If you’re a start-up business then 'agile marketing' is driven more out of urgency and necessity around the lack of finance and resources, however if you’re a large established business with embedded practices, procedures, and brand police sign offs, how on earth do you adopt 'agile marketing' and what exactly does that mean in today's digitally connected, tech savvy world?
It all sounds a bit, well, techy doesn't it?
Small, scrappy teams may have an easier time adopting Agile marketing methods. But, there are also natural limits to Agile’s progress in a startup environment.
Lack of resources, less simultaneous projects, and a natural ceiling to sharing knowledge in a tight-knit group means Agile can only go so far.
We hear the term 'agile' in everything to do with technical projects but it’s just a way of describing the ability for a process to take a different route to fit accommodate the changes in a project, including more people in the organisational opportunity, or in this case marketing's digital and fast moving agenda.
Most marketing people already understand the principle of a marketing calendar. As a tool a marketing calendar at it’s basic level allows you to map out key events in the coming weeks, months ahead and slot in aligned campaigns such as School Holidays, Valentines, Christmas etc.
But this is just the start of the planning process which is then layered with unique events associated with the sector your company is operating in, so if you sell racing bikes, you might be able to hijack a few of the perennial calendar events like Christmas, Valentines and Birthdays, but the events that are the most relevant are those that relate most to you, your product and service. By building out a robust marketing calendar you should then be able to place a sales forecast alongside each event, these can be driven by a combination of intel from previous campaigns, what went right/wrong, along with testing of new activities.
Where this starts to get challenging for more established companies is their ability to react in what has become a fast moving digital landscape, they still seem to operate in terms of months, not hours, and this is where the concept of introducing 'agile marketing' into your company can unleash the Superpower of 'employee advocacy', where we have typically seen an uplift of circa 30% incremental revenues.
In an enterprise, adopting Agile may be more difficult and resource-heavy. However, the benefits have the potential to be more widely felt. Enterprises have an opportunity to put greater resources behind their efforts and achieve greater impact, faster. In other words, if they support their Agile marketing efforts as powerfully as they’ve historically supported Big Bang campaigns the possibilities could be endless.
I could go on about this subject for a long time but in simple terms, agile businesses think 'customer first' and product/service second, and its this approach to agile marketing that sometimes allows your competitor to steal a march on your prospects and customers by making sure that they are front of mind, on topic, and on brand in an agile way.
Its about moving away from a 'fixed mindset' to an agile, and responsive one, and for many requires help and support to 'up skill' the incumbent teams.
For clarity, Social Selling is all about having an agile, internally aligned workforce, which is something we have a lot of proven experience in delivering.
If you would like to better understand more, please contact the author of this blog.
Customers of established enterprises are also likely to feel the benefits of Agile marketing faster than customers of startups. This is because customers of long-standing organizations already have a set of expectations regarding larger, more established companies. When they begin reacting more quickly to change, producing higher quality work, and delivering more often (some of the key benefits of Agile marketing), the change is immediately obvious to their customers.
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