Agile Marketing. Another buzzword to tick off on your marketing agency bingo card or something a bit more substantial? We think it’s worth talking about.
Agile has been around in engineering and manufacturing for ages. The concept stems from the fact that planning a long way into the future is a bit futile really as no-one has a clue what’s going to be happening in 3, 6 or 12 months time. Let’s take a website for example. The idea that you can look at a problem, devise a solution, scope out a project, agree all the deliverables and work in a structured way to deliver that project in 6 months (to the specification you all agreed) is a bit mad. You’ll probably find when you get there that your customers are onto something else or technology has taken a step to the right. Who knows?
Agile is about moving faster and making incremental changes. The world is not fixed and neither should your approach to marketing be. What you can do is put yourself in a position to be able to adapt quickly. We should all be open to trying things, implementing new strategies in much smaller chunks, reviewing them, learning from them and moving on to the next thing. We all need to work on much shorter cycles of activity. The days of big, inflexible marketing is long gone. Agile marketing is here to save the day!
To be truly agile, you have to have feedback and you have to have data. We think that projects are never finished; they are constantly being refined based on customer feedback and the data that we generate (if you’re not getting a stream of data from your marketing activity, you need to be shouting for it.) You need to know when things are working, when they’re not working and you need to be able to react to both scenarios. We need to spot the winning campaigns so that we can invest in them and we need to spot the duds so that we can ditch them. All this can happen quickly if you have the data.
It’s chaos out there – we just need to accept it, embrace it and be committed to moving quickly!
Give us a shout if you want to talk about how agile we are (and I don’t mean whether we can still touch our toes!)
For the record, we still can. Honest.