If your digital team could use some help becoming more effective in 2017, you’ll want to understand Agile Marketing. It has become a revolutionary tool for companies all over the world. By replacing outdated modes of thinking, Agile Marketing can help your organization receive greater exposure without spending more money. In fact, Agile is often credited with producing better results with smaller budgets.
Make Your Digital Team More Effective with These 3 Agile Marketing Tactics
To give your business the best possible chance of success this year, use these three ways Agile Marketing will make your team more effective.
1. Create Small Goals with Short Cycle Times
Competitors and markets are evolving at breakneck paces. If you can’t keep up in 2017, you’re going to fall behind a competitor who will.
A central tenet of Agile Marketing is to utilize short cycle times. This gives you smaller goals and more flexibility. If your efforts have your digital team headed in the wrong direction, Agile Marketing will show you before you waste a lot of time.
If you’re not currently using Agile Marketing practices, this might prove to be a bit of a challenge at first. Nonetheless, no matter how small the marketing objective might be, use an Agile approach by creating small goals you revisit regularly.
For example, if you’re looking to build a bigger social media following, start with a small goal you could realistically hit in a month. Instead of the huge numbers everyone is obsessed with, try getting from 0 to 3,000. That’s still very ambitious. Then, after a month, check back on how you did and tweak your approach as necessary.
If you shoot for a massive goal like 1,000,000 followers, it will take months – at the very least – before you’ll have any idea if you’re headed in the right direction. By then, your budget may be significantly reduced.
2. Real-Time Prioritization Keeps Your Team Focused
It’s important that you don’t dedicate resources to anything that’s outside the scope of your work. If you do, it will be impossible for your team to efficiently reach its goals.
An understanding of scope isn’t good enough, though. By using Agile Marketing, you’ll also need to confine every project to a specific timeframe so you can take advantage of real-time reprioritization. Doing so will allow your team to put first things first.
Whether you have a backlog of goals to work through, or you’re beginning with a clean slate, one way that Agile expert Venkatesh Krishnamurthy recommends prioritizing them is by using MoSCoW;
- Must have
- Should have if possible
- Could have as long as it doesn’t affect anything else
- Won’t have now but might in the future
MoSCoW is a tried-and-true Agile Marketing approach that will make it clear which goals your team needs to focus on right away. At the same time, it allows for other goals you may want to work toward once you’ve accomplished your initial ones.
3. Engage Your Market and Maintain Alignment with Your Business Goals
Most digital teams in 2017 have one marketing goal: engaging their audience. Simply getting your brand in front of people isn’t good enough anymore. You need to form a real connection, and you need that connection to turn customers into advocates.
According to Jim Ewel, another authority on Agile Marketing, you can’t chase engagement so much that you sacrifice your overall business goals. It’s a tough balancing act. Business goals tend to be objective and well-defined. Engagement is less so.
As a marketer, engagement might seem far more attractive. However, your company’s executives or other stakeholders aren’t going to care about it if firmer business goals are missed. Use Agile Marketing practices to keep both in alignment. Sprint planning sessions will help you bring together the paths to both. Best of all, they add an objective lens to engagement – something your executives love.
Put These Agile Marketing Tactics into Practice Immediately
Agile Marketing practices are simple, but that doesn’t mean they’re not effective. There’s a reason they have become so popular throughout every industry. Before you spend any money on traditional marketing practices, try the Agile approach: Use small, achievable goals, prioritize, and keep your audience engaged.
Author Bio:
As a small business expert, Megan specializes in reporting the latest business news, helpful tips and reliable resources, as well as providing small business advice. She has significant experience with the topic of small business marketing, and has spent several years exploring topics like copywriting, content marketing and social media.
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