Interactive marketing agency and agile marketing
“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” The words of Muhammad Ali speak to today’s most important attribute of successful marketing: agility. A great paper by Valtech painted the full picture of what agile marketing really is, and how organizations can adopt it. Agile marketing is a shift away from the traditional approach; think rigid annual plans and long market cycles and an interactive marketing agency should incorporate it. Agile marketing values flexibility, shorter response times and greater focus on the consumer. The need for agile marketing has been triggered by several changes in the landscape: fast-evolving markets and competition, shorter attention spans of today’s digitally-savvy consumers, the increased sophistication of analytics tools and more.
Significant changes need to be implemented by an interactive marketing agency in order to shift towards agile marketing. Here are some examples:
1. Moving away from long term planning: Annual marketing plans are no longer sustainable. In an environment where the only constant is change, marketers need to shift to shorter-term, more versatile marketing plans that involve constant testing and experimenting of tactics. The time between creating and executing a strategy must be reduced drastically to ensure it is current and timely. In short, marketing needs to behave like technology- i.e. release often, release fast. Ongoing beta testing, iterating and learning need to be integral to marketing.
2. Embracing marketing technology tools: There are a growing number of tools that enable centralization and agility in marketing. Customer responsive platforms such as Digital Asset Management (DAM), Product Information Management (PIM) and Web Content Management (WCM) facilitate the creation and execution of multichannel and multinational campaigns. Web analytics tools give marketers access to real-time customer intelligence, so they can react to rapid developments in consumer habits and behaviours.
3. Ensuring internal collaboration: For marketing to be successfully agile, collaboration is necessary within internal departments, especially marketing and IT. Creating alignment of marketing goals with business goals ensures a more seamless operation. Agile marketing also calls for nimble project management; for example, holding shorter, more frequent scrums instead of longer, infrequent meetings. This gets key stakeholders on the same page and up to speed with the rapid changes in the marketplace.
The benefits of agile marketing are vast. For one, once processes have been set, it is much more cost-effective. It creates business alignment and makes the function of marketing more adaptable. Last but not least, it gives you the ability to change your approach stealthily.
http://www.redbricksmedia.com/, an interactive marketing agency employs agile marketing strategies for all its clients.