The digital marketing industry moves fast. In the time it took you to read that sentence, two marketing best practices likely changed! We may be stretching the truth, but you get the picture. We’ve learned that change is the only true constant in the marketing industry. And for marketing companies, this means that we must all evolve and improve.
As with many of our clients, our agency has grown, and with growth comes new challenges and growing pains. These are “good problems” to have; they’re the catalyst for innovation and change. Looking back, we’ve adopted inbound marketing and growth-driven design. We’ve helped our clients transition into the inbound methodology and continuous improvement. We’ve been doing “agile” things… and then it hit us. To get us and our clients to the next stage in our growth, we were going to have to fully adopt agile marketing.
Why is agile marketing the solution?
When you hear the word agile, you might think of scrum boards or running sprints. And no, we aren’t talking about rugby. Communication, capacity, and scalability are cornerstones of any driven business, and they also happen to be core elements within agile marketing principles.
So we did what any good marketer would do, and we started conducting experiments. To date, we have run two test projects with the scrum framework. While they weren’t perfect, we came away with a clear picture as to why agile marketing could provide additional value to our clients and our agency. Here’s what we learned about “going agile”:
1. Measurability
One of the key values of agile marketing is measurement and accountability.
2. Productivity
While there haven’t been any scientific experiments done to prove this, the overwhelming feedback from teams that have adopted agile marketing report increased productivity.
3. Transparency
Sprint planning meetings allow stakeholders to add their valuable input and requests, while sprint review meetings provide tangible summaries of what was completed.
4. Prioritization
With clear transparency of resources and tasks, the team can prioritize and problem solve effectively.
5. Ability to Adapt to Change
With sprint planning meetings happening every 4-6 weeks, teams can pivot and align quickly, resulting in quicker response time to market industry changes.
6. Improved Internal Communication
This may be one of the biggest benefits. Not only is there increased communication between departments, but there are also daily scrum meetings to improve a marketing team’s communication, since everyone knows what everyone else is working on.
7. Customer Satisfaction
With improved communication, collaboration and productivity, our customers needs are met quicker, which leads to better results – faster. We think that would make all of our customers happy.
3… 2… 1… Lift Off!
Changing how we deliver marketing services doesn’t sum up what we are trying to accomplish through going agile. It’s not just about using using scrum boards, and running sprint retrospectives. It’s a dedication to one of our core company values: continuous improvement. For us, marketing is never “done.” It’s not so much of a destination as it is the journey.
In actuality, I think we have already started going agile just by deciding to test the theory of going agile. As we use the scrum framework to plan and transition our own processes, we’ll start a brand new cycle of continuous improvement. It’s exciting, and we’re excited to keep doing experiments for the benefit of our clients, our team, and our business.
This month, we’re prepared for our agile marketing takeoff. Next month, we’ll give you an update on our findings. And in the meantime, reach out if you’re interested in learning more about the benefits of continuous improvement for your business.
