Tech giants have come under increased pressure to clean up their platforms in recent months amid concerns about harmful material, fake news and misuse of data.

The 'Chartered Institute of Marketing' (CIM) urged businesses to “carefully consider” whether they should continue to advertise on social media, and as we know, given the option most people would choose to avoid intrusive ads.

Let's assume you have to answer the next 2 questions in order for you to stay in business, and you have to answer them today;

1) What are the 3 biggest initiative(s) you could undertake that would transform your growth in the next 2 years?

2) If you were an outsider without the legacy constraints you currently have, and were looking to 'disrupt' your business, where would you start?

With the tenure of the CMO becoming increasingly less, there is a greater urgency for companies to deliver the brand/marketing strategy whilst keeping abreast of key changes and drivers that can either inhibit, or boost a companies future performance, and from the traditional CMO role, that's an awful lot of plate spinning.

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?

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.  

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.  

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 businesses have typically seen an uplift of circa 30% incremental revenues.

I could go on about this subject for a long time but in simple terms, agile businesses think 'customer first' and product/service second.

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.

What we do know is that if brands were to stop thinking about 'advertising and reach' and thought about communities and engagement we might start to see a global adoption of the 'agile' logic that is 'social buying', it would allay an awful lot of those concerns, and actually get them to start using 'social media' as a way of authentically connecting with you and me.

Social is about being social, the buying journey has already changed in both the B2C and B2B space, innovative companies who are using social to check out potential vendors, and product/service providers are now adopting an un-gated 'content led' strategy.

And the more evolved ones are also taking the time to 'listen' to what, and how the potential customer is saying and they do this be leveraging the employee collective.