What is Agile Marketing? — And Why B2B Should Listen Up
Agile marketing is a calculated approach to the traditional marketing process. Agile marketing values flexibility, transparency, visibility, predictability, and adaptability over set marketing processes. The agile approach to marketing was created out of the values and principles of agile software development:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
Contrary to popular belief, agile marketing is not a tool, a methodology, a strategy, or an action. It’s a principle that leads to agile results. The more marketing teams adopt agile values and principles, the more agile they become.
Agile Marketing is Flexible
Agile marketing teams pivot quickly and often. They never limit themselves to a specific strategy.
An agile team remains in a continuous cycle of testing, data gathering, and data interpretation that enables them to pivot quickly. These pivots let them move through multiple strategies in the time it takes non-agile teams to create and test a single strategy.
Agile teams champion flexibility and the freedom to step outside of industry-best practices to identify the most impactful strategies. This freedom to explore allows agile marketing teams play outside of the box that non-agile teams self-impose on their strategies.
Agile marketing teams use a flexible marketing campaign strategy. These strategies hone in on an end result, but do not lock the team into a step-by-step process to achieve this result. This is because agile teams know that the individual tasks associated with a campaign will change many times.
Agile Marketing is Transparent
Agile marketing means transparency. Agile marketing teams place a high value on data gathering and interpretation.
By valuing the data collected by applications and software, agile marketing teams skip the guessing game and move straight to execution. There is little pressure to interpret the data exactly inside of agile marketing teams, instead they focus on interpreting the results. After gathering and interpreting the results, they move back into a cycle of testing their hypothesis. The entire team quickly vets these hypotheses to make sure that they don’t contradict the findings of another member’s data or previous test.
Agile Marketing is Visible
One of the most important principles of agile marketing is visibility. Teams value the visual display of quantitative information and maintain high visibility across the organization and to clients.
Agile teams use real-time analytics dashboards. These display key metrics that keep track of performance on a daily, hourly, or even minute-by-minute basis. By visually displaying their data, agile marketing teams digest and interpret results on the fly. They then share these dashboards across the entire organization and distributed teams and even other departments see the effect of their work on the business’s top-of-funnel activities.
Agile Marketing is Predictable
Predictability is crucial to agile marketing. Repetitive processes and systems create a team environment that follows a predictable format.
Every member of an agile marketing team knows exactly what they should be doing and when. They also know exactly what other team members are doing. Because of this, agile marketing teams cut down on internal communication and increase production hours. Agile teams build quick daily communication points into their processes so that team members never need to hunt down important information or project updates.
Agile Marketing is Adaptable
Finally, as you can see, agile marketing teams dive into the cycle of continuous discovery, testing, and adoption.
Teams adapt to changes in their industry, company, and disciplines. Because they focus on the values and principles of agile, their ability to execute lives outside of a toolset or company lifecycle. This gives them the distinct ability to maintain a high-level of growth that is impossible for non-agile teams.
Resources for Agile B2B Marketing Teams
This post was originally published in the Mindbox Journal.
About the Author: Jesse Williams is a young entrepreneur, husband, father, technologist, and SaaS marketing expert. You can follow him on Twitter and learn more about him and his projects here.
