A lot has been made of agile marketing or working in sprints and for some good reasons. It allows your team to respond to constant changes in the market and serve your customers and prospects in a much more timely manner. I think there are still merits for a marketing plan that aligns with your organization and where you want to go, but there are numerous benefits to agile marketing so let’s get into a few.
Why Agile Marketing Works:
- It allows your team to constantly prioritize and re-prioritize. When you work from a set marketing plan, you become a slave to that plan and feel compelled to see it through. Whereas in an agile setting, you can regroup regularly (most of the time it’s every 2 weeks) and make decisions about what needs to move up and down in terms of priority.
- Flexibility. When you’re agile, you’re flexible. You can pick up on recent results or campaigns that performed better than you expected and double down on those. For example, say you discover that running targeted ads on Facebook is driving 3x the qualified leads you expected at half the budgeted cost. Why not seize this opportunity immediately. Maybe double down on it as a bigger campaign? It probably won’t be a high performing channel forever so better to act now. It allows your team to constantly prioritize and re-prioritize. When you work from a set marketing plan, you become a slave to that plan and feel compelled to see it through. Whereas in an agile setting, you can regroup regularly (most of the time it’s every 2 weeks) and make decisions about what needs to move up and down in terms of priority.
- Keeps the team on their toes. When you run as a team in sprints, it makes people more accountable. When in a sprint, in theory, everyone is in the know of what each is working on during that sprint. With that, everyone is also expected to discuss what blockers they are experiencing. The key here is to still make your team accountable when blockers come up. Nobody wants to hear day after day and week after week that the same person is stuck on the same project. Push your team to address the issue head-on and problem solve a solution. Lastly, your team should now be in a cadence of regular results review so that you can assess what is working and what isn’t. With agile marketing, results are mandatory but the type of results will vary from good to bad. Personally I’d rather know about the bad results after 1 week versus 2 months from now. This allows us to course-correct and re-direct our efforts in a new or better way.
- Forces hard decisions faster. Forcing your team to look at results and what is working on a regular basis means that more decisions have to be made and at a much quicker interval. I see this as a positive as keeps the focus on making decisions that are right for the organization at that moment. That’s not to say agile marketing forces you down a win now at all costs path but that there is a risk it can. I still see the benefits of real-time decisions far outweighs that of waiting on long term projects.
- Alignment with other teams. A reality of being a marketer is working closely with sales. An agile marketing framework is a sales teams best friend. Say you’re a Sales Manager. You’ve started to see an alarming trend that your deals are all stalling out in the middle of your pipeline. If you’re working with a marketing team that is just following their yearly or even quarterly marketing plan, good luck. You know it’s not worth bringing up. However, if they are an agile team, this changes the game. You could approach them with the problem on Friday. On Monday it’s discussed at a team spring meeting. Tuesday proposed solutions are discussed and agreed upon between sales and marketing. And in 2 weeks, Bam! A new campaign is shipped and in the market where you’ll start seeing results.
There are certainly more benefits than just the above as well as drawbacks to agile marketing. However, tools like Asana make the switch much easier to start and continue with.
Agile Marketing and Marketing Sprints