Use Agile Marketing to Grow Your Business

Every day, without you knowing it, you encounter a little piece of digital marketing in one way or another. You see it on your social media feed while watching a YouTube video while reading a blog, or even when you search on Google. Online marketing is a massive industry and is still continuously growing. More and more businesses are aiming to be on top of the competition. Regardless of your business structure, you will want to implement a more efficient process towards your digital marketing strategy. Why not go for agile marketing?

What is Agile Marketing?

The agile marketing process involves the use of strategies and tools to help teams focus their efforts on tasks that bring better value and results. Taking inspiration from agile software development, agile marketing aims to quickly respond to changes, improve collaboration and interactions between team members, use tests and data for making decisions, and implement rapid iterations.

Why Use Agile Methodology in Digital Marketing?

Using agile in marketing has brought about a lot of positive results in how marketing teams work. If you think agile marketing is something that you’d like to explore, here are some of the benefits that you can reap once you decide to establish an agile marketing team for your business.

1. Improved productivity

Marketing teams measure their productivity differently, with some counting the number of efforts fulfilled, while others focus on the results. Whatever productivity measure your team decides to use, agile marketing can help you boost your productivity. It can enable your team to achieve more marketing goals within a shorter span of time. In fact, statistics show that 87% of teams improved their overall productivity after adopting agile methodology. 

2. Enhanced performance measurability

Performance measurement is a vital aspect of agile marketing. With the agile methodology in place, your marketing team can easily measure the results of your marketing efforts. By using the performance data you have so far gathered, you can create a better marketing strategy and invest your time and resources wisely on efforts that truly matter.

3. Better communication and transparency

With an agile marketing approach, you also get to improve your team’s communication and work visibility. By using agile methods such as Scrum or Kanban system for digital marketing, you can easily layout your tasks on a board. This will make it easy for everyone to see the amount of workload the team has to accomplish. With better transparency at work, your marketing team can also experience better communication, since the improved visibility of pending tasks will mean less back and forth communication. 

4. Streamlined prioritization

A recent survey shows that 80% of businesses that adopted Agile helped them improve their prioritization. At the same time, 71% of Agile users also noted seeing improvements in their ability to manage changing priorities. This goes to show that you get to focus your efforts on tasks that need to be prioritized, maximize the use of your resources and save time through agile marketing.

5. Greater adaptability to changes

93% of teams who implemented the Agile methodology for marketing helped them switch gears more quickly and work faster for better marketing results. Adaptability is the very nature of agile methodology. This is what makes it the ideal approach for marketing teams to be more productive and implement rapid iterations.

How to Implement Agile Marketing

With the steady growth of agile marketing and considering the benefits many companies are reaping from implementing this approach, it might get you thinking about going agile yourself. But how do you start implementing agile project management for marketing? Follow these steps and get started on your agile marketing.

1. Set up relevant and measurable metrics

For you to better gauge how your marketing efforts are working out, it’s better to implement an analytical system from the get-go. By doing so, you get to use the data you have collected and found out if any of your marketing strategies are working out. Some social media KPIs worth tracking are click-through rate, conversion, and engagement rate while some marketing metrics that you might want to measure include website traffic, number of new and returning visitors, duration and number of sessions, page views, and more.

2. Identify your marketing goals

It’s important that you clarify from the start what your end goal is in terms of implementing agile marketing solutions. Do you want to get more website visitors, gain more customers, increase your sales, or all of the above? Whether you want to achieve one or all of these, it’s ideal to be more specific with the goals that you set. For example, your whole team should be aware that you aim to increase your site visitors by 100% within 6 months or gain 50% more customers within 3 months. This way, everyone in the team can pitch in when it comes to identifying steps that you should take to meet your goals.

Once you have identified your agile marketing goals, it’s time for you to plan your sprints. You might also want to schedule a sprint planning with your team so that you can try to predict how much work you can accomplish within a specific amount of time. By using flow metrics such as throughput and cycle time, you can be more accurate about how much time and effort you will need to achieve your sprint goals.

3. Define your tasks

Once you have your agile marketing metrics and sprint goals set, you can now start identifying the tasks your team will need to accomplish. You will need to create a list of things that your marketing team will need to try to help you get closer to the goals and metrics you have planned to achieve. To do this, you can conduct research on what tasks other marketers usually follow. If you have gathered enough data within your business, you can gain insights from this data and start growing your team’s to-do list.

4. Use Scrum and Kanban to monitor your tasks

For you to better measure your team’s overall productivity and monitor how tasks are moving forward, you should implement agile marketing tools such as Scrum, Kanban or a combination of both. Whether you prefer to stick to purely Scrum or Kanban or go hybrid with Scrumban, the important thing is that you use a tool that will make it easy for you to keep an eye on your whole marketing process. By using visual project management tools such as Scrum, Kanban or Scrumban, you get to have better visibility of all actions within your team. It will also help you better understand which tasks are delivering better results towards marketing your brand.

Check out our Marketing board template to get started in no time.

5. Test, analyze, and repeat

As you work on accomplishing your sprints and completing your pending agile marketing tasks, you should make sure that you are keeping track of your velocity and the results of each task that you accomplish. Once every sprint is completed, analyze the results and figure out if there is something that you can improve or change to achieve a better outcome for your next sprints. Then on your next sprint cycles, your goal is to kaizen your processes and acquire more impactful results. See to it that you are achieving your agile marketing goals and measuring your productivity by using the metrics you have initially set during your sprint planning.

Conclusion

Whether you are a new business or a more established brand that’s trying to find better ways to grow your business and improve your performance in the market, agile marketing can definitely do wonders for you. If done properly, your agile marketing team can become more productive and become more adaptable to changes. And to help you accomplish your agile marketing efforts, add Kanban Zone to your project management tools to help you become a better manager to your marketing team.