What Is Agile Marketing And Why Is It Important To Marketing Teams?

The principles and processes of agile marketing have been touted as the only surefire way of creating a viable marketing strategy able to deal with the pressures on modern marketing teams - digitization, the rise of social and a hyper-competitive online brand arena.

Thanks to the rise and rise of social media and search engine dominance, the late naughties redefined marketing as a much more fluid, multi-channel brand experience. Rather than marketing sitting aside of the sales team, or the executive team, as a siloed ad-based add-on, it slowly became a central pivoting point for brand storytelling, sales, product development and customer service. Social channels became focal points for customer interactions. Google Ads and PPC became vital sales tools. Marketing was, and is, central to all of it.

This shift to the digital required teams of sales-savvy leaders and brand-focused professionals to work collaboratively and quickly. Hence, the creation of the Agile Marketing Manifesto, in 2012. This document has become the foundational text for a reconfigured, more modern type of marketing which refocuses both the planning of, and delivery of, marketing campaigns and outreach on: agility, reactive changes, learning and adaptability over small incremental campaigns through iterative processes, scrum and sprint style teamwork and taking small calculated marketing bets over large creative punts. 

In essence, Agile Marketing deconstructs traditional marketing processes and makes it oven-ready for the modern market.

Has Covid-19 Changed The Agile Manifesto?

Our New Normal has created an environment of reactive marketing and sales, an overreliance on tech and digital space to shore up business, and a lot of market nervousness and lack of confidence in traditional strategies to keep companies afloat. 

At its very core, the agile marketing manifesto is perfectly worded for the pandemic: agile marketing is iterative. It doesn’t take huge swings at the market, it works on the principle of analysis, calculated, and continual improvements to messaging and strategy in the wake of changes. Agile marketing is if anything, more essential than ever in a world scarred by COVID.

So what is agile marketing in 2021? What does it mean for marketing teams who are facing an uncertain future? How do the principles work in a more digital world?

Revisiting the agile marketing manifesto is a good place to start. The manifesto has 7 core Values which, when implemented, create the quintessential agile marketing team.

Validated Learning Over Opinions And Conventions

The first, and still most relevant, is the principle of learning and context-based decision making at the heart of marketing, rather than working around opinion and hierarchy. 

Survival in the post-COVID world, especially considering the prevalence of remote and hybrid workforces, means collaborative decision making based on data-based learning is paramount - you cannot make executive decisions or promote a marketing strategy without a critical understanding of your team's resources, market knowledge, and ongoing development and learning. 

Customer-Focused Collaboration Over Silos And Hierarchy

Self-explanatory, but worth reiterating in a post-COVID world - the customer has to be the focus. Certain MarTech functionality alongside effective CRM makes the laborious process of finding your customer and communicating with them easier and quicker. Use these channels to reaffirm your commitment to meeting customer needs and providing your customer with a solution. It’s classic, essential sales, made effective by agile marketing. Your customer has changed in the wake of COVID. So make sure you do too. 

Adaptive And Iterative Campaigns Over Big-Bang Campaigns

Iterative processes sit at the core of agile marketing. More than ever, marketing teams need to understand how their work succeeds or fails in context, rather than hinge any entire campaign on a hit-and-hope siloed launch. 

Using feedback and highlighting what works and doesn’t in smaller, more agile marketing campaigns is how agility manifests: this process of continual learning and adapting to market forces, customer needs, and supply chain issues guarantees a more meaningful, deliverable campaign. It also gives you the tools to fix a marketing program gone wrong and fix it quickly. 

This is agile marketing summed up: small, iterative outreach, immediate and responsive change.

The Process Of Customer Discovery Over Static Prediction

This value hinges on respecting your customer and understanding that they don’t act in predictable ways. COVID has ushered in huge attitudinal changes to everything from data protection to sustainability. Marketing and communications agility, then, wins the day as you react to, and enact changes, in the wake of new customer data.

Flexible Vs. Rigid Planning

The inherent flexibility in an agile process of marketing means you can change where needed. Rigidity is purely a matter of when you fail, not if. Imagine if every company stuck out with a hackneyed marketing strategy as the full force of COVID was felt. Some did, and they didn’t survive.

Responding To Change Over Following A Plan

A neat continuation of the above point, responding to change is not a sign of lack of preparation - the pandemic has caused a generational change to some industries and that could not have been predicted. For all the disaster preparation you can do, some decisions need to be made in the moment, and if you do have a plan, be brave enough to change it when the data shows it isn’t working.

Reactive change takes full spectrum buy-in from stakeholders. Marketing and Sales are the business front line, so their buy-in to operational changes is necessary in pulling together a new narrative based on the reality of the market. 

Many Small Experiments Over A Few Large Bets

At the business end of marketing, the rollout is activation - and all the above points are rendered useless if the end result is one massive campaign. Continual learning, iterative processing of data, and responding to change only happens with marketing outreach done piecemeal, where changes can be made immediately and adjustments made in haste.

Marketing is an imperfect industry, full of trial and error, changing customer attitudes and subject to environmental shifts in need and want. Reactivity, proactivity, and agility are now the new normal in marketing.