With every passing year, it feels like marketing is becoming more difficult to get right. It’s easy to attribute this to the extreme competition in most industries and the growing complexity of reaching the right people at the right time through the right channels.
If you go on a quick trip down memory lane, you’ll remember that not so long ago there were quite fewer ways to reach your desired audience like TV, radio, print media, and only a handful of online channels.
Now, there are countless digital platforms – social media, streaming services, and websites. People are spread out all over these different channels, making it hard to know where to focus your marketing efforts.
Add to that the complexity of effective remote working and it becomes very easy to realize that it’s not just a feeling. Marketing is indeed more difficult than ever before to get right.
To be successful in such a complex marketing environment, you need to be adaptable and capable of quickly changing directions when things are not going as planned. Otherwise said, you need to be Agile.
Key Takeaways:
- Marketing agility is an organization’s ability to adapt to changes based on a number of ever-changing factors: the market, consumer behavior, and marketing trends. It is more about mindset and culture and less about practices and tools.
- For any Agile marketing transformation to succeed, there should be shift in mindset throughout the whole organization, to be adaptable and ready to try new things and experiment. The whole organization should also commit to the Agile Marketing Manifesto, practice servant leadership, strengthen collaboration and make decisions based on facts and data.
- By achieving marketing agility, organizations can prioritize better, maintain higher levels of productivity and quality work, improve morale of its employees, and improve visibility of work across all departments and levels.
- Continuous improvement is crucial in achieving marketing agility, and there are four paths towards it: mastering the basics, understanding Agile team applications, embracing Agile leadership, and building an Agile culture.
Applying visual management is a key piece of the puzzle when it comes to achieving marketing agility. However, there are several others that you need to piece together to get there.
If you want to dive deeper into the topic of visual marketing management, and get several tested Kanban templates for different contexts, download our dedicated eBook on the topic.
Stick to the end to learn what marketing agility is, what makes it worth pursuing, and explore four paths that will lead you there.
What is Marketing Agility?
Many people get the impression that adopting Kanban or adding several meetings like the daily standup is enough to achieve marketing agility. Although these are definitely important steps in the right direction, marketing agility is far bigger than that.
Generally speaking, marketing agility is the ability of an organization to quickly and effectively adapt to changes in the market, consumer behavior, and marketing trends. It’s about being flexible, responsive, and proactive rather than sticking rigidly to a set plan.
Contrary to the common belief, marketing agility is more about mindset and culture than specific practices and tools.
It won’t be farfetched to say that applying Agile marketing is like racing in Formula 1. Yes, the car you’re driving is super important, but if you don’t know how to handle and control it, you’re more likely to crash than cross the finish line.
Here are the key components of a successful Agile marketing transformation:
- Organization-wide shift in mindset, driven by the desire to be adaptable
- Culture of experimentation
- Commitment to the Agile Marketing Manifesto
- Servant leadership
- Collaboration instead of cooperation
- Data-driven decision making
Marketing organizations of all sizes have been trying to put these pieces together for years, and there’s more than one good reason for that.
Let’s have a look at the benefits of marketing agility.
Benefits of Marketing Agility
Achieving marketing agility is a process that takes time and resources. However, the organizations that successfully complete it can expect several significant benefits.
1. More Effective Prioritization of Work
Agile marketing is extremely focused on delivering customer/stakeholder value. Therefore, organizations that embrace agility become rigorous in prioritizing work in a way that allows them to maximize the value they generate without wasting time and resources on activities that are not helpful on that front.
2. Higher Productivity
By focusing on doing the right work at the right time, marketing organizations that embrace agility are capable of achieving levels of productivity that traditional organizations simply can’t match. This is due to the fact that Agile organizations don’t rush into starting new work as soon as a request arrives, but keep their focus on finishing what’s already started first.
3. Higher Quality of Marketing Work
Marketing agility is more about achieving outcomes than simply having a high output. Otherwise said, what happens after you deliver a marketing campaign is more important than delivering as many marketing campaigns as possible within the shortest amount of time.
This focus on the outcome of everything they do allows marketing organizations that embrace agility to maximize the quality of their work. The logic is quite simple. It’s better to do one thing right that actually supports your business goals than do five rushed things, which move the needle very little or not at all for your organization.
4. Improved Employee Morale
The next benefit of marketing agility is related to the happiness of your employees. When marketers understand how their work contributes to organizational goals, they are more likely to go the extra mile.
When those efforts bear fruit, the individuals become more satisfied, loyal, and innovative. Agile marketers engage more in their work because they have control over it.
5. Better Visibility of Project Status
Remember the days of spreadsheet project management? With marketing agility, they become nothing more than a memory. To facilitate greater visibility, accountability, and transparency, Agile relies heavily on visual management.
You can see all parts of a project visualized in the same place, understand who is responsible for what in a single glimpse, and enjoy a bird’s eye view of the progress of every task. This leaves very little room for confusion and delays caused by miscommunication.
With the rapid technological advancements in recent years and further refinement of Agile ways of working, nowadays marketing organizations can visualize and connect every aspect of their work.
Just imagine having the ability to connect every social post you get to work on to the grand organizational goal of increasing revenue by X percent. With marketing agility and Portfolio Kanban, in particular, you don’t have to imagine.
The Importance of Continuous Education for Achieving Marketing Agility
By reaching this point of the article it should be clear that marketing agility can be a game changer for any organization. However, achieving the benefits covered so far and the many others there to obtain is far from easy.
Even though many try, few organizations are lucky enough to get all the benefits of marketing agility. One of the primary reasons for that is lack of proper education.
The internet is quite full of educational content on Agile marketing. Blog articles, how-to videos, whitepapers, and a ton of other resources are practically a click away.
The problem is that most of the available content is very fragmented and difficult to piece together.
Far too many organizations underestimate the value of continuous Agile education. The most recent Annual State of Agile Marketing Report documented that more than 70% of marketers found educational resources like Agile coaching, certifications, and self-paced learning courses valuable for achieving marketing agility. Yet, less than 35% of them got such support from their organizations.
Considering how approximately 70% of all transformational efforts fail, it’s easy to see why continuous education is so important for achieving marketing agility.
The good news is that there are learning paths leading to marketing agility fitting even for the busiest marketers on every organizational level.
4 Microlearning Paths Leading to Marketing Agility
Microlearning is an educational approach that’s been getting increasing traction in recent years. Its popularity in dynamic and time-consuming business functions like marketing has been growing for a reason – it’s easy to fit even within the busiest of days.
With microlearning, you can achieve marketing agility within any organization in a less demanding way and build a sustainable foundation for obtaining all the desired benefits.
You just have to identify the right learning path for you and your employees. Here are several tested examples:
- Path 1: Mastering the Basics
- Path 2: Understanding Agile Team Applications
- Path 3: Embracing Agile Leadership
- Path 4: Building an Agile Culture
Let’s have a deeper look at each of them.
Path 1: Mastering the Basics
Every award-winning writer started their journey by learning the alphabet before mastering the craft of writing. To be successful with Agile, a marketer (be it an intern or the CMO) must learn the very basics of marketing agility.
You must understand why agility is so valuable, be familiar with the values and principles of the Agile Marketing Manifesto, speak the language (e.g. know that Scrum is more than part of rugby), know the importance of customer centricity and visual management, and be familiar with the roles and responsibilities on an Agile team.
All the above-mentioned basic pieces of knowledge can be obtained separately in less than one hour. When you connect them together and block 30 minutes on your calendar for a couple of weeks for learning, you’ll be amazed how quickly marketing agility will start to make sense.
Path 2: Understanding Agile Team Applications
If understanding the basics is not an issue for a marketing organization struggling to achieve agility, then maybe the problem lies in its ability to adapt that knowledge to the specific organizational context.
A mistake that far too many teams make is trying to implement a universal recipe for applying Agile marketing. Unfortunately, those rarely work. Teams operate differently, and agility doesn’t have to require throwing out the window everything you do right now.
By learning different Agile team applications like creating a team charter, building and managing backlogs, tailoring a Kanban board to your specific needs, applying different prioritization techniques, and testing different approaches for capacity estimation, you can find your own working recipe for marketing agility.
When you tie together as a team the items of this learning path, agility might prove to be closer than you thought. To make the most of it, everyone on your team must walk the path so they can give their informed input on what the best approach for your organization would be.
Path 3: Embracing Agile Leadership
The third learning path on the list is exclusively for marketers in leadership roles. One of the most frequently mentioned myths related to Agile in every line of work is that it makes managers obsolete.
This couldn’t be further away from the truth and yet it still gets in the way of achieving marketing agility by feeding the internal resistance within people in leadership roles who feel threatened.
In reality, Agile requires a slightly different style of leadership to get right. It won’t make your management role obsolete and won’t put you on the market for a new job.
On the contrary, by walking the Agile leadership learning path, you’ll understand what effective management looks like in an Agile environment, learn how to apply modern strategic planning mechanisms, prioritize work for your team in a flexible way, and understand how to hire the right people for your organization.
Path 4: Building an Agile Culture
The final learning path for you to consider may very well be the differentiator between achieving marketing agility in the long run and endless frustration with how you do things as an organization.
Any transformational effort is tied to culture. No matter how beneficial it may be, there will always be opponents to the transformation who will put up fierce resistance to the changes you’re trying to make.
By focusing on building an Agile culture, you’ve got every chance to minimize the resistance and help everyone within your organization feel safe and motivated to go out of their way of doing things for the greater good.
By dedicating an hour or so every day for a few weeks to learning about the Agile mindset, understanding how to diagnose your current culture, grasping how to start building an Agile culture, and finding ways to create psychological safety, you will skyrocket your chances of long-term operational success.
This learning path is suitable for anyone in a leadership role. Whether you’re the team lead of a content marketing team or a CMO of an enterprise-level organization, continuous learning about the “soft side” of embracing marketing agility will get you closer to your transformational goals.
Ready to Start on a Path?
There’s no hiding from the fact that marketing is changing faster than ever before and it’s unlikely that the pace will soon drop.
As a result, it’s clear that agility is the way of the future for organizations that want to be successful in this unpredictable environment characterized by ever-growing competition in most industries.
By reaching the end of this article, it should be clear what marketing agility is and what benefits are in store for those who are able to achieve it.
The road to Agile marketing is long and full of challenges. To reach your desired destination, you’ve got to embrace visual management and identify the best path for you and our organization as a whole.
The four learning paths we covered to this point will get you closer to your destination in an easy and time-efficient manner. All you have to do is choose one and don’t stop until you reach its end.
So, are you ready to start on a path?
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About the Author: Alex
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