According to Forrester research, 69% of marketer leaders say they face problem in annual planning. And the reason behind is, they are still working the same way they did a decade ago: research, plan, create, distribute, and measure.
This strategy may have worked fine back in the 1990s but, in today’s world, if you are working with this strategy you are not going to win, it is because today customers have changed a lot.
They have become more demanding. They want everything at the right place and at the right time. This change in consumer behavior has created problems for marketers.
Due to which, most of the marketers missed their deadlines.
But, what if there were better ways to work in this fast changing world so that you do not miss your deadlines and make your client happy.
This sounds, good. But the question is how we can achieve all of this? It’s simple: Agile marketing.
We know that most of you guys already have heard about this. But still, there are marketers who haven’t heard about Agile.
According to Agile Marketing Survey, 43% of marketers do not know what Agile is or how it works.
This blog post is written for those marketers who have not heard about Agile. So, without wasting any time let’s dive in.
What Agile marketing really is?
It is a modern work management methodology which has taken its inspiration from Agile development. In 2001, 17 programmers gathered at a ski resort in Utah and came up with the agile development manifesto, which they published all over the world.
Agile development values:
- Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools.
- Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation.
- Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation.
- Responding to Change Over Following a Plan.
But, the best part of Agile development values is that we can apply these values to marketing and number of practitioners has pointed out this. Like, Scott Brinker in his article pointed out that both the first and the last of the four values above apply to marketing. He also suggests four other values:
- Intimate customer tribes over an impersonal mass market.
- Testing and data over opinion and convention.
- Numerous small experiments over few large bets.
- Engagement and transparency over official posturing.
Then again back in 2006, Matt Blumberg of return path wrote a post which highlighted the efforts to use an agile development tool to track marketing activities. And then Frank Days, Neil Perkins and Greg Meyer too pointed out marketing approach through agile development.
All of these articles had one thing common is the desire to make marketing more transparent, more accountable, more productivity and able to change in any marketing situation.
Just like agile development, a group of marketer get together and issue agile marketing values:
Agile Marketing values:
An agile marketing value is inspired from Agile development:
- Validated learning over opinions and conventions
- Customer focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy
- Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns
- The process of customer discovery over static prediction
- Flexible vs. rigid planning
- Responding to change over following a plan
- Many small experiments over a few large bets
The process of Agile marketing:
Agile marketing follows a process called Scrum, which is designed to increase the speed of the productivity and responsiveness of marketing.
Agile Scrum is iterative processes which focus on short marketing experiments, frequent feedback, and the ability to change according to the market situation.
Check below for better understanding What Scrum really is?
Scrum is one of the most popular Agile Framework which is based on the idea that is quick. In a scrum, a small team plans to complete a certain amount of work or sprint in a certain period of time.
A scrum sprint is a regular, repeatable work cycle in scrum methodology during which work is completed and made ready for review.
Generally, scrum sprints are less than 30 days long. In a scrum, all the sprint task is established and identified in sprint planning meeting. The product owner and team decide what need to be moved from product backlog into sprint backlog.
A daily stand-up meeting is held on scrum framework where the team is given a chance to update project status and discuss the solution for the problems.
A Scrum sprint is followed by sprint review where the team reviewed the process in order to identify lessons that can be used to improve the next sprint.
Then after sprint review, sprint retrospective meeting is held. The idea for organizing this meeting is to discuss how the work is done in the sprint period and also give the team a chance to think of a better alternative for doing things efficiently.
Agile marketing model:
Before embarking any marketing effort the team must agree on Agile marketing model. The Agile marketing model starts by:
1. Customer segment:
The customer segments are necessary when creating a marketing model for business. You must know which customer your organization likes to target.
Identify your customer by listing your customer segment because every customer has different needs, behavior or buying pattern.
These are the factors you must keep in mind when you are segmenting your customer:
- Basic Demographics Segmentation must include factors like gender, age, location, and language.
- Behavioural Segmentation: Segment your customer by the purchase behavior of your customer. This must include factors like Revenue, lifetime value, Buying frequency, Customer journey status, shopping channel, purchase channel and attribution.
- Psychographic Segmentation would be a market that has a similar attitude, Values, lifestyles, personality, interest or hobbies.
2. Identify your customer problems
Identify the top three problems of each customer segment because different customer segment may have different problems. But keep in mind the problem of the customer must be specific and don’t dwell the negative side of the customer needs, wants and desire.
3. Describe solution for your problem.
After identifying the problem of the customer, describe a solution for your customer problem so, that your customer enjoys the full benefit of your product.
You can also describe your solution just like Geoffrey Moore’s did.
4. Identify the unique value proposition
It is one of the most valuable assets of marketing you must know if you want to get everything right. Identify the unique value proposition of your customer segment like:
- Why do your customers choose you over the competition?
- What aspect of the problem your product is solving?
- What is the unique selling point of your product?
And remember, don’t forget to include an emotional component of your value proposition like what makes your product an emotional buy? Are you appealing to your customer fear?greed?aspiration?
5. Identify your channels
What is the use of developing a product, if your customer is unaware of it? No use. So, if you want everyone to know about your product then you must first identify how will your product reach to your customer? What roles do your channels will play in your marketing?
Will you sell your product through business development deals or channel partners? Or will you sell your product through something like apple app store or Android market?
6. Identify the touch point of customers.
If you want your product to get more engagement then you must engage with your customer at multiple touch points like a company website, twitter feed, Facebook page, Google+ brand page, and events.
But remember to be caution when engaging the customer at multiple touch points because it can make or break your customer relationship. So, ask these three question to yourself when you are engaging the customer at multiple touch points:
- Is your message across all channels are consistent?
- Is the customer experience consistent and reinforcing your customer positioning?
- Are there opportunities to cross-sell or to gather referrals?
7. Identify the key metrics to measure you marketing success.
If you want to know whether you are earning more than a dollar of sales for every dollar you spent on marketing. You must first identify the key metrics because metrics is a quantifiable measure that is used to track and access the status of the specific business.
You can also get the idea of metrics from Dave McClure “Startup metrics for pirates” where Dave coined the acronym AARRR for tracking the key metrics of the customer lifecycle.
8. Document your revenue stream.
Last but not the least; identify what is the different source of revenue in your company? For example, you may have product revenue, service revenue or advertising revenue.
Why Agile Marketing?
Two out of three marketers want to know why they should use Agile Marketing in their business process and the answer to their question is boil down below:
1. Agile marketing moves at the blazing speed.
In this fast changing world, 8 out of 10 entrepreneurs who start businesses fail within the first 18 months. And the reason for their failure is:
- They are slow to respond to their competitive threads.
- Slow to respond to customer complaints.
- Slow to change when something is not working.
But if the entrepreneurs have used Agile marketing then they would not have failed because Agile marketing work at the series of rapid sprint which helps them complete their project for a limited period of time, reviewing at the end of each sprint what worked and what didn’t and adjusting as necessary.
Agile marketing completes the project at the rapid cycle of test, learn and optimize which help many entrepreneurs to gain a competitive advantage by responding quickly to the competitive threads and customer complaints.
2. Agile marketing provides total transparency.
Do you think it is possible to complete a project at a time when your team has no real understanding what you do; they negotiate their result rather than collaborate for performance?
But Agile marketing is completely different it focuses on being more transparent and nimble.
3. The daily stand-up meeting is held.
In Agile marketing, daily stand-up meeting are held to keep everyone on track and inform. In this meeting, each member of a team report on what did they do yesterday, what they will do today, and any obstacles they are facing.
4. Project updates are highlighted on a storyboard.
Agile marketing uses storyboard rather than software tool to highlight the progress report. This keeps the process transparent and everyone can see which phase the project is standing right now.
5. Sprint review is held at the end of every sprint.
Agile marketing hold sprint review at the end of every sprint where the team discusses the problems they face when completing a sprint and solutions are also provided.
Also Read: 3 tips to enhance the art of scrum sprint planning
6. Agile marketing improves the quality of the product.
Yeah, it’s true. Agile marketing improves the quality of the product and the reason is that Agile team work on stories that are described from the customer point of view, which help the team to focus on that thing which matters most to the customer.
In simple word you can say that Agile keep their customer at the top priority.
Conclusion
If you are one of those marketers who is failing in this complex marketing world and want to cure the poor marketing credibility then your business need to adopt Agile marketing.
Agile marketing is a weapon, to keep your business to stay relevant, effective and responsive. But it’s in your hand to decide whether you want to adopt Agile marketing or not.
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