As marketers, we can all agree that today’s marketing is evolving at

an extremely fast pace. This is primarily due to the influence of

technology and the number of devices, media channels and touch

points available to consumers. Consequently, companies

are becoming increasingly concerned with understanding how

to adapt their marketing activities

to the continuously changing customer behaviour and competitor

landscape.

A big part of successfully responding to the changes in the external

environment consists of actually being able to anticipate and embrace

change in a proactive manner. This article will present the definition

of agile marketing, its key advantages, as well as how to adopt agile

marketing that some of the agile frameworks experience in the

context of marketing.

What is Agile Marketing?

Agile marketing is an optimised approach to people, processes and

tools in marketing planning and execution, in response to changing

customer behaviour and market trends. It provides a way to add,

remove and/or modify marketing targets, strategies and tactics on an

ongoing basis. Agile marketing centres on a change in business mind-

set from the traditional marketing structure to a more flexible (agile)

structure that has been so successful in the information technology

industry. It champions data-driven marketing decision making, with

an emphasis on value creation from a customer’s perspective. Every

member of the agile marketing team must embrace the core values of

the agile methodology in order to facilitate this shift in mind-set and

support the successful completion of the team’s activities and the

achievement of the team’s objectives.

This shift in mind-set is most visible within the creation and

execution of the marketing plan. An agile marketing plan is one that

is continuously reviewed and updated within each quarter, even

though the overall allocated marketing budget and time remain

constant. This article won’t cover the ins and outs of

creating a strategic marketing plan, but it is important to

emphasise the importance of creating a marketing plan

before actually attempting to implement agile marketing.

Certainly, traditional marketing has already adopted some elements of

agile methodologies. In particular, this refers to the iterative structure

of the marketing calendar. Most strategic marketing plans are

structured in four iterations (quarters) of three months each, which

aligns with the iterative nature of agile methodologies. Each quarter

in the marketing calendar can then be subdivided into three sprints of

one month each.

Agile marketing recognizes that short term marketing plans are more

stable than long-term plans. You will definitely know what you want

to be doing and achieving in the first quarter of your marketing plan,

but do you know what marketing channel, Google update or

technology will emerge or dominate the market in the next 12

months? Adopting agile marketing provides the flexibility needed to

abandon (sometimes at short notice) the marketing strategies and

tactics that don’t work and redirect the remainder of the marketing

budget into channels that fit better with the profile of your target

audiences. This helps to address the biggest challenge of marketing:

creating and successfully executing marketing campaigns in the face

of uncertainty with changing customer expectations and buying

patterns.

To better understand the needed change in mind-set, consider the

following scenario:

Sharon is the CMO of a global B2B technology company with her

marketing team spread across four continents, where she is supported

by multiple country managers. Due to the time difference

between the regions, she schedules the daily meeting (scrum) to 4pm

UK time to accommodate team members in Europe, North America,

Middle East and Africa. They also meet at the end of every month to

review how everyone is preforming in relation to the predetermined

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) as defined in the integrated

marketing plan. Each team member also presents a summary

PowerPoint presentation to the entire team at the end of each quarter.

The meeting’s attendees include the heads of departments for Social

Media, SEO, PPC, Lead Generation, Marketing Automation, Web

Analytics, Conversion Optimization, Website Product and

Content Marketing. Each attendee updates everyone with any new

developments or hindrances within their department’s scope of

work. At the end of each month, each member prepares a Power

Point presentation to provide a summary report of the positives and

negatives during the month and how it impacts other

marketing channels and the strategic marketing plan as a whole,

following which the CMO meets with each head of department to

review the lessons learnt during the month and define what needs to

change for the following month.

In addition to benefiting the company externally (i.e. with engaging

its customers), adopting an agile approach to marketing also helps

break down tactical silos within the organisation and improve internal

company communication. More specifically, it helps to foster more

open communication and better information flow amongst team

members and across different departments (teams) within a business.

Agile can help marketing teams think more effectively from a

customer’s perspective to make smarter marketing decisions that

remove the ‘us’ against ‘them’ mentality and this can have a

significant direct impact on the company’s return on investment

(ROI). Agile marketing does this by reducing duplication of

marketing goals and enables flexible campaign planning and

execution, which in turn helps to reduce marketing waste and overall

marketing costs, so that more profit is retained within the company.

Although the agile methodology has been extremely successfully

implemented in IT software development, its framework would

require some tweaking to be adopted successfully within marketing

teams. In the previous article we presented the agile values and

principles that need to be integrated within marketing teams to

increase the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and their success

rates. This article presents in some more depth the key advantages of

agile marketing and some considerations for its implementation

across the industry.

Advantages of Agile Marketing

Although agile marketing is gaining traction due to its flexibility and

applicability in a range of different business contexts, this does not

mean that agile will work for absolutely any business. There are still

some industries that need to work with the waterfall approach, either

due to the nature of their products or their target audiences. However,

for those companies willing and able to switch to agile, here are the

key advantages (benefits) that their marketing teams can expect to

experience:

Management Visibility. Managing large marketing teams can be

frustrating for people in senior management, lower level managers

and even team members. Agile marketing provides tremendous

visibility and transparency through daily meetings and the use of agile

project management tools which highlight the contribution

of every team member in terms of tasks they are working on and

objectives they are trying to achieve.

Increased business revenue through customer

satisfaction. Agile projects involve obtaining regular

customer feedback on an ongoing basis and not just at

the beginning when we create an integrated marketing plan.

Feedbacks from customers helps form a better understanding of what

is working as it relates to our marketing strategy.

Ability to respond to change. We all agree that the modus

operandi of our customers and competitors changes – and

frequently. Being able to identify and accommodate these changes

relatively quickly is the key reason why the methodology is called

"Agile Marketing".

Motivated Marketing Teams. Agile marketing team members relate

to each other in a positive and encouraging manner, which is based on

Respect, Openness, Commitment, Focus and Courage. These core

values contribute to the high employee engagement and

retention experienced in companies that practice agile marketing.

Productive Marketing Teams. The agile

marketing methodology includes several practices that enhance

productivity. The collaborative and cross-functional nature of agile

teams means that each and every member of the team

is continuously learning from others, as well as contributing to the

learning of others.

Things to consider with Agile Marketing

Agile includes a range of different frameworks and some of them are

not necessarily useful for marketing. However, there are a number

which can be adapted by most marketing teams. The two most widely

accepted agile frameworks that marketing teams could adopt to

improve marketing process, communication and team interactions are

the Scrum framework (created by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland)

and the Kanban framework, which originated in the manufacturing

industry in the 1950s and has since then entered the IT industry and

(now) the marketing industry. But what about large corporations

heavily reliant on large marketing teams? As a point of illustration,

have a look at the following scenario.

Rachel is the global CMO of a cosmetics company which

employs 7,000-strong worldwide marketing team. She decided to

introduce agile marketing across the entire marketing team but she is

confused as to how 7,000 people will all attend a daily standup

meeting of 15 minutes. What can Rachel do to successfully introduce

agile to her team?

Industry consensus is that the recommended team size for agile teams

using the scrum framework is between 3-9 people. This is said to

guarantee optimal performance, interactions and effective

communication within the team. For global marketing teams with

hundreds (or, as in this case, thousands) of members, it would make

sense to adopt an enterprise agile framework. This would involve

providing on-the-job training for the entire marketing team about

agile, working through the Scrum framework as a foundation, and

then adapting any of the other frameworks mentioned below,

depending on which one is the most suitable one, given the size,

scope and complexity of the marketing function within the company.

The first value in the agile manifesto is "Individuals and interactions

over processes and tools." – this means that the key to implementing

agile is to foster open and positive working relationships within the

marketing team. Although virtual communication tools like Skype

and WebEx can complement communication within agile teams, it is

extremely important to have agile teams co-located in the same office

space if possible. Additionally, it would also be needed to hire

an independent contractor to coach the entire organization (not just

the marketing team) through the agile marketing adoption

process. Clearly, with 7000+ members of the marketing team it is not

possible to implement co-location and face-to-face communication on

such a great scale. However, a framework can be devised which

would allow country marketing teams to implement scrum on their

micro-scale, and the transnational activities and decision making can

then be supported by one of the scaled agile frameworks, such as:

SaFE (http://www.scaledagileframework.com/)

LeSS (https://less.works/)

Disciplined Agile

Delivery (http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com/)

Nexus (https://www.scrum.org/Resources/The-Nexus-Guide).

We will look at these in greater detail in a future post.

Conclusion

Marketing teams today are often siloed by default and this makes

consensus-driven decision making difficult, particularly in large-

scale organisations that operate in a number of global markets. The

bureaucratic, hierarchical, demand-and-control driven nature of most

marketing teams does not empower team members to be self-

organizing, proactive or flexible, because targets are usually set top-

down, with little input from grassroots marketing) and a culture of

fear dominates the workplace, which stifles creativity and interest in

trying new approaches.

Agile marketing can help in dealing with these issues and

transforming the way companies communicate with their customers

and the impact this has on the final ROI, however, the key is in

identifying and adapting the agile frameworks that are appropriate for

the particular industry the company operates in, the product(s) it is

selling and customers it is serving. The process of how companies can

adopt agile marketing will be discussed in my next LinkedIn post. In

the meantime, if you want to learn more about Agile Methodologies

with an emphasis on the Scrum framework, feel free to download the

document below, watch the videos and interpret them for yourself in

the context of marketing (no email registration required).

Download The Scrum Guide

http://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2016/2016-Scrum-

Guide-US.pdf#zoom=100

Introduction to Scrum: https://youtu.be/9TycLR0TqFA

Intro to Kanban in Under 5 Minutes (What is Kanban, Learn

Kanban) https://youtu.be/R8dYLbJiTUE

To get certified or learn more about Scrum framework

visit https://www.scrum.org/ or https://www.scrumalliance.org/

Attend local Scrum, Kanban and Agile meetup groups near you to

learn from the experts in the IT industry https://www.meetup.com/

About The Author

Femi Olajiga is an independent consultant: Agile Digital Marketing

Consultant (Web Analytics, Customer Experience and User

Experience). You can connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter or visit

my website CXconversion.com

Share and find out more about Agile Marketing in my previous post -

Agile Marketing Mindset: Explained

The Principles of Agile Marketing: Explained

Did you like this post? To read my insights on Agile marketing,

customer experience, marketing and user experience trends, just click

the 'follow' button at the top of this page.