What is Agile Marketing? And what are Scrum Teams?

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 flexible than the competition to the daily new media messages, advertising campaigns and above all changes in customer behavior. 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.

Only those who stay on the ball on the Internet and in social media will be heard by their target customers or the so-called buyer personas.
Agile marketing makes use of the knowledge gained from software development. This is also where the instrument of so-called Scrum Teams was invented. In the development of new software products, the software developers and business analysts involved have traditionally often worked separately. It is not uncommon for the different specialists to work past each other.

However, the development times of new software projects have been shortened considerably in recent years in order to bring new software products or product improvements to the market faster and faster. At the same time, the complexity of software projects is increasing. Thus the idea was born to provide the specialists involved with a project manager. This new manager should be in constant contact with the (mostly internal) client of the finished software product and thus play an important role in internal communication within the team and external communication with third parties. At the same time the development process was divided into many small steps (sprints) - the Scrum method was born. The new project manager received special training and became a Scrum Master.

Agile marketing needs Scrum

Marketing and IT are converging more and more. 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.

Of course, marketing campaigns do not only communicate, they also serve to win leads and customers. 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 in turn be converted to leads (lead generation). Leads should become customers. And customers are to be inspired in order to win new customers as fans and "brand advocates".

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 modern agile marketing enables a new and more effective form of process organization in marketing - with Scrum Teams.

Agile marketing and Scrum make real-time marketing possible

When the power goes out at the 2013 Superbowl, the well-known biscuit brand Oreo tweets a black picture with the headline "You can still dunk in the dark". The post is immediately shared over 15,000 times and is the number one topic of conversation among bored football fans during the power outage. When you consider now that a 30-second TV spot during the Super Bowl cost four million US dollars at the time, you get an idea of how valuable real-time agile marketing can be.

The secret of success behind this measure is a marketing team that is organized like a Scrum Team. The marketing team is continuously close to the current events of its target group (the Superbowl). As a Scrum Team, it is processually able to create a campaign itself at a favourable moment and immediately and then react in real time. Without meeting, approval from above or long internal processes.

Why do we need new Marketing Scrum Teams in Agile Marketing?

Marketing teams traditionally consist of specialists who often enough work past each other. Marketing departments today are in many cases still functionally organized. So it's not surprising that the advertising department has no idea what the Direct Mail Team is doing. The website team is with the IT department anyway. And the social media managers are in PR. Oh yes, and mobile marketing and retargeting is done by an agency anyway.
Updates are only available at team meetings and campaigns are often separated into individual marketing instruments. Even integrating a QR code into a print campaign, placing a landing page or microsite on the website and using email marketing to manage the leads gained in this way ("just doing it") still presents many marketing teams with gigantic process-related and resource-related challenges.
In the age of digital marketing, the above standard processes and measures must not take longer than one working day. No, this is not impossible - just not with old methods. With Scrum Teams a lot can be changed for the better.

How does an agile marketing team work?

A Marketing Scrum Team consists of a Campaign Owner, the Marketing Team and the Marketing Scrum Master. The Campaign Owner is for example a product manager or sales manager of the company who needs a quick campaign to take advantage of market opportunities. In principle, anyone in the company can be the client (owner) of a campaign, as long as their idea and goals are authorized by senior management.
A Scrum Team is self-organizing and interdisciplinary. In a joint Scrum briefing the team decides how to do its work most effectively - instead of having this division of work dictated by other people from outside the team. Interdisciplinary teams have all the skills needed to realize the campaign without being dependent on people outside the marketing team.

As an agile marketing team, the Scrum team delivers the campaigns in an agile and flexible way and then reacts immediately to the feedback of the stakeholders (especially the idea provider or campaign owner). This team model achieves high creativity, flexibility and productivity in the creation and management of marketing campaigns.

Agile Marketing - The players in the Marketing Scrum Team

If you want to take on the role of a thought leader for your target group, you cannot avoid using Agile Marketing to anchor fast and flexible campaign management in your company. This is the only way to continuously occupy your topic in people's perception - whether in print, TV, the press or on the Internet.
The Marketing Scrum Team is constantly recomposing itself, depending on the campaign. In addition to the traditionally important marketing specialists (e.g. Above the Line, Media, Direct Mail), in Agile Marketing the online oriented job profiles are becoming more and more important for the success of Scrum based marketing campaigns in real time. Finally, we would like to briefly explain five important roles.

• Social Media Expert: Actually you need two different social media experts. One expert takes care of the maintenance of your own appearance and the development of the social proof in the classic social networks through Facebook Marketing, Twitter Marketing, etc. The other expert should be specialized in the social networks for professional contacts such as Xing and LinkedIn in order to generate and maintain potential customers there.
• Email Marketing Expert: To turn leads into customers, an effective and inbound marketing oriented email marketing campaign must be implemented. Each campaign will be targeted to one or more Buyer Personas, if possible, which have been identified at the beginning of the campaign development.
• Marketing Technologist: Marketing employees with sound IT skills are rare and new. In view of the increasing number of software tools and online platforms required, modern marketing teams need Marketing Technologists who can simultaneously handle interfaces to web design (HTML and CSS), software development (Java and JavaScript) and marketing automation (Hubspot, Google Analytics etc.). This knowledge is necessary to realize the increasing and faster changing needs of the marketing team. Typical tasks of the Marketing Technologist in the Scrum team are the constant adaptation of the website and the Content Management System (CMS) to the new campaigns, the necessary adaptations in the CRM system and the Marketing Automation Software (e.g. design of new landing pages) or the briefing to technical marketing agencies.
• Inbound Marketing Expert: Choosing the right keywords can usually lead to faster and more targeted success. For this purpose, the inbound marketer analyses e.g. the right and necessary keywords and content offers and passes them on to the Marketing Scrum Team. Another task of the inbound marketer is the SEO optimization of the campaign website. For this he is in close contact with the Marketing Technologist.
  Influencer Marketing Expert: His core tasks are, for example, to bring campaigns to the right buyer personas and to sit down with important influencers or the thought leader or opinion leader of the industry to win them over as reinforcers of the marketing campaign. The influencer marketer is in close contact with the social media experts to build and establish the necessary social proof.