Why you should introduce Agile Marketing

More and more companies want to introduce Agile Marketing in order to achieve rapid market success, sustainable competitive advantages and a unique position in the market - i.e. Thought Leadership. Agile marketing is a new approach to managing marketing campaigns flexibly and updating them at any time.

As market leader and thought leader of a market, you should prepare your entire marketing organization in the digital age to be able to react flexibly to changes in customer behavior or competition with your own measures at any time. Anyone facing this challenge should consider introducing Agile Marketing in their company.

• Especially in social media marketing, it is important to detect possible changes of opinion on relevant topics on the Internet (e.g. as part of Twitter marketing) and to permanently contribute to the ongoing exchange of opinions with your target group in a value-adding way.
• This applies to fast-moving social media channels (especially Twitter and Facebook) as well as content marketing areas where long-term oriented content is created (e.g. studies, surveys).
• If you build thought leadership, you will in most cases produce content that will inspire your target group and convince them of your competence. Content instruments such as white papers, blog posts or infographics are particularly suitable for this purpose. It's not just a matter of writing new content, but also of revising and redistributing existing content at lightning speed.

The marketing tasks just mentioned are a constant challenge and a real management task. No wonder that more and more marketing departments and content marketing teams are introducing Agile Marketing. Agile Marketing supports marketing teams with new processes, tools and team roles.

What is the Agile Marketing Manifesto?

Introducing Agile Marketing means focusing on a fast, flexible and project-oriented approach to marketing. Agile marketing is a still young field that goes back to agile project management and its successful application in software development. But what exactly is Agile Marketing?

Agile Marketing stands on the shoulders of Agile Project Management, a process method that originated in software development. The first approaches to agile software development were already created in the early 1990s with so-called Extreme Programming. It took another decade to formulate a structured approach to agile processes and methods. The term "agile" for this type of software development was chosen in 2001 at a meeting of software developers in Utah/USA. At this meeting, the "Agile Manifesto" was also formulated, which has since become a worldwide standard in software development.

Only a short time later the Agile Marketing Manifesto was created. As early as 2012, a number of marketing experts met in San Francisco to develop a manifesto on the topic of Agile Marketing. The reason for the meeting was to integrate agile methods more strongly into the marketing organizations of companies in order to be able to react more quickly to the constantly changing world of marketing and the flood of new marketing tools.

Since then, flexibility and agility have become important components of modern marketing. The following values are the seven pillars of Agile Marketing. If you introduce Agile Marketing, you should not only know these principles, but live them every day in a team.

The seven pillars of Agile Marketing

1. Validated learning is more important than opinions and conventions

Traditionally, the opinion of the highest paid manager in the team is often more important than the facts and actual findings in marketing. In Agile Marketing, established conventions and top management opinions are replaced by a new cycle of implementation, evaluation and learning. By following this cycle, you will gain more valuable insights for managing marketing than by following established standards in the organization.

2. Customer-focused collaboration is more important than silos and hierarchies

The internal cooperation within the company must be completely aligned and focused on the customer and his needs. The power struggles and silo thinking that are common today, e.g. between marketing and sales or even between individual sub-areas of a marketing department, are no longer acceptable in times of ultra-fast action and reaction times in online marketing. Hierarchical decision-making processes hinder fast and customer-oriented campaigns and marketing initiatives.

This is why modern tools and processes for internal "collaboration" are also in demand in agile marketing. Ideally, the customer will even become part of this process, as he can provide valuable input on his requirements and needs. A continuous exchange and mutual learning is more valuable than conventionally set hierarchies.

3. Adaptable and iterative campaigns are more important than big-bang campaigns

In the past, large-scale advertising campaigns with a "big bang" were crucial to success. They were the only proven means of helping a brand to break through and, if necessary, to achieve thought leadership.

With online marketing, inbound marketing and social media, this age is coming to an end, no matter how cool and expensive the famous TV spots at the American Super Bowl are. In agile marketing you rely on fast, permanently adapted and iteratively revised measures and marketing campaigns. In this way, you receive much faster insights and feedback on the potential and problems of your measures. And you optimize much faster - in inbound marketing, in some cases already in real time.

"Big Bang" campaigns have long planning and decision-making processes. This can be dangerous if the competition has already switched to Agile Marketing. Then you often can't get through with your own messages or find yourself in the back ranks of search engines like Google.

This has a lot to do with leadership culture in marketing. Because you should not always just talk, but also take the first step and (be allowed to) start. An Agile Marketing campaign is then adapted step by step. Even if the first iterations are not very successful and a completely new approach may have to be found, it is still better than planning a big-bang campaign for a long time and then seeing it fail spectacularly.

4. The process of customer insight is more important than static predictions

Customers behave less and less the way we would like them to or the way old marketing textbooks would have us believe. Even modern constructs like a customer journey or a buyer persona remain blurred and often inconsistent in practice.

This is why modern agile marketing is committed to the fact that researching customers and customer needs is a constant, never-ending process with ever new insights. Those who think they know their customers have already stopped questioning them and themselves.

It requires a high level of respect for the complexity of people and their changing needs, a consistently high level of commitment to customer research and regular interaction with customers instead of static or statistical predictions regarding customer needs.

5. Flexible approach instead of rigid planning

In the Agile Marketing Manifesto it says a bit martial: "Marketing is like war. Just as no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, no marketing plan survives contact with the ever-changing markets out there."

Plans are not bad per se and they remain necessary. As the saying goes, "Failing to plan is planning to fail". Failing to plan is planning to fail. Every real marketing plan must offer room for manoeuvre to counteract possible changes in an agile and flexible way.

6. Reacting to change is more important than following a plan

Changes can upset much of a plan. Therefore: Go with the flow! Not only in software development, but also in marketing, it is crucial to constantly think or work in small steps (sprints).

So if you are planning a marketing measure or creating a market strategy, you will proceed in many small steps. Stop after each step and check the results so far instead of going straight on to the next step. This is the only way to identify the need for change and unused potential in time.

7. Many small experiments versus fewer big bets

Small and flexible campaigns do not always have to work. But you can learn from them and quickly implement new ideas.

Agile marketing corresponds to many small experiments with many learning curves and steps of cognition. For many marketing departments, this alone means saying goodbye to standard processes that they have grown fond of. 

Conclusion

These seven pillars of Agile Marketing show very clearly how agile the "new" marketing really has to be. Agile marketing is not a trend, but rather a comprehensive transformation. It is an opportunity for companies to achieve the highest possible success in marketing in an ever-changing digital world.