Why agile marketing must be about more than social media

4 Agile Marketing Experts give their views on what it takes

Unfortunately, too many marketers have confused ad-hoc social media promotions with genuine agile marketing.

While the original concept of ‘agile’ as a way of working was first popularised in the world of software development, it wasn’t until recently when applied to the realm of social media that we’ve started to talk about ‘agile marketing’.

Certainly real-time engagement with your customers can get you noticed. Oreo Cookies, for example, is famous for its ‘dunk in the dark’ tweet during the Super Bowl power outage.

The success of Oreo Cookies has spurred many brands to attempt their own quick turnaround content for social media, which has often got them noticed in the wrong kind of way.

From barely thought-out newsjacking attempts, to the sloppy creation of ham-fisted memes, poor execution has helped make agile marketing a constant source of embarrassment for brands around the world...

It only takes a quick review of the list of top social media fails to see this process in action.

But it doesn’t have to be this way

Agile marketing is not about jumping on news headlines or riding off the back of a surge of tweets. It’s about creating an environment in which customer understanding, personalised content, data analytics and departmental alignment can work together to increase efficiency and speed to market across all levels of an organisation.

It’s about responding to data, trends or customer behaviour in a way that is both fast and smart.

If you want to move beyond the hit-or-miss social-media version of agile marketing however, it requires a bit of strategic planning. Quite a bit actually. Responding quickly and smartly is not an easy balance to strike, particularly if you don’t even know what your marketing problems are yet.

So how do you succeed with agile marketing? We interviewed experts from Sirius Decisions, Chiefmartec, Silverpop and Smart Insights to get their views on what agility really mean for marketers.

Be ready to take risk

Marketing is changing but the way companies do marketing haven't kept up. It's all too easy to plan and run a campaign the same way you always have. With marketing becoming increasingly driven by micro-moments, James Norwood, our CMO says marketers need to think in real time.

Traditional marketing is being turned on its head. When you plan for a launch your first instinct is to do it the same way you always have. But then you think no, maybe what you need is a rough and ready unplugged style video on Youtube.

Sometimes marketers got to be ready to take a few risks to get their message out sooner in a way that might get through to their customers, seize the moment before it's too late. Being agile can have a huge payoff if you have the right people and right capabilities - but the journey is in no means easy.

Avoiding sloppy work that hurts your brand

Before digital marketers jump on the latest trends, they need to understand how their brands relate to them, why they need to comment, or even if their customers care.

“Unfortunately, working fast doesn’t always mean working well,” says Scott Brinker of Chiefmartec.

In software development, the area that agile was first adopted in, there is a concept of 'technical debt', where sloppy code ends up costing you more time down the line than it would have done to write it well in the first place. 

 When embracing agile and breaking away from processes purely focused on best practice, I think marketers really need to watch out for a similar effect: brand debt.

To recover from brand debt, Brinker says, you have to work even harder down the road to recover from that deficit in the eyes of customers and clients who were exposed to it. Clear, open communication within the company is vital to avoid this.

Using data to make smart decisions

Agile marketing was never truly possible before, as the technology needed simply didn’t exist. From an internal point of view, the development of collaborative working tools has proved a fundamental catalyst for driving this change.

Externally, the growth of agile marketing has largely been the result of a rise in big data analytics and personalisation platforms.

By monitoring how customers and prospects interact with your content, you can start making more intelligent marketing decisions on the fly.

States Ellen Valentine, veteran marketing leader at Silverpop. As a result, if a consumer’s attitude towards a certain product or service shifts, marketers can use this information to adjust their messaging accordingly.

It is this level of real-time personalisation that is coming to define the new era of agile marketing. In addition, by running small experiments on an on-going basis, you can achieve continuous, incremental improvements.

The danger of data without a clear focus

At the same time, brands should be careful not to depend too heavily on the outputs of big-data without a clear focus.

If marketers don’t know where their marketing problems are and what they should be testing, they put themselves at risk of being bogged down in data that doesn’t actually add anything to their campaigns. In many ways this can be an agile marketer's worst nightmare.

By working in a purely real-time environment, marketing professionals may find themselves constantly iterating a campaign based on the very latest data and statistics.

By getting too bogged down in these iterations, marketers may run the risk of weakening their brands by failing to provide a consistent messaging strategy.

“The trick with getting better results from marketing is asking the right question from the outset,” says Dave Chaffey, CEO of Smart Insights.

It’s about finding a line between the traditional ‘tick-box mentality’, in which marketers blindly follow the rest of the industry and becoming so flexible that the brand loses all identity and control.

Collaboration is key

Julian Archer, research director at Sirius Decisions, says brands must work to “build a more agile marketing ecosystem” throughout their entire organisation.

This means not only working to develop real-time engagement with customers, but also collaborating with one another in a more flexible and ultimately intelligent fashion.

Agile marketing is just as much about improving internal inefficiencies as it is about developing an external approach.

Agile, when implemented correctly, can give marketing great flexibility, while retaining the core structure required to keep marketing on track.

This is the ideal middle ground that marketers need to achieve: flexibility and openness to new ideas, without a complete abandonment of marketing best practice.

So are you ready for agile? Take our 3-min agile marketing test to find out