You’ve already heard about “agile management” or “agile methodologies”. These terms are common in the industry and the area of software development, but they have become more and more frequent in the daily life of advertising and communication agencies. In these businesses, the idea is known as Agile Marketing.
Agile management emerged in the 80s due to successive market demands for innovation, productivity, flexibility, and improvement in the quality of software projects.
With the growth of organizations and the daily demand for results, new challenges have arisen in the field of project management in different business areas, including the reality of the agencies.
The market became more demanding, making it necessary to deliver more value to customers and respond quickly to business changes, reducing costs and increasing the efficiency of project teams.
In this article, you will learn what Agile Marketing is and how you can implement it in your company, with the best agile methodologies aligned with Marketing. And GitScrum offers you the best features to increase your Marketing productivity and get solid results from your clients!
What is Agile Marketing?
Bringing Agile to the Marketing scope, we can conceptualize Agile Marketing as an accelerated project management strategy with clear objectives.
In Agile Marketing, the project is divided into small tasks: teams identify each step of the process and focus their efforts on executing them with quality and objectivity until the process is completed.
At each delivery, the project impacts are evaluated and improvements are made and implemented in the next ones, eliminating failures.
Agile Marketing understands the use and analysis of data as a basis for problem-solving in real-time, performing tests, interpreting the results, doing and redoing as many times as needed, to always improve. With agile management, it is possible to carry out several projects or campaigns at the same time, especially a feature like GitScrum’s Boards, which helps you organize all your Marketing tasks in different campaigns, adopting new ideas whenever necessary.
With home office teams, Agile Marketing can make even more sense, as agile methodologies make it easier for people to get involved in each stage of the project, in addition to making the entire process visible, with specific goals and deadlines.
The Principles of Agile Marketing
Incorporating the agile mindset is the first step for those who want to adopt agile methodologies present in Agile Marketing.
Agile Marketing Principles
1. The highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of marketing that solves the problems.
2. Welcome and plan for changes. The ability to respond quickly to change is a source of competitive advantage.
3. Deliver marketing programs frequently, from a few weeks to a few months, with a preference for the shorter timescale.
4. Good marketing requires close alignment with business, sales, and development people.
5. Create marketing programs around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need and trust them to get the job done.
6. Learning, through the “build – measure – learn” feedback loop, is the main measure of progress.
7. Sustainable marketing requires you to maintain a steady pace and flow.
8. Don’t be afraid of failing, but it doesn’t fail the same way twice.
9. Continuous attention to marketing fundamentals and good design increase agility.
10. Simplicity is essential.
Agile Marketing Values
Let’s look into each of the 7 Agile Marketing values. They may sound simple, but they bring profound changes to the traditional way of marketing. Let’s go to them:
More acknowledgment than opinion
This methodology consists of a circular and constant process of validation of learning through the steps of implement-measure-learn.
So, instead of basing decisions on market conventions or on the opinions of those who have more power in the hierarchy, this methodology works with data, tests, and experiments.
More Consumer-centric collaboration than isolation actions
Agile Marketing envisions teams working collaboratively and focused on customer needs.
In this work model, knowledge is shared between the team and with other departments (sales, IT, etc.) and decision-making is joint, always keeping an eye on the customer’s demands.
In traditional marketing, on the other hand, two problems can occur the creation of silos, which isolate knowledge and generate a departmental war, and the strict adherence to hierarchies, which bureaucratize communication and decision-making. Agile marketing wants to make these structures more flexible.
Iterative campaigns rather than linear campaigns
Marketing tends to create advertising campaigns under the linear development model. The problem is that they take a big budget to stay on the market for a long time, without the prediction of adaptations and corrections.
Agile Marketing, then, proposes a non-linear, iterative approach that starts with a small strategy. Marketing must implement it, learn from its success or failure, adjust, re-launch, and keep learning to improve the strategy.
More Consumer Discovery Process Than Static Predictions
Market research supports customer knowledge in traditional marketing. However, consumers are unpredictable and can behave in ways that research does not indicate. Therefore, understanding the customer is hard and continuous work.
In Agile Marketing, consumer learning is a process of discovery. Throughout the creation of projects, it is necessary to monitor behaviors, measure responses to strategies and improve this knowledge. Once again, learning fulfills a non-linear process.
Flexible planning rather than rigid planning
Agile Marketing requires flexibility. If not, how will the company adapt to market changes and consumer responses to its strategies?
To explain this, the manifesto makes a comparison with a war: just as battle plans don’t survive contact with the enemy, marketing plans also don’t resist contact with the market—a reality of constant and accelerating change. And of GitScrum’s features that might help you see what you should do next in your Marketing plans is User Stories. You will see a difference when you have a set of activities once you know better your client, product, goals, etc.
More responses to changes than following a plan
You will realize that this value is equal to what the original agile manifesto brings. Responding to change is necessary for both software development and marketing. After all, we live in a dynamic market, with unpredictable behavior and purchase journeys.
It doesn’t matter if this change will change the entire plan—the important thing is to adapt to the market and gain a competitive advantage.
More small experiments than blind bets
Imagine that your company’s marketing takes months to plan a large campaign, involves several employees on the team, and dedicates a good part of the annual budget to it.
When launching the campaign, however, the public does not adhere to the approach. If you leave it to evaluate and adjust the campaign just a month from now, as planned in the planning, it may be too late.
Instead, agile marketing proposes that the team do small experiments over shorter periods. The intention is to prove your success or failure quickly, then make the adjustments and so improve the strategy successively to achieve the best results.
Why Adopt Agile Marketing?
It certainly isn’t an overnight change. Adopting Agile Marketing requires transformations in attitudes, mindsets, and forms of organization in your business. But you will certainly see the advantages of this process.
These are the main ones:
Increases productivity
Agile Marketing allows the team to achieve more results in less time. This is called productivity. According to The State of Agile Marketing report, increasing productivity is the number one reason to adopt agile marketing. And GitScrum has a powerful tool like Sprints, which will give you the right direction to your team to produce more in a certain time.
With agility in the processes, no more time is wasted with unproductive meetings or projects that do not aim at customer satisfaction. Total dedication to solutions that bring results for the business.
Brings efficiency
Efficiency is about doing things the best way. That’s what Agile Marketing brings to strategies: with small experiments and iterative campaigns, you can identify gaps and opportunities for improvement before winning the market. Thus, it is possible to achieve results without wasting resources.
Keeps the focus on the consumer
Traditional marketing often looks more at the brand and its products than at the market. However, we have increasingly more informed and demanding consumers, so it is necessary to meet their demands and deliver value to them.
Agile Marketing then maintains full consumer focus throughout the campaign creation process. The way they respond to the strategies is what drives future adjustments and investments, with a character of continuous improvement.
Increases team alignment
Agile teams meet constantly to review plans, share activities, run tests, and measure results. These are quick meetings, usually daily, to keep the team aligned with each other and with other areas of the company.
In this way, marketing gains transparency, internal communication improves and the project has better visibility among everyone.
Fosters innovation
Innovation requires agility. Innovative ideas, campaigns, and products do not appear in rigid and hierarchical structures, nor can they be stuck in bureaucratic approval and decision-making processes.
To innovate, you need collaboration, autonomy, a focus on the consumer, and rapid adaptation to the market — everything that Agile Marketing brings.
GitScrum supports your team to better results and effective deliveries!
Set your workflow and board to guide your Agile team, assign Tasks, Subtasks and keep in charge of the whole process evolvements. Allow your Agile team to collaborate.