point in the journey. But not only there, testing sales pitches, contact center scripts or the famous a/b testing. The important caveat is that the goal of testing is not just to improve performance .
Testing should improve your understanding of your customers and their needs in order to refine segmentation around more specific characteristics and enable even more personalized communications.
Supported by long-term planning:
Planning is not the enemy of Agile. This is where we diverge from the norm. An Agile marketing team needs to be connected to a company’s strategy. Teams shouldn’t be able to follow data wherever it goes, tailoring their messaging and advertising solely based on customer feedback.
The overall company strategy should be the guiding principle. Additionally, when building sprint backlogs, teams should take a mid- to long-term view of major milestones ahead (typically a 90-day overall backlog plan) in order to plan larger, integrated campaigns and incorporate disciplines like TV, events, and commerce that take longer to develop.
Adapting beyond just following the plan:
That said, planning is a compass, not a train track. Teams must be able to adapt the plan to events on the ground, whether to respond to new input or to address new opportunities.
Structured around customers, not products or goals:
This is another controversial topic. Many Agile marketing teams are organized around products/services. We believe it is much better to organize teams around customer groups or segments . If the idea is to do customer discovery, organizing around customer segments can better organize the impacts.
The Benefits of Agile Marketing
Agile Marketing is a new way of organizing your marketing workflow. The idea is to break free from the annual marketing plan and company silos to respond more quickly to market demands and opportunities, in order to reduce costs and improve performance.
As a framework, it is not to be applied without a conscious understanding of the specifics of each company and market. It takes discipline, leadership and commitment to make it work.
It takes practice and it gets better over time. However, blindly applying the method without critical thinking is the key to failure . More than focusing on some buzzwords and concepts, adopting Agile marketing should be about increasing the connection with customers and prospects, generating more value at a faster pace in alignment with the Brand's strategy.
Agile has become a normal part of corporate discourse. A number of companies, from large corporations to startups, have adopted it as a tool and framework to deal with uncertainty, changing consumer needs, and to defend themselves against competition.
Far from being a fad, Agile is a very effective method to improve and increase the production of teams, keep them more focused on the customer and break down silos to generate more value . Above all, Agile is a set of agile methodologies, organized by software developers, to change the way software is created.
The agile manifesto says that:
“ We are discovering better ways of developing software by doing it, and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Working software on comprehensive documentation.
Client collaboration on contract negotiation.
Responding to change rather than following a plan.
In other words, even though there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. ”
Source: Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Large and small companies use Agile, without distinction, everyone can use it. At Math Marketing , for example, we have adopted it since birth. As a subsidiary of an IT company, Agile is part of our DNA. In other words, adopting a more agile way of managing your marketing teams is essential.
Agile Marketing Strategy
Agile Marketing, Growth Ranking and Marketing Performance
The challenge of Agile marketing is to adapt a software development framework to a new context. Marketing is not the same as software. Different skills, goals and profiles make adaptation difficult, and blindly following the method without taking into account the differences will only create entropy.
Topics like Growth Ranking and Marketing Performance Growth Hacking , while inspired by Agile methodology, do not provide a comprehensive framework for large-scale marketing planning and execution. Unfortunately, these concepts are sometimes used interchangeably, almost as synonyms, even though they are not, which adds to the confusion.
Agile Marketing – It’s all about marketing
According to the American Marketing Association :
“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, partners and society at large.”
Therefore, Agile Marketing, as it is also known in Brazil, is a new method for delivering this code number of philippines exchange. It should, above all, focus on the relationship between the company and its customers. Trying new ways to facilitate the exchange between the parties. An analysis by McKinsey shows that moving towards Agile marketing can generate 5-15% more growth, while reducing 10-30% of costs.
What is Marketing Performance?
The Interactive Advertising Bureau defines Marketing Performance as:
“The intent of the campaign is to drive consumer action rather than raise awareness.
The cause and effect between the ad and consumer action can be clearly measured.
The buyer can optimize their purchase in real or near real time based on the measurement.
In many cases, payment is made based on consumer action (this is not necessary if the other three criteria are met)”
Growth ranking has a more fluid definition, but the original definition, by Sean Ellis :
“A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is examined for its potential impact on scalable growth. Does positioning matter? Only if it can be argued that it matters to drive sustainable growth.”
Agile Marketing should focus on:
Integrated and multidisciplinary teams:
This one is pretty straight out of the agile playbook. An agile team needs to have all the essential capabilities needed to create, launch, and measure communications.
If you are an e-commerce company, Creative, Analytics, CRM , Media Planning, SEO and CRO should be on your team. Maybe Pricing, if you plan to run multiple promotions, discounts or change your average ticket. If you are a B2B company, maybe Events and PR (Public Relations) should be part of your team.
The point is, teams must be able to fully develop all stages of a campaign in order to achieve the expected results.
Data-driven decisions :
Historically, much of marketing and communications has been about gut feelings, “creative genius” and conjecture. We are not advocating against intuition, in fact, the opposite; we believe that marketing intuition should be followed by data.
Marketing analysis should be the basis of an Agile marketing team , and analysis should be the framework for increasing its impact on business. Data can and should be the basis of this strategy. Use big data to your advantage!
Autonomy to decide, approve and launch :
To be agile, teams must have a high level of autonomy over the campaigns they create.
Lengthy approval processes and corporate bureaucracy can increasingly kill performance. This means that departments like legal must be involved in the process and sometimes even be a member of the team. The brand image should act as a strategic framework to help direct the decision-making process and provide guidelines within which teams can operate.
Customer Discovery and Testing:
Everything an Agile marketing team does should be based on testing. With today’s digital tools, it’s easy to test and improve at every point in the journey. But not only there, testing sales pitches, contact center scripts or the famous a/b testing. The important caveat is that the goal of testing is not just to improve performance .
Testing should improve your understanding of your customers and their needs in order to refine segmentation around more specific characteristics and enable even more personalized communications.
Supported by long-term planning:
Planning is not the enemy of Agile. This is where we diverge from the norm. An Agile marketing team needs to be connected to a company’s strategy. Teams shouldn’t be able to follow data wherever it goes, tailoring their messaging and advertising solely based on customer feedback.
The overall company strategy should be the guiding principle. Additionally, when building sprint backlogs, teams should take a mid- to long-term view of major milestones ahead (typically a 90-day overall backlog plan) in order to plan larger, integrated campaigns and incorporate disciplines like TV, events, and commerce that take longer to develop.
Adapting beyond just following the plan:
That said, planning is a compass, not a train track. Teams must be able to adapt the plan to events on the ground, whether to respond to new input or to address new opportunities.
Structured around customers, not products or goals:
This is another controversial topic. Many Agile marketing teams are organized around products/services. We believe it is much better to organize teams around customer groups or segments . If the idea is to do customer discovery, organizing around customer segments can better organize the impacts.
The Benefits of Agile Marketing
Agile Marketing is a new way of organizing your marketing workflow. The idea is to break free from the annual marketing plan and company silos to respond more quickly to market demands and opportunities, in order to reduce costs and improve performance.
As a framework, it is not to be applied without a conscious understanding of the specifics of each company and market. It takes discipline, leadership and commitment to make it work.
It takes practice and it gets better over time. However, blindly applying the method without critical thinking is the key to failure . More than focusing on some buzzwords and concepts, adopting Agile marketing should be about increasing the connection with customers and prospects, generating more value at a faster pace in alignment with the Brand's strategy.