What is Agile Digital Marketing?
Are you a marketer? If so, you might be aware of and follow the traditional waterfall marketing approach. Following the waterfall approach, your team would create yearly, quarterly, and monthly plans with a series of initiatives to implement throughout the year. Of course, your marketing team might have followed this approach for a long time and would have benefited from it as well. Indeed, it is a straightforward approach. However, it still makes it hard to foresee the market's pulse within 12 months. This inadequacy in predictability can derail your workflows. Even this might have happened in your organization in the past.
You might argue that the waterfall approach is beneficial in many ways. So, why should my team look for a different approach? Yes, the waterfall approach might have provided your team with benefits like easy delegation of duty, the establishment of timelines, and meticulous planning. But, as a marketer, you should consider following the Agile approach in your marketing.
When your team follows Agile Digital Marketing, team members will work in Sprints. Even, it will be possible for your team to adjust and optimize shorter campaigns to reflect the present conditions in the market. Further, when you follow this approach, your team will always work on the campaigns with the highest value with priority.
Agile Digital Marketing – What Does it Mean?
You might have heard about the Agile Development framework. This framework is the real inspiration for the Agile Marketing approach. To be specific, Agile digital marketing is managing your marketing campaigns, projects, and your marketing department. The method helps you manage fluctuating priorities, keeping pace with your customers’ new technological developments and needs. Some of the critical things part of Agile Digital Marketing are listed below:
- Agility in Digital Marketing involves responding to change as against sticking to a plan.
- It focuses on iterations at a rapid pace as against big-bang campaigns.
- As against focusing on a few large bets, its focus will be on many small experiments.
- Rather than focusing on target markets, Agile Digital Marketing will make your team focus on interactions and individuals.
- As against hierarchy and silos, importance will be given to collaboration.
To be precise, the Agile Digital Marketing Strategy is a technique for managing your marketing department. Not only department but also you can manage your marketing campaigns and projects using this approach of marketing. Above all, you will get the opportunity to handle these things by changing the priorities when required based on the technology development and the evolving needs of customers. With Agile marketing, these things become possible as your team will:
- Work in iterations
- Communicate with complete transparency
- Use adaptive strategic planning
- Respond at a rapid pace to the development in the industry
Some decades ago, big organizations avoided these approaches in marketing. They were hiding behind rules, systems, and policies. But, we live in a colonial era that makes transparency and honesty the need of the day. So, organizations cannot stick to their old practices anymore. The role of Agile in Digital Marketing embraces the unexpected by adapting, responding, and most importantly, listening to the demands of both the industry and the customers.
How to Implement Agile Digital Marketing?
Are you interested in knowing how Agile is used in Digital Marketing? If so, it is better to know how to implement Agile Digital Marketing. With the tips given below, you can embrace Agility in your Digital Marketing to get results not only quickly but also effectively:
1. Setup A System to Listen:
When you were young, you might have got this advice from one of your elders: First, listen to what I say and then respond. Yes, listening is the first step in any process. In marketing, you should have an ear to the ground reality. Otherwise, there are more chances that you will miss unbelievable chances. How to listen will be your question. Here are some ideas to help you:
Use Social Networking:
Thanks to social media platforms! Many of them are providing great feeds to marketers and other professionals. You can get a bounce on a breaking news in the marketing domain from Twitter and Reddit. Of course, Facebook is an excellent option as well. You can also invest in a social listening dashboard when relying on social media for listening. When you do this, you can stay informed of the market's records, catchphrases, and patterns. Accordingly, you can frame your marketing techniques.
Use Google Alerts:
Your organization might have some key expressions and catchphrases. You can make Google Alerts for these phrases. When you sign up for Google Alert for specific key phrases, Google will send you an email when breaking news hits the market with these key phrases. In turn, you can stay updated. Even Twitter offers such a service using which you can track news with specific catchphrases, hashtags, and mentions, to name a few.
2. Have A Plan in Place For Quickly Responding:
When something happens in the market, you should respond to the news quickly on behalf of your organization. This is where individuals are gaining a better edge over organizations. Small organizations and startups can ensure the best presence online with essential nimble promotion.
Besides understanding how Agile is used in Digital Marketing, it is better to understand why to use Agile in Digital Marketing.
Why Use Agile Practices in Digital Marketing?
When you strengthen the Agility of your marketing team, you can get many benefits. Here are some benefits listed, and with the understanding of these benefits, you will start implementing Agile Digital Marketing practices without any delay:
1. Better Collaboration:
When you follow the Agile methodology in Digital Marketing, you will ensure better communication of status updates within your team. Irrespective of the progress of every person in your team on the project presently being handled, ensuring that each team member is on the same page will help spot colossal failures and successful Sprints. This does not mean that you should keep everyone in the loop. You can spot topics that should be discussed only with a particular group of people during stand-up. In turn, you can avoid unnecessary waste of the most valuable time of your team members, who are not essential to reaching a particular solution.
2. Extra Transparency:
The Agile Digital Marketing strategy will let your team keep an eye on Sprints. In turn, your team can take members from other teams to support a particular project if the need arises. Nevertheless, you can take a step further by appointing a project owner as a gatekeeper for filtering outside team requests. When this is done, you can prevent the other team members from getting frustrated with distractions from outside. Simultaneously, the project owner will decide whether a particular request will be included in the development backlog. Then, they will work with the team on task prioritization. The high level of transparency between the team members is one of the critical factors that decide the success of any marketing project.
Assigning a project owner is a technique that can bring clear benefits for different external and internal requests that your marketing team might get. Nevertheless, other teams like your organization's customer service, management, and sales team can benefit from this approach of safeguarding the workflow of team members and gaining a more detailed view of what other departments are heading towards.
3. Achieve A Collaborative Balance:
Of course, increased collaboration between teams is good. Nevertheless, it has a downside as well. The reason is that it can increase the potential of additional work flooding into the workspace. But thankfully, the Agile Digital Marketing strategy puts an effective stoppage to requests from other departments that are not so important. In turn, your marketing team can pay attention to what matters the most.
Adopting the Agile Approach will help balance highly collaborative teams in your organization and siloed teams without interacting with the other departments.
4. Make Real-Time Adjustments:
The role of Agile in Digital Marketing means just working smarter within a shorter time frame. It will not be an overstatement to say that it is an efficient method to adjust your workflow on the go. When you are in the thick of a couple of weeks' project window, the probability of you getting into some issue is more. But, this is nothing to worry about.
When you take the case of the traditional waterfall approach, you would be waiting for a month and even three months to review and put the necessary changes into practice. But, in Agile methodology, you will have the tools and quickness required for making changes instantly. This will help your marketing team with proper management of expectations.
So, these are just a few examples of how Agile Digital Marketing can be beneficial as you can get more by including Agile practices in your marketing strategies.
References
- https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/agile-digital-marketing-what-it-looks-like-and-how-to-implement-it/
- https://pantheon.io/blog/what-agile-digital-marketing-and-why-should-i-invest
