The cost that you incur is not just money! Without realizing it, you are spending else, and perhaps even more important than money: time! So it’s time to manage and use the time well with your financial budget to succeed in your business. How? This is where Agile Management and Agile Marketing techniques come to your aid and as its name implies, your marketing process is agile and influential at the same time.
In this article, we will provide a simple and comprehensive definition of agile management and marketing and discuss how to implement this management and marketing approach into your business. That is, we will introduce you to the concept of customer story, scrum team and task management systems.
What is Agile Management?
In February 2001, a number of programmers shared a passion for finding a way to optimize their work. Their common concern was their lack of time and low productivity, and no matter how hard they tried, they were still unable to complete their projects in a timely manner. After much discussion, they finally came to terms with a new way of managing the programming process known today as “Agile Management”.
For these programmers, agile management is the kind of management that breaks your tasks down into smaller, rather than large, end-to-end projects. Split between members so that you can work faster and have better returns. For example, developers of large companies such as Toyota and Honda have increased their productivity several times over the long run of using this management approach.
What is Agile Marketing?
Now we know what agile management is, we can dive into agile marketing. After agile management made an unprecedented advancement in the programming world, marketers were tempted to steal the key to their success! And that’s how agile marketing came into the business world. Just like agile management, agile marketing also breaks down a project that looks great and time-consuming into a few, yet transparent, parts to increase the speed and effectiveness of the work.
The difference that agile marketing has with other marketing methods is that in agile marketing you always have to be aware of the day-to-day market situation so that you can adapt to it and that’s something that even in agile management (at least today) is necessary applied.
Agile marketing increases the speed, quality, flexibility and effectiveness of your marketing many times over other methods.
What are the Benefits of Agile Marketing for Your Business?
If you are going to abandon one system and replace it with another, it must only be because of all the benefits it brings with itself, otherwise, it is not rational! Here are some of the benefits of agile marketing:
- First of all, this marketing method helps us focus more on our customers and create more lasting value for them.
- In addition, you know that the modern world is changing like electricity and wind, and if we cannot adapt ourselves to its speed, we will certainly fail. But there is no need to worry because another benefit of agile marketing is precisely that it helps us get ourselves into the marketing world.
To understand the reality and seriousness of the problem, here are some examples of these changes: Over the course of a year, over 80 updates have been made to Google’s algorithms, and things like the Panda algorithm and the Penguin algorithm have changed greatly. Directly affecting Google search results (hopefully you are interested in SEO!) And thousands of others like these that make it hard for marketers to shine. Now that we can’t slow down Google! The only solution is to speed up and cope with these changes.
How does Agile Marketing make a Difference to Your Business?
Now that we’ve talked enough about what agile marketing is and what benefits it can have for your business, it’s time to know what amazing changes this can make to your business.
Agile marketing helps your team focus on valuable projects, collectively working, measure its impact, and keep moving forward with the results.
You might ask, “What exactly is agile marketing doing?”
In this section, we will examine each of these obstacles and demonstrate how they hinder your progress. Then we’ve come up with an agile management and marketing approach to solve these problems to clear the way for you as much as possible.
Organize information in a hierarchy
The first thing that hampers our progress is that we constantly bring new information into our organization, but often we can’t use it for the benefit of our business and marketing. Why? Because it’s all wrong to organize our information!
We get a lot of information and what is our purpose? To make the most of this information to produce and deliver customer service. But since our organization does not revolve around the customer, we cannot apply this information directly to our customers. But if you listen to agile marketing, you will find that it eliminates the hierarchy of information and replaces them in the “agile information management” model.
In the agile model, the hierarchy of information organization collapses and the information is grouped linearly, meaning that we no longer classify information on the basis of their “superiority”, but rather put them all together and prioritize their importance.
Cascading (Goodbye cascading model, hello agile model!)
We run our business based on a cascading model that is both slower and less responsive to the business world.
The cascade model works in a step-by-step manner. That is, in the first stage we do some of the work to get to the second stage, then the third and so on (in the meantime it is not possible to start the second until the first stage is over). But if the assumption is made in phase two or three of a change in the business market (changes such as Google or Penguin algorithm updates) we will not be able to respond to this change because it is more than a few months past the start of the first phase!
The point is that the status of businesses, social networks, and SEO is not changing monthly, but rather hourly and even minute! The reason the cascade structure no longer suits today’s market is that you have to start from scratch if you want to make a difference!
Fortunately, agile management can save us here! How? The agile model is designed precisely so that you can keep up with the fast-changing business market. Agile management gives you insights that can greatly predict the business world. In the meantime, in agile marketing it is possible to do several steps at a time and, if necessary, make a change in the previous step without affecting the subsequent steps.
What are the Principles of Agile Marketing?
Let’s get into a little more detail in this section and take a look at the four principles of agile marketing.
1. Agile marketing is customer-centric.
Customers are the most important factor in agile marketing (or any kind of marketing) because the reason we are doing this business is that we want to help our customers. What we need to do is put the customer at the center of our work. There are many ways to do this, each of which somehow brings you closer to your goal, but you’re looking for agility! So you have to choose the fastest and most effective. One way that agile marketing offers and features is that it is the “customer story”.
2. Agile marketing has cross-functional teams.
If you remember, we said that one of our problems was hierarchical information classification. But we did not find a solution.
In agile marketing, everything revolves around the customer.
Organizations usually work by creating a specific team for each part of the work and separating them from other teams to get the job done. But in agile marketing, this method is not used at all and you need to bring together people of different backgrounds to work together to maximize the speed, accuracy, and quality of your business and marketing.
Now how to create a cross-functional team? Do not worry. Here are some tips for you. One of the most popular ways is “outpatient meetings”. Note that the time for outpatient sessions should not exceed ten to fifteen minutes. What to do now in these outpatient meetings? Usually, in these short sessions, we want to deal with three things very quickly: what we did, what we should do next, and what factors might hinder our progress.
3. Agile Marketing is Pragmatic!
One of the biggest obstacles to the growth of many businesses is that they focus too much on thinking and planning, not even spending half the time on the action (which is the most important criteria). But agile marketing invites you to the action! This means you get started immediately and get your plan right after the initial planning. Now if you need to change halfway, it’s easy to imagine what to change because you know that with agile marketing, you’ll quickly adapt to the needs of the day.
4. Agile Marketing Needs Repetition!
Like all businesses, your work is on a path to success: you produce a product or service, you enter the business world, and you wait for the outcome. The question now is that businesses that use agile marketing will follow the same path, but why are they more successful?
Speed and flexibility! That’s the answer. In regular business, if your product or service is not successful and satisfactory, you are wasting a lot of time and actually lagging behind your competitors. But agile marketing gives you a winning leaf. What leaf? That you learn from your mistake in the shortest possible time and continue where it left off.
How to integrate Agile Marketing into our Business?
By the time you joined us, we have explained to you what agile marketing and agile management are and what their advantages are. Now, the more important point is: how to put this marketing approach into practice in our business.
Write the story of your customers
If you remember, in the “customer-centric” section, which is the first principle of agile marketing, we said that the best way to put the customer at the center is to use the customer story. Now, what is the “customer story” itself? You are putting yourself at the customer’s side and seeing what you expect from a service or product. Another and more common way is to interact directly with customers. This means that you communicate directly with your customers and get information about their needs and expectations. This has two advantages for you and the customer:
- It makes the customer transparent and accurate in their requests.
- It helps you determine a clear path to move forward with a clear understanding of the customer (and its needs).
This way you are actually collaborating with your customers and somehow incorporating them into your business to know what they need to succeed. The following formula makes it easier for you:
“As … I need … to be able to …”
One customer might say, “As a marketer, I need a website with useful content to grow my business.”
Keep in mind that customer stories should be as concise and as simple as possible, not only does it not make it easier and more optimistic, but it also adds more complexity.
