What is Marketing Agility?
Would you like to find out what marketing agility is? Keep reading!
Marketing agility is the extent of a company’s iterations between executing marketing decisions and making sense of the market to better adapt to it.
It’s a crucial tool for making marketing decisions when the market is very volatile and unpredictable.
What is the Purpose of Marketing Agility?
Every business today requires agility to traverse complex markets. Therefore, the concept of marketing agility in practice becomes agile marketing.
Every marketing team today practices some form of agile ceremonies to achieve marketing agility.
For the most part, marketing agility includes:
- Consistent optimization of various marketing activities across the company to improve the marketing strategy
- Working to tackle predictable and unpredictable changes in customer behavior, expectations, and customer preferences
- The anticipation of early signs of change and responding to it
- Turning any form of change into an opportunity
- Tapping into new markets while improving current market share
Furthermore, an organization that embraces marketing agility works on doing the following:
- Develop data warehouses to use data to create a single customer view, putting them at the center
- Create a closed-loop system that allows consistent iterations and changes, thanks to regular data inputs
- Embrace various learning organization competencies in marketing, including a shared vision, mental models, personal mastery, team learning, and systems thinking
- Develop a culture of rewarding out-of-the-box thinking and risk-taking, enabling creative and innovative processes
- Adopt a learning mentality where you promote dialog as a result of a problem and foster problem-solving without distributing blame
It’s safe to say that marketing agility allows marketing teams to adopt an opportunistic approach. That is true for all aspects of marketing, including traditional and digital marketing.
It gives a formal approach to different kinds of thinkers, combining analytics and innovation. Meanwhile, it keeps the marketing department and all stakeholders on the same page regarding changing strategies.
What are Examples of Marketing Agility?
The agile journey requires some changes to your existing marketing operations and marketing activities. Adopting the agile practice in every process across the company is not wise. Instead, it’s better to take certain steps to implement agile methodology across your marketing efforts.
This also allows your marketers and the rest of your employees to get familiar with the new structure.
In any case, if you want to acquire marketing agility across your organization, the following are some examples and steps to put you on track.
Create a Consolidated Marketing Database
It’s reasonable to expect that adopting agile concepts brings a ton of ideas and insights. You need to consolidate all this information in one place. That includes past insights and future data and information you stumble upon.
Having the data on all your customers in one place allows you to understand them better. It also allows you to track their history, determine new patterns, and develop appropriate solutions.
Let’s say you know where a certain customer interacts with your company and have a record of the communications. Using this information, it’s easier to predict expectations, provide better value to each customer, and in the long run, improve sales.
Technology today simplifies this process, making it faster and more efficient. In doing so, it makes it easier to anticipate customer actions.
That said, creating and maintaining a database also benefits you by:
- Providing key insights into customer relationships
- Improving analytics to allow better decision making
- Allowing a deeper understanding of customer issues and concerns
Therefore, the database allows for a better understanding of your customers. That said, consolidating customer information is a lengthy process requiring technical and non-technical expertise.
Combine Your Product, Channel, and Customer Insights
Marketing needs your product, channels, and customer insights to work. A common mistake that organizations make is to separate these entities. That leads to losing focus on the larger objective because each department is racing to improve its processes.
To achieve marketing agility, you have to combine all three. It’s preferable to do so without making any changes to your organizational structure.
It requires a change in the process. You need to introduce a mechanism to drive customer insights through existing channels on your products.
In doing so, the key is to identify the right customer segment and channels with regard to the product.
Most firms tend to generalize this process to speed up operations, but there’s a flaw in this execution. Since each customer segment is unique and has different behaviors, a general process only provides limited information.
Adapt to a Marketing Automation Culture
Many companies are working to implement process automation across the board. However, when it comes to marketing automation, there is often always room for betterment.
Whether through upgrades or a regular check, you must ensure all your automation efforts are efficient.
To notice the rise of marketing automation, look at how companies create and manage customer databases. However, current marketing automation efforts go beyond that, focusing on improving speed by eliminating redundant manual tasks.
In doing so, a marketer has more time to:
- Analyze relevant data to come up with insight-driven decisions
- Plan ahead for any potential changes in the marketing industry
- Focus on the operational side of marketing
- Support the creative process
- Work on their training and learning
The extra time that every marketer saves provides opportunities to focus on unique projects, expand their skills, and be more agile.
Find More Ways to Utilize Customer Insights
As your marketers have more time on their hands, it’s easier to focus on utilizing customer insights from the information in your databases. To make use of the data, make sure you collect the following information:
- Customer choices
- Each customer group’s lifestyle preferences
- Location and demographic data
- Previous purchase habits for your personas/customers
Based on this information, you come up with valuable insights and manage them, taking advantage of each insight for the next project.
This allows you to:
- Create marketing campaigns that target specific groups
- Divide and segment all your customers based on relevant factors
- Tweak your marketing strategy, accounting for future changes
- Find ways for marketing innovation
The difference between successful and unsuccessful companies often comes down to how much effort they put into understanding their customers.
Prioritize Customer Insight Across the Organization
Every marketing team has to answer to senior management. You need your stakeholders and top management to sign off on most projects and actions.
Therefore, you have to find a way to communicate the importance of customer insight. However, the communication needs to be sound, and for that:
- You have to summarize and convert all the information into digestible bits of information.
- Provide a before and after scenario with results
- Keep a thorough record that shows budget utilization for marketing efforts
- Provide a scenario that describes the result of not taking any action
In doing so, there’s a higher chance for you to get the green light for most projects.
Conclusion
Developing marketing agility is a long process, but it leads to consistent growth in the long run. There’s a good chance that you are already halfway towards achieving it.
However, it’s still an iterative process that remains ongoing for as long as your company is present.
That said, marketing agility allows for deeper insights into your customers, allowing you to direct your efforts better.
