About this episode
In this episode, Andrea Fryrear, founder of Agile Sherpas dispels common misunderstandings around agile marketing and shares how you can use it to drive business growth predictably. Insights she shares include:
- How to approach agile marketing when starting out?
- How is agile marketing any different from growth marketing?
- How can agile marketing be applied in a B2B context
- How to iterate and test with agile marketing
- Can agile marketing be effectively used by smaller teams and individuals or just enterprise teams
- What are the critical elements to ensure that the process works when using hybrid agile methodologies?
- How to handle teams when using agile methodologies
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What is agile marketing?
Agile marketing is the process of managing and improving the way a marketing team does its work through the application of specific agile methodologies.
Agile marketing is designed to increase alignment between a business’s goals and sales staff, to improve communication, both within and outside the marketing team. The aim is to increase the speed and responsiveness of marketing. The process copies that of agile software development, with some differences in the details.
Andrea Fryrear says that the agile marketing process is iterative, allowing for short marketing experiments, frequent feedback, and the ability to react to changing market conditions.
Andrea Fryrear also says agile marketing –
- Is not limited to software development and helps alleviate some of the complexity of traditional marketing
- Doesn’t sacrifice planning and stability for the sake of speed
- Puts decision making in the hands of marketers, achieving strategic business objectives as well as benefiting customers
- Aims to do away with the limitations of traditional marketing
Management consulting firm McKinsey & Company shares a similar perspective –
Agile, in the marketing context, means using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly iterating. At scale, a high-functioning agile marketing organization can run hundreds of campaigns simultaneously and multiple new ideas every week.
The truth is, many marketing organizations think they’re working in an agile way because they’ve adopted some agility principles, such as test and learn or reliance on cross-functional teams. But when you look below the surface, you quickly find they’re only partly agile, and they therefore only reap partial benefits. For example, marketing often doesn’t have the support of the legal department, IT, or finance, so approvals, back-end dependencies, or spend allocations are slow. Or their agency and technology partners aren’t aligned on the need for speed and can’t move quickly enough. Simply put: if you’re not agile all the way, then you’re not agile.
How can you use lean or agile principles to boost business growth?
Hal Conick, a staff writer for the American Marketing Association, has this to say –
Russ Lange, a partner at marketing consultancy CMG Partners, defines lean as a methodology that continuously reduces waste and limits the amount of work in progress. Agile, on the other hand, improves effectiveness; Lange says that adopting agile processes means constantly looking for new tasks, experimenting with them and learning if they work. “Together, they can do wonderful things,” he says. His company, which assists larger organizations in adopting these processes, reports that 67% of companies using lean and agile marketing increase their profits and revenue.
How can marketers — whether in small business, the middle market or a Fortune 500 company — use lean and agile principles to their advantage?
The video below shares some insights.