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Agile. A lot of marketers are saying it. Not a lot of marketers are truly doing it correctly.
Agile marketing (a term borrowed from software developers who do "agile development") is setting specific, measurable goals and crafting a plan to reach those goals, but then being prepared and flexible when the plans need to change.
We’ve seen companies come in with beautiful 3 month sprints that are extremely detailed and rock solid...until something doesn’t perform the way they expected. The data doesn’t lie, and sometimes it shows you that your original strategy isn’t cutting it. When hitting your revenue goals are the only priority, being agile is the only way you’re going to make it happen.
Set your team up to create, launch, analyze, iterate, and repeat...otherwise known as true agile marketing.
So, How Do You Do It?
At Hüify, we always start with understanding and outlining the goals. You can’t make any decisions, let alone quick decisions, without understanding where you’re supposed to be heading. We start every engagement with digging into the historical data, asking the questions people should be asking but aren’t, and documenting specific, measurable, and attainable goals for our clients.
SEE ALSO: Gaining Attention From The Informed Buyer in 2017
From there we ensure that those goals are constantly being tracked and are visible to the entire team. It doesn’t do anyone any good if the metrics are only being checked by one team member once a month. They need to be reviewed daily to make sure you’re on the right track and to catch the hiccups early on. This way we’re able to identify lack of performance immediately, be transparent about what it means, and quickly recommend and implement a new or revised strategy.
Boom. Agile marketing = goals achieved.
Understanding Your Data Is Key
Having and understanding your marketing data is the only way to be agile. Trying to implement an agile strategy without a way to track and analyze is like trying to navigate with your eyes closed. It will be really disappointing and embarrassing to get to the end of your well-planned journey only to realize you were heading completely the wrong direction without even knowing.
You must not only be reviewing your basic data daily for trends, but also know how to recognize issues quickly so you have time to dig in, diagnose the problem, and make adjustments to ensure you hit your goals.
SEE ALSO: Getting Things Done In A Distracting World
Our tools of choice for tracking our data trends are HubSpot and Databox.
HubSpot allows us to implement all of our marketing and sales strategies and collect all relevant data in one place. We're able to really dig deep into the analytics to understand how our emails, blog posts, social messaging, and other aspects of our campaign are performing.
For real time data analytics, Databox is the answer. It gives our team real time insight into our data and analytics across multiple platforms. It helps the sales and marketing teams align and stay focused on our goals––and make improvements when needed.
Oh, and the dashboard is beautiful.
The Benefits Of Agile Marketing
We live and breathe agile marketing, and our clients do the same. The main and most important benefit is that we simply hit our goals. And for the rare times that we don’t, we are able to point to the exact reason for not achieving the goal and formulate a new strategy for improvement.
For us, this means we are able to build trust into our partnerships with our clients and continue to prove our value. For our clients, this means that they are never caught off guard or unprepared when reporting on their metrics in a board meeting. We’re always able to stay one step ahead of the game and make adjustments in real time rather than waiting for the final results.
How are you implementing agile marketing? Are you achieving your goals?
Helping marketing and sales teams determine their revenue goals and implementing the strategy to hit them is kind of our thing––click here to see if we can help.
