Agile Marketing: What Every Marketer Needs to Know
The word Agile is popular in the context of software development. You can’t help but agree how brilliantly agile works in terms of speed, performance, and responsiveness in meeting expectations. The word on the street now is that the same concept of Agile is now making a bold entry into the world if marketing as well. Lo and behold, Agile Marketing is born. What is the new stress or value does it bring to marketing? Well, considering all it paves the way for continuous improvement in marketing.
Let us understand the whole concept and the practical implementation in its totality.
What exactly is Agile?
Agile development is a popular software development methodology initially created by startups. Over time its popularity grew and now it is widely adopted by all major mainstream software development companies. Leaving out the technical concepts associated with it, we can define Agile as the approach of running concurrent processes to minimize the development time and ensure optimum output right from the beginning. With Agile methodology the testing of a product is done at every state of development leaving no room for glitches at a later stage.
What is so special about it?
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Agile quickly became the most popular development methodology just due to the huge boost it provides to productivity, revenue growth, and quicker marketability of a product. With concurrent processes, the development time is slashed resulting in cost advantage and less time to market. At the same time by simultaneous testing mechanisms ensure a better quality of the finished product for users.
What can the Agile approach do for Marketing?
Now that we’ve established the depth and edge Agile approach offers to software development, we try to see if we can apply the same methodology to marketing. Marketing is now at a highly competitive space and marketers are hard pressed to ensure they create great, memorable campaigns. Marketers in major organizations like Teradata have now implemented Agile Marketing into their marketing plans. So how can this Agile stuff be put into marketing practice?
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Product development will now need to embed marketing elements intuitively to ensure traction right when the user is handling the product. On the other hand, marketing process will work rigorously with different steps running concurrently to offer a highly concerted output and exert a bigger influence. For example, the product testing and feedback gathering process can just be intertwined with a marketing campaign to augment the effect while grabbing the respective data. This is how an Agile approach can just boost marketing efforts in various ways.
How Does Agile Marketing Work?
Agile as we have already come to know works with an iterative approach. Marketing teams of yore made big bets on certain predictions that could bring huge loss to a brand. With the Agile approach, they only can bet on predictions with a smaller span and naturally can have a much smaller risk exposure. Instead of putting a big bet on an entire outcome from now on they can put several bets on small short timed predictions at various stages. This enhances their chances of coming up with the right predictions.
Just as the concurrent processes like analysis, design, development, and testing taking place simultaneously can result in quicker time to market and feedback, concurrent marketing processes will ensure better and quicker traction and higher sales growth.
High Agility, High Conversions
Marketing is in a constant state of flux, which means any planned approach is bound to face failure a number of times. On the other hand, depending on the situation, your marketing process can quickly respond and adapt to it. This is what forms the basis of Agile marketing. It quickly allows the team to see what processes increase conversions and what don’t before adopting a certain process full time. Marketers will now influence product design with real-time feedback and reach their audience as soon as the product is ready. This collaboration among developers, marketers and end users makes the development process faster and more precise.
Why Is Agile Marketing Essential for CMOs?
CMOs of business organizations will find that adopting an agile marketing approach is inevitable. This is because they can now dispense with long drawn out marketing channels and ensure better success by collaborating with people of various skills together. In the digital world, marketers are quick to grab this approach as they work in a responsive environment, for most businesses with feeble digital activities, there will be a lot of challenges.
Key Benefits of Agile Marketing
Agile marketing can really revolutionize the entire product lifecycle and business process. Here are some of the key advantages of Agile marketing.
- Quicker time to market: Agile marketing will ensure fast paced product development and marketing process ensuring quickest access by end users.
- Responsible marketing: Responsiveness and iteration at every step will also make better responsibility for product standards and quality.
- Competitive Edge: Quicker time to market and real-time feedback mechanism will give companies a higher competitive edge.
- Customer driven innovation: Agile marketing would bring the developers, marketers and end users closer allow greater collaboration to drive innovation and customer-centric product development.
The Promise and Future of Agile
The promise of Agile for marketing is huge. It is enhanced speed, optimum flexibility, quick iteration and robust responsiveness. Thanks to Agile marketers and their prowess with finding meaning from data, brands will have a more precision-driven grasp over market dynamics and predictions. No longer will blind assessments cost marketers the time and investment spent on the wrong campaigns. Agile marketing can transform how businesses contact their customers and promote their offerings.
A whopping 41% of marketers who began to use an Agile process in their marketing are strongly in favor of continuing with it for the years to come. More marketers and businesses plan to join the Agile bandwagon as the focus on end user experience continues to become important and marketing continues to become more high tech.
