Marketing technology is upending the way, and the speed at which marketing teams work with each other; customers, vendors and other teams in their organization. New platforms and technologies are opening up exciting new possibilities for marketers to communicate and engage with prospects and customers more effectively. What’s more, marketing professionals can now almost instantly measure the effectiveness of their outputs, which allows them to iterate and adjust their work until optimal results are achieved.
To capitalize on this, marketing teams must change the way they work. They need to be able to turn on a dime and pivot quickly. The entire team should be in sync with each other and aligned with company goals.
The answer of course, is for marketing to go agile. Here’s why:
- 55% of agile marketing teams say they can change gears quickly and effectively based on feedback from audiences and stakeholders
- 47% of agile marketing teams say that they produce higher quality work with agile
- 52% of agile marketing teams reported that following agile transformation they have better visibility into project status (Source)
Originally developed as a better way to manage software development projects, agile methodologies are all about adopting tactical flexibility as a way to succeed in a fast-changing environment. It is based on four foundational values and twelve supporting principles that are used to manage lean processes, collaboration, communication and the speedy development of feature subsets. For marketing leaders looking to drive success and encourage productivity, agile puts forth proven methodologies to help them achieve this.
But what exactly is agile marketing?
Agile marketing is a tactical approach to manage processes more effectively while constantly improving results by leveraging objective data from the field. Although every agile marketing team has their own unique way of implementing agile, they all share a few common traits:
- Accountability – agile teams exhibit pride in ownership, which is necessary to deliver high-value outputs. One way of making this happen is to start having daily stand-up meetings. In these meetings, which should take no more than 15 minutes, team members discuss what they did the previous day, what roadblocks they ran into and what their plans are for the day.
- Collaborative work – agile teams cooperate and are always on the lookout for different ways to do better work in a more effective manner. The success or failure of a project is the responsibility of the entire team. Politics, in-fighting and power struggles need to be put aside for the common good of the team, the organization and its customers.
- Boards – agile teams use a centralized board to track progress and keep everyone aligned. It’s important that everyone has access to the board and that it’s easy to onboard and offboard new team members and other stakeholders.
- Experimentation – agile teams leverage technologies like a/b and multivariate testing to frequently release small experiments. For example, a marketing team might want to check whether tweaking a campaign’s call to action will resonate better with a target audience.
- Monitoring and measuring results – agile teams have powerful tracking tools in place so that they can quickly understand the results of each test they run. Tests that show promising results are scaled while those that don’t are scrapped.
- Sprint-oriented work – agile teams break big projects down into digestible tasks that can be completed in a specific time frame; usually between two to six weeks. Huge projects like a product launch, might not fit into one sprint, and so are broken down into numerous sprints that are handled one at a time.
The agile race to ultimate productivity can only be won with task management software to support agile processes and methodologies. Ideally, this software should be flexible and customizable enough to adapt to a marketing team’s unique workflow and style.
Planview AdaptiveWork Go supports agile marketing teams with a simple, intuitive platform that makes it easy to drive agile adoption. Set up a live demo today.
