How agile marketers can take a page from DevOps teams

Marketers need to become even more agile to reach their audience with the right message, at the right time and through the right channel

The world of DevOps is evolving, with more and more enterprises integrating this approach into their overall operations. This does wonders for the technical operations of your business. But it is also useful for marketers as well.

The point of DevOps is to increase efficiency, productivity and agility. It streamlines the build, development and launch process, infusing key data and insights into each step.

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Marketers can learn a thing or two from this shifting mindset. Marketers need to become even more agile to reach their audience with the right message, at the right time and through the right channel.

DevOps requires agile software development, a methodology that is intricately linked with consumer feedback, quality and speed.

The marketing team has a closer relationship with IT professionals, designers and developers than ever before. DevOps has essentially bridged that gap, connecting teams through philosophy, process and technology.

Therefore, as the world continues to evolve and productivity continues to rise, agile marketers can put these DevOps theories to use when building their own campaigns.

What agile marketers can do to increase efficiency using DevOps methods

Automate where possible

DevOps is all about speed and continuous delivery. The number one reason brands choose to automate their marketing is to reduce the time spent on trivial marketing tasks.

The DevOps approach is very succinct, straightforward and efficient. Therefore, agile marketers can learn from this methodology. Increasing the use of marketing automation ensures that campaigns run smoothly and effectively by relying on continuous feedback and immediately adapting to learnings.

There are a number of ways for marketers to automate campaigns:

• Chatbots: Chatbots like Instabot allow marketers to create automated website chat funnels to engage visitors and guide them towards conversion. These bots can answer questions, provide links to content and schedule demos. Marketing teams can always jump into the conversation to help with more complex questions. A study conducted by Juniper Research show that Chatbots are expected to reduce business costs by more than $8 billion per year by 2022.
• Email Automation: Email marketing still ranks as the most effective acquisition and retention channel, but only 42% of marketers leverage marketing automation as part of those strategies. Just as DevOps teams look for ways to automate the delivery of software into production, marketing teams can use email automation to deliver personalized messages based on customer behaviors.
• Ad Retargeting: Ad retargeting is a highly effective way to drive interested shoppers back to complete their purchase. Ad retargeting automation tools, like AdRoll, integrate with your e-commerce, email and reporting platforms to turn customer data into personalized and timely ads that convert.

Automation in marketing is growing increasingly popular. It reduces the risk of human error and takes a more data-driven approach to marketing that is trackable and repeatable.

Focus more on goals

As any good agile marketer knows, you need to have goals in order to succeed. In fact, marketers who set goals are 466% more likely to report success than those who don’t.

That being said, DevOps shows marketers that these goals can easily be achieved by setting up a very clear path to success.

Marketers have goals, of course. But they aren’t as clear as they would like. Different KPI’s can be grouped into an individual campaign initiative. This makes it more difficult to define success because one goal can be achieved while another KPI falls short. Was the campaign a success then?

DevOps attach singular goals to each push. This way there’s a binary pass or fail result. Marketers should do the same. If a marketing team is going to launch a content marketing campaign, for example. The campaign could try to drive referral traffic, social engagement and brand awareness, but that would make it more difficult to measure if it was successful or not.

Instead, there should be a singular goal that clearly defines success or failure. This could be the conversion rate of traffic from the campaign.

With this knowledge, marketers can create campaigns that actually achieve clearly defined goals.

Cross-collaborate with marketing, analytics and development

DevOps simplifies the process of cross-channel communication. By definition, it brings teams together across an organization.

Cross-collaboration is essential for a marketing campaign to succeed. Marketers need a deep understanding of what a product or service can and can’t do, as well as when new features and functionality will be delivered for customers to use.

Marketers, for instance, can’t say a product does one thing if it doesn’t. If they’re relying on old information, then that might very well be the case.

Luckily, marketers can learn through DevOps that this communication and collaboration is essential for a proper launch. DevOps teams use tools like JFrog and Docker Registry to automate the development pipeline from creation to the deployment of code.

Similarly, marketing teams can leverage marketing automation tools like Campaign Monitor and Shopify to automate email communications based on customer behaviors.

Everyone has a say in the quality, testing and deployment of products and services, meaning everyone is extremely knowledgeable at every step of the process.

This is thanks to the process of continuous feedback that DevOps provides. Marketers can utilize feedback from the IT team, as well as from consumers, to learn how to best describe a product, market it to audiences and drive them to action.

Establish consistency through messaging across campaigns

DevOps opens up communication pathways because it increases efficiency, productivity and agility, forcing all teams to work together.

With this in mind, marketers and developers alike can prioritize key points of interest throughout their messaging because they will be aligned with the organization at large.

Studies show that poor communication costs businesses more than $37 billion.

Messaging is important in marketing. Consumers want to interact with a consistent brand across all channels, mediums and platforms. In fact, 87% of consumers think brands need to do a better job providing users with a consistent experience. If your brand is offering up inconsistent messaging, your consumers will look elsewhere.

Luckily, DevOps teaches marketers how to prioritize key points and keep those points consistent.

This falls in line with the overall goals of the company that become more succinct thanks to the DevOps team. It also makes it easier for marketers to convey this information to designers, copywriters and others.

Marketing and DevOps — a common ground

DevOps improves overall business function. By utilizing core strategies and theories, marketers can create a more streamlined process that ensures higher results - this means increased traffic, awareness and sales for a brand.