Agile marketing is a tactical marketing approach in which teams identify and focus their collective efforts on high-value projects, complete those projects cooperatively, measure their impact, and then continuously and incrementally improve the results over time.

There are four important characteristics of every successful agile marketing team: agile-based teamwork, decisions based on data, rapid and iterative releases, and adherence to the Agile Marketing Manifesto. Agile marketing requires a strategic vision, as well as short, medium, and long-term planning. It is different from traditional marketing in focus on frequent releases, deliberate experimentation, and unrelenting commitment to audience satisfaction. Agile marketing teams use sprints (short, finite periods of intensive work) to complete those projects cooperatively. After each sprint, they measure the impact of the projects and then continuously and incrementally improve the results over time.

It’s crucial to understand whether an agile marketing approach is best for your company. Here are some questions you might ask before taking steps in agile marketing:

Do you have more than three people on your team? Agile frameworks yield greater results with larger teams.

Does your teamwork as a unit toward common goals, or do you have individual priorities and projects? If the latter is true, stick with a waterfall approach. Agile marketing is more effective when individuals with unique skill sets collaborate to
produce a campaign together.

Is your project owner readily available to the team? If the person with all the answers is difficult to reach, your ability to produce work quickly will suffer, and an agile approach will be less successful.

Does your team require detailed processes or workflows to complete a project, or can it quickly adapt when new ideas emerge? Being agile is all about efficiency, so getting stuck in an outdated process will impede your ability to innovate.

Are you willing to make time for retrospectives, or is it essential that you move on immediately to the next project? Being agile requires inspection and adaptation. If you can’t make time to regularly evaluate how your work could improve, you are not committing to an agile approach.

Crucial Elements

There are a number of prerequisites for agile marketing to work. A marketing organization must have a clear sense of what it wants to accomplish with its agile initiative, for example, which customer segments it wants to acquire or which customer decision journeys it wants to improve, and have sufficient data, analytics, and the right kind of marketing-technology infrastructure in place. Another crucial prerequisite is sponsorship and stewardship of the shift to agile by senior marketing leaders. They provide key resources and crucial support when the new ways of working encounter inevitable resistance.

While these elements are crucial for success, it is the most important item to bring together a small team of talented people who can work together at speed. They should possess skills across multiple functions (both internal and external), be released from
their “BAU” (business as usual) day jobs to work together full time, and be co-located in a “war room”. The mission of the
war-room team is to execute a series of quick-turnaround experiments designed to create real bottom-line impact.

How to Implement Agile Digital Marketing

Use Social Media as a Resource
Our world is full of communication: emails, phone calls, meetings, but the value of listening should not be overlooked. An agile strategy starts when you embrace listening. Social media is the perfect platform for agile listening. Using a combination of several social media for breaking news and invest in a social listening dashboard such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social can let you keep up with the trends. You also need to create relevant keywords and phrases for your company to filter the information and get the data you need.

Improve Your Communication Skills
Good communication skills are essential tools for effective collaboration in agile marketing. Agile Marketing leaders need to be able to have effective conversations with their teams, marketing agencies, specialist suppliers, and stakeholders. Agile communication means being an active listener who can reflect what they’ve heard, encourage their audience, clarify and extend what they’ve heard, and ask open questions.

Analyzing Data
The leaders must set priorities and objectives that align with the brand’s goals. They must be able to coordinate data sharing between team members, decide which insights to act on, assign resources to analyze new data, and design new objectives within a short time frame to respond to that data. Analyzing data and putting what you learn from it to use rapidly are at the core of agile digital marketing. Many companies are pouring millions into their data and analytics infrastructures. Successfully managing those infrastructures takes a cross-functional team of professionals in information technology, business, and marketing.

Test the Results
Agile marketers employ a well-rounded data analysis run small tests regularly based on insights they get from the data. These sprints will determine if insight is valid before you invest in scaling it up. At the end of each sprint, the team leader can evaluate the results of the test and develop a new set of initiatives and goals.

Scale by Little
Adapting to agile digital marketing can bring benefits to your business, but it requires bucking tradition in several ways, and it can be risky to try to transform an entire marketing department or organization all at once. Start small by dedicating just a minor percentage of your marketing efforts to agile digital marketing. Build a small, cross-functional team, and give team members time to get their feet under them. As that initial team becomes more adept and starts to see results, you can scale up until all your digital marketing initiatives are agile.

Conclusion

The agile Marketing process involves responding to change rather than following a plan. It enables companies to better address and respond to the fast-changing marketing environment nowadays. It requires small but talented teams and shortens planning cycles to days or weeks by the process called sprint.
Digital agile marketing strategies require marketers to continuously focus on company related news to obtain valuable information, analyze and test the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. This approach is often accompanied by a break with tradition, and complete adapting to the new strategy is realized by taking small steps.