Agile Marketing for Thought Leaders - Eight practical tips and success factors

How does Agile Marketing work in practice?

How do you successfully apply the agile methods in the daily business of an established marketing department? Here are a few tips on how to use Agile Marketing effectively and thus further develop your thought leadership.

Agile marketing is a new, important development of marketing in times of digitalization. The future-oriented world of online marketing requires an ever faster intervention of a brand in the markets and in the ongoing communication between customers. Only through constant presence in the minds of the target group can one stand out from the crowd and ultimately become a thought leader.

Restructuring of their campaign management

Agile marketing is much more than a new marketing trend. Agile is about a comprehensive transformation for companies to continuously achieve the highest possible success in marketing in the digital world.

Agile methods originate from project management and were defined for processes in software development in the so-called Agile Manifesto. These principles were adapted for marketing shortly afterwards and summarized in the Agile Marketing Manifesto. Thus, Agile Marketing has emerged as a central component of modern marketing techniques.

• Agile Marketing - Scrum Task Board

  In a previous blog post on the connection between thought leadership and agile marketing, we already showed you the importance of the individual principles of the Agile Marketing Manifesto for your practice. Now we show you how and with which eight instruments and success factors you can effectively use Agile Marketing in your marketing processes. These are the key tools you need to work in an agile marketing team.

  • Campaign Owner - He/she is responsible for the campaign and manages the resources required for it.
  • Marketing Scrum Teams - Here the actual campaign development takes place. The team consists of all people involved in the company - from IT to controlling, plus the external agencies and freelancers involved.
  • Scrum Task Board - A metaplan wall on which post-its are used to post the tasks (so-called user stories), arranged according to the categories To-Do, Doing, Testing and Done.
  • Definition of Done - With this requirement, the marketing owner defines the quality requirement for the output, where a requirement is considered "done".
  • Burn Down Chart - Day by day, the system records how many requirements have been completed in the current process run (so-called Sprint), how much time is still available and how much should have been completed already (so-called Ideal Tasks Remaining).
  • Sprint Planning Meeting - Before each sprint, all participants - from the campaign owner to the marketing scrum team - come together for a one-day meeting. The Campaign Owner first presents the highest priorities for the upcoming Sprint. Then the whole team together determines the way to fulfill these requirements. This involves planning which subtasks can be completed by whom in the time available.
  • Daily Scrum / Morning Updates - Every morning a Jour Fixe is held for about 15 minutes with the Marketing Scrum Team to discuss what was done yesterday, what could not be done (and why) and what is planned for today. This has become one of the most popular building blocks in Agile Marketing.
  • Sprint Reviews / Re-Briefings - Always take place at the end of a Sprint / Briefing. Stakeholders, such as management, are also welcome to attend, as this is where what has (or hasn't) been developed in the last four weeks is listed and the corresponding successes are demonstrated in a larger group.

Perfect Agile Marketing with central elements from Inbound Marketing

1. Buyer Persona

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 characters created to make it easier to get different perspectives on a thing (e.g. customer target groups).

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 like:

• What is the person's position in the company?
• What does a typical working day of the persona look like?
• What are the person's personal/professional goals?
• What personal/professional challenges does the person face?
• Does the person use the Internet for purchasing decisions?
• At what times is the person online and what social networks does he or she use?
• How does the person acquire new knowledge?

2. Buyer's journey

The Buyer's Journey is a journey in the mind of the customer and this journey is called the "Buyer's 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 Buyer's Journey is an important analysis and control instrument that is used to check again and again whether the planned and ongoing measures are really oriented to the needs of the people.

Agile Marketing - Buyers Journey Phases

The three phases of the Buyer's 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 suppliers/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 offers that correspond to his current status in the Buyer's Journey.

Finally

In the future, every marketing department must devote itself to the topic of Agile Marketing in order to remain competitive in the long term and to prevent entire marketing campaigns from going to waste.

To do this, however, the corporate culture must be open and the marketing strategies must be agile. They are the very foundation of Agile Marketing. It is certainly not easy to introduce Agile Marketing from now on and to change teams with processes that were supposedly successful in the past. And as with all change processes, the focus is first and foremost on communication - with all partners and stakeholders involved, from management to agency.

Above all, however, you need a digital strategy and, if necessary, professionals to advise you on this.