Your marketing team has a weekly brainstorming session, yet delivering results has been slow. You have conducted massive strategy sessions, but implementing the tactics have cost you considerable time. You have a number of projects to complete, but you are time crunched.

Is there a better, a more efficient solution to these marketing woes? Yes. Agile Marketing!

Agile marketing is nothing but speed optimization, the speed at which you will plan, the speed at which you will execute and the speed at which you will fail. Doing things faster allows sufficient time on your watch to re-think your first approach if it indicates the presence of bugs and optimize it better. Thus, helping you generate revenue faster for each project and making meetings more purposeful.

The projects are prioritized on the basis of which needs less time for getting the desired results whilst delivering the maximum revenue. This means moving from traditional marketing to a more advanced marketing process that is efficient, transparent, and flexible.

Here are the 3 Laws you must follow to put together an efficient team of agile marketers:

Law #1 Form An Agile Team

Putting the Team Together

A marketing head’s biggest challenge is putting together a great agile marketing team as they are the biggest asset. Here are the 5 pointers to consider while formulating the team-

1. A small team works best for agile marketing. Ideally, 6 or fewer team members are preferable as there are fewer chances of stalling responsibilities compared to a big team.

2. Put together a cross-functional team so that you have a unit of varied talents. For example, an expert writer, designer, marketing automation specialist, programmer, database analyst, etc all in one team.

3. Try to have everyone co-located in the same room till completion of the agile project. In case of remote team members, make sure the team is collaborating through Skype, Google Hangouts, etc.

4. Be on a constant lookout for innovation. Ensure that your team is executing something  new that will help in making significant progress on the project as well as in the company.

5. Irrespective of title, roles or seniority, there should be an equal contribution from everyone. They should deliver their work on time.

Productivity Hacks: Initiate A Daily Stand-up Meeting

Short and to the point, assemble your team for a daily stand-up meeting to quickly review their tasks for the day. This ensures that everyone is on track and knows what they are going to deliver that day. The other benefits are-

– Identify and solve roadblocks quicker

– Improved team collaboration and transparency

Keep Them In Charge: Choose a Quarterback

This person will have an anticipatory view on projects based on perspective, scope and deliverables. He will oversee the standup meetings, negotiate with team members who want to drop out or recruit a new one.

What qualities should you look for in your quarterback?

– Someone who understands agile practices

– Someone with the ability to facilitate meetings or negotiate consensus

Law #2 Choose. Strategize. Execute.

Choose: The Right Project

It is not necessary that each of your marketing processes should be implemented with agile marketing. The key is to identify the most important aspect of your business and apply agility to it.

What type of projects should you pick?

– Projects that are likely to drive more revenue

– Projects that will impact customer satisfaction

– Projects that will improve the efficiency of the department

Strategize: One Subset At A Time

Do not spend maximum time on strategizing or data crunching. Instead, isolate your project into subsets based on what you want to accomplish.

Once you have broken down your objective into subsets, you can work on accomplishing them one subset at a time. This will lift a load off your team’s back and give a clear focus.

Execute: Begin With The End

To keep your team on track, you should always identify the ideal outcome in the beginning. Once you have the end goal in mind, even when the project size or requirement increases, there will be no reason for your work getting stalled. While identifying the outcome, here are two things to bear in mind-

1. A great bid for agile marketing are the projects that can be delivered within 3 months. Why? Projects with shorter time period are easier to keep the momentum up against that of projects requiring 12+ months duration.

2. Before you kick-start the work, crisply define your goal so that everyone in your team are on the same page.

Embrace Design & Test

Be on constant testing for what works best for your team. Try out a new process or trend, like the content, creatives,  etc. You should test which campaign elements are working out for you so that you can replace the ones that are not.

This is a way of knowing what is important to your team, and finding out if you are doing better or worse. The process to follow while designing and testing-

– Plan

– Communicate with the team

– Feedback from team members

– Demo to the stakeholders for feedback

– Review

– Retrospect

Make mistakes faster so that you recover faster too. This way, you will be equipped to respond faster in the right manner when things go wrong.

Law #3 Deliver Results

Deliver Quickly And Improve Upon It

In agile marketing, you have to deliver the result as quickly as you can, like in weeks or months (but not years). Why?

When you deliver as soon as you possibly can, you also give yourself the time to consider the areas for improvement. Was there an issue with the plan? Your team should quickly determine an action to resolve it.

Once you start realizing the benefits of your initiative, you can then accordingly refine and realign your process based on the feedback and changing objectives.

Speed: Be Reasonably Early

With agile marketing, you need to deliver early. Do not over think or be extra cautious like how it used to be in traditional marketing. Why? Because this consumes valuable time, the time that you could instead be using to launch a new campaign. Remember that agile marketing doesn’t necessarily mean working longer hours, but working more efficiently.

Conclusion

Adhere to these 3 laws and realize the success of agile marketing and walk the talk.

P.S: The success of your marketing team is driven by the team as a whole, not by individuals. Give your team members their space, communicate better, and enjoy substantially more efficient results.

Download an interesting research on what works (and what doesn’t) in email marketing for ecommerce by TargetingMantra.

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