Vishwa Vijay Rana is the co-founder of Unispade, an Agency discovery platform for Brands.
What if you could add 75% more value to your target customers by doing 35% less work than before?
You must have heard about Agile and Scrum before which is usually always related to software development processes to build complex software quickly on the go.
You get up in the morning and think about what you want to achieve and when you look at the metrics from your last campaign, you get back at damage control.
With a rapidly changing environment, marketers are usually in a reactive mode and Agile Marketing gives the marketers a chance to become pro-active in their approach.
When you think of Agile Marketing, rather than defining it, think of what it can do.
The AMF is not a tool or software but a set of guidelines derived from the Agile Methodologies developed for the purpose of simplifying and speeding up processes for complex software development projects.
Now there are various different Agile Frameworks but the most well-adapted frameworks for marketing are:
It is an iterative approach to where you get regular continuous feedback from the users, team members, and other stakeholders.
This lets the team come back and check up on their activities and improve what they are doing as soon as the metrics or feedback comes in.
Thus, Agile Marketing Framework is a pre-defined set of actions. Budgets may change rapidly when you work with an Agile framework.
Traditional Processes are as follows in the image below.
Image Source:- www.scrum.org
Agile processes are as follows in the image below.
Image Source:- www.scrum.org
All these changes has lead to a demand to replace the old outdated planning and strategizing processes.
The older processes have no scope to respond to feedbacks and entertain changes rapidly.
Some processes do not even have a structure to receive feedbacks from the major stakeholders.
Agile Marketing Framework provides an approach to pull together a cross functional team, plan and re-plan marketing operations on a daily basis depending on the qualitative and quantitative feedbacks received.
AMF helps teams in the following ways:
1. Incompetent Marketers
If your organization is not hiring the right team with the right skill set, AMF can not help you. A skilled marketing workforce is the key to implementation of Agile Methodologies.
2. The Illusion of being Agile
Moment Marketing is not Agile Marketing. The difference between Traditional Teams and Agile teams (As elaborated further in the article) is that Agile Marketing is an overall framework, a strategic decision and not a tactical one.
3. Inefficient Strategy
Agile framework will not help you in deciding which marketing channels will yield best results. This is totally up to the team's brainstorming, strategizing and experience capabilities.
Traditional Marketing Teams
Agile Marketing Teams
There are 2 concepts you need to keep in mind while transitioning towards Agile Methodology:
Prerequisites of Building an Agile Marketing Team
Team
Source: McKinsey
Process
However, teams do not necessarily need to adopt a single particular framework.
Many organizations work with a hybrid framework model that embraces good things and eliminate irrelevant things from each framework.