Marketing technology sophistication increases. The number of channels that brands need to reach keeps growing as audience expectations rise, and marketers discover that traditional methods aren’t as effective as before. Fortunately, for marketers, Agile marketing comes to their rescue and holds the key to making marketing work.
The buzz around Agile marketing increases with every passing day, making brands wonder whether it is too complicated to understand and implement. Agile marketing comes with its own set of terms, tools, and tactics, each of which may be unheard of by most marketers. However, it is quite accessible if marketers are flexible enough to avoid being held down by rigid, prescriptive approaches that aren’t useful.
What Is Agile Marketing?
Agile marketing is a tactical approach that requires teams to collectively identify and focus on high-value projects to complete them, measure the impact, and continuously improve results. It is a long-term, deliberate application of a specific Agile framework to manage and enhance how marketing teams get their work done.
It requires short-, medium-, and long-term marketing plans along with a strategic vision and differs from traditional marketing by focusing on frequent releases, relentless commitment to audience satisfaction, and deliberate experimentation. Agile marketing teams use sprints to complete projects and also determine whether a project was valuable or not and whether it should be repeated. It embraces failure as long as it provides insight for future projects and comes with lessons, which are then considered a success.
Values of Agile Marketing
Despite appearing different from the outside, every Agile marketing implementation will share some similar characteristics. If your team is missing one or more of these characteristics, it’s time you took a good look at your team to understand whether it genuinely is Agile. How agile teams work makes it clear as to what the typical values of Agile marketing are. These values are as follows.
- Responding to change rather than following a plan
- Rapid iterations rather than big campaigns
- Testing and data rather than opinions and conventions
- Multiple small experiments rather than a few big predictions
- Individuals and interactions rather than broader markets
- Collaborations rather than silos and hierarchy
This shows that Agile marketing is focused on marketing tactics rather than strategy and can be helpful. These teams look, work, and act differently, and if your team isn’t different after you adopt Agile, you haven’t truly utilized the full capabilities.
How to Use Agile Marketing?
Shifting to Agile marketing can be overwhelming, but mustn’t be feared. There are simple steps that guide brands and marketers to start using Agile. These steps are as follows.
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Prepare a To-Do List
Marketers must create backlogs, which in this case are prioritized to-do lists that teams use to identify the highest value work. The work of the highest value will accordingly be taken up by the team next. This list needs to be updated often to prevent working on the wrong projects.
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Build a Board
This board helps teams visualize the work and segregate work into three columns, namely, ‘To Do, Doing, and Done.’ this eases teams’ work during phases when work is passed through, or the handoffs needed to complete work.
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Set Limits
Set hard limits on how much work can be undertaken at a time. The limit varies according to the number of people on the team. Brands can accordingly set limits per person or per day. The point of setting boundaries is to maintain focus on the work at hand, rather than focusing on beginning new projects.
It is also advised to plan for or touchpoints to evaluate and continuously improve your process along with these steps. Make a list of new improvements that could be implemented and implement one each week.
How to Choose an Agile Marketing Framework?
To choose a Framework for Agile marketing, one must first be aware of the available framework types. Contrary to popular belief, Scrum is not the only way to implement an Agile mindset on a team. Other than Scrum, two other frameworks chosen from the three significant methodologies are as follows.
- Scrum
- Kanban
- Scrumban
The option of picking the right framework provides brands and marketers with a certain flexibility, empowering for marketing teams that seek an Agile approach. In most cases, marketers prefer a hybrid framework to get the most out of their Agile marketing strategy.
Scrum
Scrum’s focus is set on recovering incremental delivery. It uses shots sprints, which are or bursts of focused work that create a focus on valuable work and rid the team of distractions. Each sprint requires teams to decide how much work they can accomplish from their to-do list. The units can then focus on completing that work within a given time frame, known as a sprint.
Teams are focused on these items until the sprint concludes, which results in invaluable work at the end of the sprint. Teams manage this process with a few meetings, which proceed as follows.
- Sprint Plans
To outline upcoming work ok and completed by committing to it as a team.
- Standup Meets
Teams assess the progress, how they can succeed by helping each other, video, and what holds them back.
- Review
These are demonstrations for people outside the team to see what has been accomplished during sprints.
- Retrospective
Teams review the process of the past sprint to identify areas where they can improve.
Scrum Framework Roles
Specific roles are clearly defined in the Scrum process. These are as follows.
- Scrum Master
Own the process, facilitate meetings, and manage interpersonal relationships within the team.
- Product Owner
Ensure the team is doing the right word at the right time and is devoted to a single team.
- Team Members
Every member works together for mutual success, with little to no hierarchy within the team.
Who Should Choose Scrum?
Scrum is designed for teams with a strength of five to nine people. It works best when teams are cross-functional and gives search teams a better Chance At delivering the work they commit to during sprint planning. Scrum is also beneficial for teams that suffer from external interactions as it allows members to put work into the backlog.
Kanban
The Kanban framework is all about flow and designed to create systems that continuously deliver value to customers by creating visibility and focus. Visibility is established through the renowned Kanban board, which includes vertical columns that represent the work stage. The board is meant to show what a team is currently working on.
Focus is created by applying WIP limits, where WIP stands for Work in Progress. These limits are counterintuitive, but get things done faster. According to research from MarketingProfs in 2019, a high percentage of marketers can never say no to incoming requests, even if the requests do not align. Therefore, WIP limits and visualized work help solve this problem and many others.
Kanban is more complicated than just board and limits; however, these two are sufficient to get marketers started on Agile marketing. Along with time, marketers can incorporate additional practices as needed to mature their framework. This framework does not have a rigid meeting structure in Scrum, but marketers are advised to hold daily meetings and regular retrospectives to keep the process sailing smoothly.
Who Should Choose Kanban?
Kanban can work for teams of any size and is particularly suited for teams that fall outside of Scrum’s referred strength of five to nine individuals. Single-person teams can make use of the Kanban system as it scales up without much additional effort. Kanban is beneficial for teams that are not cross-functional, which could be the case for freelancers or agencies.
Scrumban
Most of you must have guessed correctly that Scrumban is a combination methodology that derives certain elements from Scrum and others from Kanban to create a hybrid Agile marketing framework. To simplify this, Scrumban applies a Kanban system in a Scrum context.
A real-world scenario involves visualizing workflow on a Kanban board while implementing WIP limits and continuing to plan and release work within sprints. It is as good as having access to a fully loaded buffet of agile options and choosing your best. However, sensitize a hybrid framework, every team can have their individual, unique auditions for removals. No two Scrumban frameworks will be exactly alike.
The meetings, visualized workflow, and retrospectives are the three things that form the foundation of any good Agile team. Scrumban gives marketers control over every aspect of their Agile system and brings excellent results once rolled out.
Conclusion
Agile marketing is all about experimentation and learning. The best Agile marketing teams have leaders who allow teams to choose the framework that works best with them, try it out for a good while, and modify it as needed. Scrum is great for teams with a higher number of individuals, while Kanban can be used by a single-person team or more. To get the best out of Agile marketing, teams make use of hybrid frameworks (Scrumban), which provide optimum features for campaigns and projects and deliver better results.
