What is Agile Marketing? An Ultimate Guide on Benefits of Agile Marketing

Agile marketing has become the hottest trend in the marketing industry. It is the new buzzword in marketing, but unfortunately has a lot misconception and wrong information that leads to its poor implementation. However, if utilized properly, agile marketing enables you to quickly respond to the changing sphere of marketing.

It helps identify & leverage new opportunities to capitalize on them before everyone is doing so. But due to the increasing amount of misinformation, M-Connect Solutions’s marketing team thought to bring you an ultimate guide on what agile marketing is and how your business will benefit from it. So, without further delay, let’s get started on what is agile marketing.

What is Agile Marketing?

Agile, at its marketing core, means utilizing the data & information you already have to find new opportunities to provide real-time solutions to problems people face. It is a tactical approach towards marketing where the team is put together to identify and focus on the high-value projects & complete them in harmony.

In addition to solving problems in real-time, the agile marketing team deploys tests quickly, evaluates the outcomes & iterates rapidly. The agile marketing company can run multiple campaigns simultaneously at scale and come up with new ideas every week.

Agile marketers work intensively for short periods called sprints to complete high-value projects in co-operation. The team continuously measure the impact after each sprint and incrementally improve the outcomes for their project

Agile is not just another marketing strategy, it’s a marketing approach that helps guide your marketing processes & strategies through data-driven insights. Agile marketing has roots in agile software development and adopts marketing practices from there. Such kind of adaptation results in better work in a short span without missing most deadlines.

Characteristics of Agile Marketing

Based on the principles defined by Jim Ewel’s Agile Marketing Manifesto, here are the key characteristics of agile marketing. Few of these characteristics might come off as a tad rigid for the modern definition of Agile. Thus, they have been tweaked a little to fit rightly into agile marketing in 2021.

1. Adaptability

Adaptability is one of the renowned characteristics of agile marketing. The agile marketing team here responds quickly to new trends and disruptions to identify new opportunities and seize them before your rivals do. Adaptability is an ongoing process of measuring & experimenting with what works and what doesn’t.

2. Responsiveness

Responsiveness is another agile marketing characteristic that’s closely related to adaptability. It is defined as the speed at which you respond to new trends and development and how successful you are at it. Responsiveness has to do with maintaining the balance between collecting enough data for informed decisions and implementing changes.

3. Teamwork

The team is also one of the key characteristics of agile marketing. It heavily puts emphasis on collaboration and co-operation for max output and efficiency. Here, technology plays a vital role for the team to effectively collaborate digitally and help other team members to work better.

4. Productivity

The main focus of working together in the team is to maximize productivity by reacting faster and achieving goals sooner without wasting time on redundant tasks. This is also where your agile marketing can leverage technology and use productivity tools to achieve max productivity in the short frame.

5. Experiment

Experimenting in agile marketing is much bigger than CRO, conversion optimization, and A/B testing. In agile marketing, experimentation is an ongoing process where new ideas, hypotheses, and misconceptions are tested, verified, and busted. You’ll have to constantly try out new tools, campaign ideas, and different channels for optimizing your marketing channel.

6. Data-Driven

Every aspect in agile marketing is data-driven. All the key decisions should be taken not on assumptions or gut feeling but should be verified, informed, and measured by data. You can be creative in coming up with ideas and innovative solutions but their success or failure is determined by what data you have.

Pros & Cons of Agile Marketing

Agile marketing has got the impression of a new model of digital marketing that everyone should adopt. However, just like anything else, agile marketing does have pros and cons that you must know before trying it on.

Pros or Benefits of Agile Marketing

Let’s get to know the benefits of agile marketing as listed below:

• Agile marketing is focused on maximizing growth and help you make the most out of your ideas every time if done properly.
• Having agility in your business means responding quickly to good and bad events.
• You will be identifying & seizing new opportunities while your rivals will follow their fixed processes.
• Decisions are informed and data-driven rather than based on opinions, guesses, or hunches.
• Your successes and failures teach you how to make better decisions in the future.
• Agile marketing helps the team to become more productive & fix issues in processes efficiently.
• Another benefit of agile marketing is you can score well on your short-term goals & long-term objectives.

Cons of Agile Marketing

There are so many positive talks going on about how agile marketing is superior to the conventional approach. However, it’s also important to understand the negative sides of it as well to know if this approach is right for your business or not. Below are the cons of agile marketing:

• Companies misunderstand the concept of agile marketing which leads them to implement it incorrectly.
• It requires businesses to change their existing marketing processes from top to bottom which is quite difficult for many to cope with.
• The major focus in agile marketing is given to short-term goals due to which long-term goals can suffer a lot.
• Sometimes, outputs are fragmented, which makes it hard to keep up the quality and consistency across all the campaigns/projects.
• Requires a relatively large team thus, hiring talents can be crucial. Also, outsourcing the work is tricky for businesses with small teams.
• Sprints lead to burnout of the team and may need breaks & recovery periods more often.

Misconceptions in the Agile Marketing

With pros and cons on both hands, it’s time for your mind to focus on the misconceptions that we have busted. Such common misconceptions lead to false hopes and wrong ideas about agile marketing and how to implement it. So, here we go:

1. It is Just Another Trend

Yes, agile marketing is indeed the latest trend but it’s simply far from bring just another trend that’ll vanish or be replaced by a new & shiny one next year. Experts believe that agile marketing is here to stay for long and will continue to evolve.

2. It Is All About Speed

Another misconception most marketers have about the agile approach is it’s all about how fast you can be to complete the task at hand. Yes, speed is one of the key aspects of agile marketing, however, it’s not the only thing that matters. There’s no point in launching a new campaign as quickly as possible and fails miserably faster.

Here, the significance of speed is all about scoring your target as early as possible.

3. It Is All About Change

Given the adaptive nature, it easy to assume that agile marketing has to constantly deal with the change. This is not the complete truth. If the change is what you are describing as the purpose for utilizing agile marketing, then you are doing it wrong. Consider change as a by-product of agile marketing but this change helps drive continuous improvement, which means changing what doesn’t work and keep what does.

Wrapping Up

Let the agile marketing work for your business. It is a modern concept for today’s growth-driven businesses. However, most find it hard to shift to an agile marketing approach from traditional ones, especially the old and established ones.

About Hemant Parmar

Hemant Parmar is an eCommerce expert and a keen Magento consultant who specializes in meeting the needs of businesses in the e-commerce space. Years in the eCommerce market make him a perfect choice for sharing his expertise on eCommerce and Magento 2 development. He believes that customers need to be met no matter how challenging it might be.

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