Marketing is a dynamic field that’s constantly changing. Marketers need to adopt a flexible strategy that helps achieve short-, medium- and long-term goals. That’s where the Agile methodology comes into play. An agile approach focuses on frequent iterations, experimentation and most importantly, it can be molded to suit the current business climate.

It never hurts to adopt agile methods into your marketing strategy, especially today. Here are the core ideas behind agile marketing management and how they can help you respond to market changes.

Agile marketing foundations

• Customer experience
  The primary object of any marketing campaign is to improve interaction with customers. Your market has expectations and you’ll have to meet them if you want to succeed. Customer experience requires marketers to build an awareness of market expectations, target demographics, communication platforms and more. It might seem like an obvious point to make but it’s an important one: customer experience forms the base from which all other marketing principles stem.
• Change
  Agile theory is based on the notion that nothing is static, everything is prone to change. While it’s important to have an overarching goal in mind, the strategies and tactics you use reach this goal will need constant revision. This might involve capitalizing on newfound opportunities, reacting to a sudden crisis (particularly topical right now!) or just learning something new about your market that wasn’t true yesterday.

Agile marketing principles

Agile marketing principles don’t differ much from the agile principles applied to other industries. That’s because, at their core, agile principles are about human interactions and human requirements. Not industry interactions and industry requirements.

• Focus on individuals
  Software, tools and data are all well and good, but they’re never more important than the people who use them. All business practices should help enable human productivity and interaction. Collaboration is integral to any project and poor organizational structure should never result in a failure to meet customer expectations. Speaking of interaction, customer interaction should be prioritized in such a way that your customers are indirectly (or directly) involved at every level of decision-making.
• Constant revision
  Data is the digital body language of your customers, it’s both the input and output of modern marketing practice. Testing is backbone of any marketing strategy. Agile marketing uses the metrics provided by online tools to engage in constant cycles of testing, revision and improvement. Modern technology allows marketers to run small, controlled experiments in strategy, and every decision made should be backed by a wealth of empirical evidence. Agile marketing principle put forward the idea that everything can be improved, everything should be improved; The process of improving your practices is a never-ending exploration of market climates and should be one of your primary concerns.

Agile marketing mechanics

While it’s important to keep agile principles in mind at all times, there are several mechanics of agile marketing that are essential. Without following these agile mechanics, nothing else you do will work as intended.

• Transparency
  Agile methods in general require a culture of transparency to work. Everyone involved needs to know the rules of workings of agile to adequately contribute to the schemes’ over success. A robust communication structure helps in the process of removing impediments to development and promotes cooperation.
• Feedback
  Agile isn’t just about rapid development, it’s about taking the opinions of all stakeholders into consideration when considering the next step. Every venture should have some form of qualitative or quantitative feedback worked into the design process.
• Multi-tasking
  All too often, departments will fall into a niche whereby they’re responsible for one very specific aspect of a marketing project. Customer experience and customer feedback aren’t so easily categorized, making it necessary for departments to collaborate on a whole new level. Teams will need to work side-by-side and might require a complete restructuring to adapt to new market demands.

About the author:

Patrick Del Rosario is a business blogger from Knowledge Train. Knowledge Train offers agile project management courses at competitive prices. When not writing articles about project management tips and business ideas, Patrick enjoys doing photography.