Make Agile Marketing Work for Your Team

We’re more than half-way through January which means that statistically speaking, you’ll be abandoning your New Year’s resolutions very soon. Your spouse doesn’t want that to happen. Your client doesn’t want that to happen. Roger West doesn’t want that to happen, so neither should you. Don’t exile your aspirations to the island of misfit dreams. Don’t settle for dropping your business or fitness goals at the first wink of February. In fact, up the ante. Merge the two, and get agile.

Sure, you probably should have started implementing an agile strategy at the end of last year to secure a fully profitable 2020 - but the beauty of agile is that it’s built upon the principles of speed and adaptation. Basically, you have no excuse but to get started. Before you do, let’s get one thing straight. Agile marketing straddles the line between sexy buzzword and an effective marketing strategy. Don’t let its surge in popularity deter you - this time there’s real merit to the accolades.

Why You Should Care About Agile Marketing

Agile marketing facilitates rapid growth and enhances your ability to pivot focus, goals, and tactics as needed. Implementing an agile marketing strategy and getting your team “fit” will allow you to make drastic changes in responsiveness, creative choice, and collaboration. Agile’s reliance on hard data means that course-corrections and campaign choices are informed by irrefutable evidence - making it easy to execute and justify any end-of-sprint revisions. Don’t believe the benefits? Take a look at the numbers:

• 95% of respondents in a VersionOne report state they experienced success in their agile projects.
• Agile campaigns are 2x more likely to succeed than traditionally run campaigns, according to Standish Chaos.
• 92% of senior executives believe that organizational agility is a crucial element of their business success.
• 87% of businesses reported an increase in team productivity after adopting agile strategies.

On board yet? Good! It’s time to limber up.

Off to the Races with Agile Marketing

Agile marketing is a series of sprints, and if you’ve ever gotten on a treadmill after a few months of extended “recovery”, then you know that jumping into a HIIT workout isn’t the wisest decision. You need to do a dynamic warm-up. You have to make sure you’re hydrated. There are steps you need to take to get yourself ready for sprinting and other fast-paced activities.

Getting an agile campaign up and running is no different. You don’t have to go from 0 to 100, there are ways to quickly and effectively implement agile without causing injury or upset. Take these steps to get yourself on track for an effective year of agile marketing and better client service. You don’t have to use each and every one of these strategies, choose the ones that work best for your team of sprinters-in-the-making.

Collaboration: Getting agile is a team effort. If you can’t get your people to buy into it - it won’t work. To successfully implement agile, create an environment that makes your team feel safe to collaborate time and time again. Every member of your team will be given their own set of responsibilities that contributes to the overall campaign or marketing goal, making it imperative to encourage the success of everyone as individuals and ultimately, as members of the team.

Shrinking Your Thinking: This doesn’t mean minimize your ambitions. Instead, shrink the timeframe within which you’d like to achieve your goals, then augment those goals to fit this new interval. Instead of saying, “I want 10,000 new followers in 2020,” make your goal to obtain 250 new followers in a two week sprint, and continue to modify your goals and methods to maintain that upwards trajectory. And - if your goal changes, that’s perfectly okay! Redefine and start your next sprint.

Start Scrummin’: Holding a daily scrum is not a novel concept, but it is essential to getting your team agile. Get your team together for fifteen minutes each morning to discuss what they did the day before, what they’re doing that day, and any problems standing between them and fulfilling their daily responsibilities.

Track It: This is non-negotiable. You need to track your progress. It doesn’t matter how you do it. It can be in a notebook, it can be on your boardroom whiteboard, or it can be tracked in your project management software of choice. If you’re not assessing your progress or your team’s progress, there’s no point in going agile. Like any track star, you need to monitor your sprints to find any issues, room for improvement, or even methodologies that work.

 

Sounds good, right? If you want to work with an agile team - Roger West is here for you. Let’s work together and create your most agile campaign yet.