Now’s the Time to Embrace Agile Marketing

Getting a square peg to fit into a round hole might work for NASA engineers, but not so much for marketers. If you’re still applying past techniques of planning and executing your marketing campaigns over 3, 6 or 12 months, then analyzing results and adapting, your efforts will fail in today’s online-driven environment as surely as the CO2 scrubber on a disastrous Apollo mission.

That quiet you’re hearing? That’s the seep of customers you’re not reaching because your messages and methods are getting bogged down in long-term calendars, Big Ideas that require weeks if not months of planning and preparation, and a strategy that’s set in cement. Feedback is necessarily slow, so you can’t react and change tack on the fly. It’s a linear process that can be time-consuming and as inefficient as it is ineffective.

However, being agile, able to adapt to changing demands and scenarios quickly, can deliver clear, immediate results while keeping in step with long-term business goals. “Agile marketing” is all about small strategies, prioritizing tasks, testing small ideas that can be implemented fast, and measuring results then refocusing efforts on just what’s working. It means putting real data in the form of select metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) over instinct or gut feelings. And it means being open to new ideas as they emerge from your marketing team, and never being married to one.

Of course, this might go against the way your company is wired, where approvals could take days or weeks and implementation can bog down as a result. To be agile, you have to empower team members by giving them access to the same data, encouraging collaboration and sharing of results, and authorizing them to move forward on their own. Not every effort will be a moon shot; indeed, it’s the routine of deliberate experimentation that makes agile marketing so powerful. The team will learn quickly, with minimal investment, what isn’t working, so they can devote more effort to the things that are. Programs become two-week sprints, rather than annual slogs.

Are you ready to embrace an agile mindset? Let’s talk about how to put your marketing campaign into orbit.