Agility is the darling of business logophiliacs. Strategists, managers, marketers and bloggers are in love with the concept of agility. There’s agile software development, agile communication practices, and now there’s Agile Marketing Automation. Agile Marketing Automation is the tool for an inbound marketing approach that informs, interacts and nurtures leads to impact revenue as they move through the sale funnel. Agile Marketing Automation enables fast, yet controlled changes. It supports marketing, benefits sales, and proves ROI with a powerful suite of features that can be easily adjusted on demand.
Agile Marketing Automation: Spinning, Skidding or Sliding?
The benefits of Agile Marketing Automation are outstanding. There’s the ability to change direction, to correct course, to modify your approach, to receive and integrate feedback, to stay under control in the driver’s seat, and to win the Piston Cup! But with speed and agility comes risk. You’re either spinning, skidding or sliding. Which one are you?
Agile Marketing Automation is only a tool. It’s only as good as the process that it supports. You do have an Agile Marketing process don’t you? Of course we do! We are Marketing! We are Communicators! We recognize that reactions are fickle and that we need to respond in real time. We pivot on a dime. We are movers. We are shakers. Being agile is our core. If anyone can love an agile process, it’s Marketing.
These days Marketers have more “responsibility” than ever before. Marketing ideas can be tested, reviewed, and optimized with campaigns, metrics and deeper data. There’s customer responsibility, social media marketing, content marketing. So many disparate functions, tools, systems and data to capture our imagination! When the siren song begins to play, and agile seems just a day away, how do we successfully apply Agile Methods to our marketing efforts?
Agile Methods emerged as a software development movement in reaction to the constraints associated with heavily regimented processes. It is an approach that values communication and feedback; that recognizes that all information is not known in advance; and that supports change through iteration.
These are values that are shared by Marketing. Managing communication between a brand and a prospect is all about providing them the right information at the right time in the buying process. Recognizing that prospects value communication and feedback is the reason for targeted content to inform, entertain, socialize and earn the prospect’s business. Marketing Automation tools support this form of agility by allowing prospects to define the path through their modes of interaction which include targeted search, website visits, whitepaper downloads, or demo requests.
The mission of Agile Marketing is simple:
- To continually ensure marketing and sales alignment with business goals
- To increase communication and collaboration between marketing/sales/clients
- To enable rapid and adaptive campaign development
- To respond to change with modification, correction, and optimization
Agile Marketing activities include:
- Short and iterative cycles (less than 1 month)
- Daily communication through stand-ups
- Clients and Marketers brainstorm to generate user stories with success metrics
- A backlog is created to host the user stories
- Marketers build/evolve campaigns based on user stories
- Testing occurs throughout the lifecycle
- Acceptance criteria are defined by Marketing, Sales, Clients before build/implementation
- Focus on what can and should be done now
- Customers try out the prototype campaign/service/feature and evolve their requirements
- Changes are “timeboxed”
While there are many success stories with Agile Methods for Marketing Automation, it’s important to remember that the goal is to deliver value in a repeatable, defined and predictable way. Determining which Agile Methods approach works for your organization requires a strong team leader and an a powerful Marketing Automation tool. A Marketing Automation tool that will support both the marketing and sales departments by capturing leads, defining criteria that determines the relevant content to provide to leads, and then nurturing those leads to become sales ready. Agile Methods combined with Agile Marketing Automation is an inspired approach right out of the marketing playbook.
