Agile Marketing

What is Agile Marketing?

In Germany, the term Agile Marketing is used more often. However, only a few people know what to do with it. Some consider it to be a new hype, others a trend-setting development in marketing that soon no company will be able to ignore. Marketing measures of the old school are more and more recognized as insufficient when it comes to agility and flexibility, such as in online marketing. The Internet is constantly changing and marketing measures have to adapt to this if they are aimed at Internet customers. Everything must be faster, more spontaneous and, if necessary, adaptable when something changes. For about two years now, there has been increasing talk about Agile Marketing as a new and important discipline in marketing. A provider of safety services for car and rail traffic is in demand as an expert in the public eye not only when it comes to long-term future topics, but also very specific when it comes to current news such as accidents. The marketing and thought leadership department of such a company, with its agile approach, is well equipped for quick reactions and campaign adjustments. Especially with regard to the digital transformation of processes, the buzzword "agile" comes up again and again. Agile marketing does not only mean developing viral campaigns, but it also describes the ability to place relevant content in the right place at exactly the right time. This requires highly flexible internal processes in marketing and close proximity to the target group. Agile Marketing has even been written down in an Agile Marketing Manifesto to define the successful marketing concept of the future.

How to apply Agile Marketing?

In agile marketing, timely feedback from relevant customers is essential for the permanent adaptation of marketing measures. Communication with customers via blogs and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook are meant to react more agile, i.e. faster and more flexible to the needs and interests of customers. An increasingly fast-paced environment requires marketing to react faster and more flexibly while maintaining the same high quality. New communication instruments and channels are forcing a new - and agile - way of working and new necessary knowledge in marketing. If you transfer the objectives and insights from agile working to marketing, there are numerous advantages:

Advantages of Agile Marketing

Faster response

to external influences during the development and implementation of marketing measures.

Faster implementation

of the marketing measures - no big "big bang campaigns", but more frequent, permanent, adapting actions.

Structured processing

of marketing projects and communication between the parties involved.

Higher motivation

by self-determination of the distribution of tasks and self-organisation of the team.

Agile marketing sees customers as Buyer Personas

Wikipedia defines personas as "fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behavior set that might use a site, brand or product in a similar way". Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude, and/or behavior set that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way". Important in Agile Marketing is the choice of questions when formulating a Buyer Persona. Here, a distinction should be made between industrial goods marketing (B2B) and consumer goods marketing (B2C). While in the B2C area the questions are mainly aimed at private life and personal needs, in the B2B area the focus is primarily on the professional life of the persons interviewed. For example, a persona gives answers to questions such as:

React in real-time through Agile Marketing

What does a typical working day of the person look like?

Does the person use the Internet to make purchasing decisions?

What are the person's personal/professional goals?

At what times is the person online and what social networks does the person use?

What personal/professional challenges does the person face?

How does the person acquire new knowledge?

Agile Marketing considers the whole customer journey

The Customer Journey is a journey in the mind of the customer and this journey is called "Customer Journey". It describes the ideal-typical information and purchase decision process of a customer with all phases from feeling a problem to buying and using a product/service to solve the problem. In Thought Leadership Marketing, the Customer Journey is an important instrument for analysis and control, which is used to check again and again whether the planned and ongoing measures are really oriented to the needs of the people.

The four phases of the Customer Journey describe the formation of problem awareness and motivation to act (Awareness Stage), the information and opinion formation about alternative problem-solving possibilities (Consideration Stage) and the phase of checking suitable providers/solutions and the subsequent purchase decision and use of the product (Decision Stage). In each phase, a customer develops different needs for content and offers - and is therefore receptive to different content in each case.

Lead Nurturing Workflows are therefore structured in such a way that each customer receives exactly the content and information that corresponds to his current status in the Customer Journey.

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The Agile Marketing Manifesto - Modern Marketing is agile

Marketing and IT are becoming increasingly similar. Today's marketing management is about coordinating many different technological tools. For example, today's marketing department simultaneously uses software solutions for marketing automation, social media listening, social publishing, website, blog, and mobile apps. Marketing campaigns are increasingly tailored to specific buyer personas. And campaigns run cross-medially across different media and customer channels at ever shorter intervals. In the process, a great deal of content is produced and published. This content should be designed and used in such a way that it promotes the communicative uniqueness of the brand and thus contributes to the thought leadership of the company. Marketing campaigns of course not only communicate but also serve to win leads and customers.

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Therefore all marketing tools, content products, and campaigns used should be coordinated to form a seamless customer acquisition chain. Social media visitors should become website visitors. Visitors should be converted to leads. Leads should become customers. And customers should be inspired to become fans and "brand advocates" to win new customers. All this is becoming increasingly difficult to manage with traditional marketing team structures and processes. Potential remains unused, campaigns start too slowly and cannot react to new trends and opportunities on a daily basis.

A new generation of marketing management is emerging - Agile Marketing. This new agile marketing enables a new and more effective form of process organization in marketing - with Scrum Teams.

Why Agile Processes in Marketing?

With the rapid growth of social media in recent years, the market has become more dynamic, fast moving and broad. Classic marketing and its process control no longer has a suitable answer to this. The pressure on marketers and marketing departments is increasing and bottlenecks can occur. These bottlenecks can lead to delayed project times or in the worst case to an enormous loss of sales. This is exactly where the Agile Methodology from software development comes in. Once confronted with this truth, the marketer will play a greater role in the customer journey and the resulting better customer experience. More and more marketers and marketing departments overseas and in Germany see new opportunities in agile marketing. But the truth is this: Most companies have not yet understood that their process management is outdated and can no longer keep up with modern marketing or even go under.

Some examples in which the classical waterfall process management in modern marketing, no longer comes along.tls_agile_prozesse_marketing

  • A company decides within a project to organize a relaunch of its website and needs the image library of the old website for this. Problem: The contact person of the project, who created the website at that time, is no longer in the company and the documentation was not openly discussed within the team, so information is missing.
  • Call the customer support of a company on the general telephone number and you will be redirected several times until you reach the right person/department.
  • You want to report a problem to a company and have a mail address info@unternehmen.de , but your request can only be solved by telephone. They are given the e-mail address of the department and are asked to ask for the telephone number

All these examples show the problem of the classical flow of a process. Since many processes are automated and not specified to persons, high waiting times occur, which lead to low customer satisfaction. This is something every company would like to avoid.

Using Scrum in Marketing

Agile Marketing is perhaps the most important change in marketing of the last decades. In the digital age, it is about being able to react faster and more flexibly than the competition to the daily new media messages, advertising campaigns and above all changes in customer behavior. Only those who stay on the ball on the Internet and in social media will find their target customers or the so-called Buyer Personas.

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Today's marketing management is about coordinating many different technological tools. Today's marketing department, for example, simultaneously uses software solutions for marketing automation such as Hubspot, Marketo, Act-On and many more. These offer social media listening, social publishing, CMS systems, CRM, blog and mobile apps. Marketing campaigns are increasingly tailored to specific buyer personas. And campaigns run cross-medially through different media and customer channels at ever shorter intervals. In the process, a great deal of content is produced and published.

All this is becoming increasingly difficult to manage with traditional marketing team structures and processes. The waterfall method is already outdated in today's fast-moving marketing world and therefore potential remains unused, campaigns start too slowly and cannot react to new trends on a daily basis. A new generation of process management is just emerging Marketing Management - Agile Marketing. This new agile marketing enables a new and more effective form of process organization in marketing - with Scrum Teams.

Sprint

One, two or three weeks (usually) during which an Agile Marketing team works together to complete a predetermined list of tasks/stories from the backlog The sprints can be held on a rotational basis, in consultation with the client, so that current topics do not lose weight and topicality can be guaranteed at all times.

Scrum

An agile framework is an approach in which a small team works as a unit to achieve a common goal. This is in contrast to a traditional sequential project management approach. Invented by software developers, it finds its raison d'être in marketing. In practice, Scrum is mostly used in the modified version -modified Scrum- by Agile Marketers.

Backlog

A constantly expanding list of work requirements, tasks or subtasks that can be assigned to an Agile Marketing team by the customer or Scrum Master. Backlog tasks are often referred to as "stories", which as a whole make up the story. These are prioritized by due dates, hours and/or task points.

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Storyboard

A visualization of the work derived from a Kanban. Storyboards are usually created manually, with whiteboard and sticky notes or digitally in work management solutions. A storyboard consists of at least three columns (also called swimlanes) that show the progress of the work in a sprint or several sticky notes that represent the individual stories in a sprint. The cards are moved across the board in the storyboard to show the progress in a sprint.

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Swimlanes

columns that divide a storyboard into different states. Typical swimlane names are, from left to right, "New", "In progress", "Waiting for approval" and "Finished". Sticky notes show the progress in the swimlanes during a sprint. Swimlanes simplify project overview at all times and can guarantee a smooth project progress. In marketing, this agile approach can detect and neutralize bottle necks faster. This simplifies the project management for the Scrum Master.

Successfully implementing Agile Methods in Marketing

More and more companies want to introduce Agile Marketing in order to achieve fast market success, sustainable competitive advantages and a unique position in the market. Agile marketing is a flexibilization of the traditional marketing organization and a new approach to manage marketing campaigns flexibly and update them at any time. You get more work done - or not. The point is to work through the right things! Agile marketing is a management principle derived from software development that helps marketing organizations to master the challenges of the digital era. Especially with inbound marketing, your marketing team works at digital speed. You can see the success of your ongoing marketing campaigns in real time and constantly optimize them in collaboration with colleagues from all teams. With marketing automation software, you can link your email marketing, your activities in social networks, your blog and your customer acquisition processes on the web into an efficiently interlinked system. Every employee who uses your inbound marketing software creates your company's customer communication in real time. Therefore, make sure already in your planning phase that you and your management team are prepared for fast response times and high delegation. Integrate important elements of agile project management into your marketing with Agile-Marketing:tls_agile_methoden

  1. Give higher priority to the current "strong" learnings of your team than to your experiences and (pre-)judgements about customer behaviour.
  2. Put the customer-focused cooperation of all those involved in the company above the protection of departmental interests.
  3. Replace old big bang campaigns with a multitude of simultaneously running campaigns tailored to individual segments. Optimize campaigns iteratively.
  4. Consider researching the needs of the customer as an ongoing, never-ending learning process. Stay open to constant changes in customer behavior.
  5. Adapt your marketing planning and build in much more flexibility than before. Be sure to discuss these changes with your controlling and sales department. Your marketing plan should be designed to be as changeable as the business in your market.
  6. It is better to react to visible changes than to rigidly follow an existing plan. Work with your team in small steps (so-called sprints) and check the success.
  7. Start many small worthwhile experiments in your inbound marketing. This will give you a higher learning curve and better results in customer acquisition.

Before the introduction of agile methods you have to check the status quo of your company. Sean Zinsmeister, Vice President of Infer.com recommends a comprehensive situation analysis based on the following parameters:

  1. Situation analysis - For this purpose they should check the internal situation i.e. employees, resources, technology etc. and the external situation i.e. market leader in their industry, competitors etc.
  2. PESTLE analysis (politics, economics, social environment, technology, legality and environment)
  3. Customer Analysis - Create buyer personas based on your product or service and find your appropriate customer categories.
  4. Competition analysis - According to the motto "Keep your friedns clos and your enemies closer" you should ask in the market for the competitors, their keywords, their product range and their prices.
  5. Porters Five Forces Model: Porter's model is suitable for this purpose, the so-called Five Forces Model, which gives you an overview of your product and your competition.