Ep. 45 Agile Marketing: An innovative approach to a constantly changing landscape
Agile Marketing
with Janet Mesh @ Aimtal
Are you struggling to keep up with the constantly evolving marketing landscape? Discover the power of agile marketing - a strategy that prioritizes user engagement, network building, and consistent social interaction to ensure your marketing efforts remain current, effective, and relevant.
This dynamic approach to marketing involves continuously gaining insights, pivoting when necessary, and always questioning what's working and what's not. The key to a successful pivot lies in setting your ego aside, re-evaluating your goals, and being brutally honest about the performance of your current strategies.
Embrace Change: Adapt to the ever-evolving world of marketing.
Great marketers plan and forecast, but they also accept the inherent nature of marketing – it's always changing. New threads, strategies, tactics, and technologies emerge almost every day. Marketers must, therefore, anticipate change and adapt accordingly. At a philosophical level, agile marketing keeps you united with this ever-evolving industry, continuously updating your strategies to ensure your marketing is not only industry-appropriate but also customer-focused.
Developing your strategies around your audience's behaviors, interests, and goals is paramount. This involves a structured approach to marketing that should contain these key stages:
1. Research – Understand your market and your audience.
2. Strategy – Develop a detailed plan based on your research.
3. Execution – Implement your strategy.
4. Analysis – Review the results and efficiency of your strategy.
5. Optimization – Adjust and improve your strategy for better results.
A universal language for modern-day marketing
Agile marketing is excellent for standardizing a highly varied process. This methodology, available at Agilemarketingmanifesto.org, is centered around five values that can guide any marketing effort to success:
1. Focusing on customer value and business outcomes over activities and outputs.
2. Delivering value early and often negating the pursuit of perfection.
3. Learning through experiments and data rather than relying solely on opinions and conventions.
4. Prioritizing cross-functional collaboration over silos and hierarchies.
5. Responding to change over following a static plan.
By adhering to these values, marketers can build a common language and better understand their approach, which can prove beneficial when dealing with clients and colleagues.
The Intersection of Strategy and Sales
The dynamics between marketing and sales teams are imperative for business growth. They must work in tandem to ensure that the needs of potential customers are met while prioritizing business growth. Implementing an agile marketing approach within your firm can help to align these teams, fostering improved collaboration, better lead generation, and, ultimately, increased sales.
Organizing your team around the client's needs can also impact the relationship dynamics within your agency. When teams have open access to each other and their clients, it creates a more fluid and responsive relationship, facilitating a customer-centric approach to marketing.
Prioritizing Marketing for Success
Effective marketing strategies do more than just appeal to your target audience. They must also align with your business goals, audience preferences, and budget considerations. Prioritizing marketing entails assessing and balancing these factors to create an integrated strategy that delivers on your objectives and resonates with your audience.
Start by asking, "Who is my audience, and why would they care about my products or services?" Resolve these questions first. The "how" and "what" will naturally follow. Get to know your customers, highlight your value over your competitors, and the pieces will start falling into place.
At the end of the day, remember that marketing is an investment that compounds over time. With a solid foundation, careful planning, and an agile approach, your marketing efforts will deliver results well into the future.
Striving Toward Excellent Customer Understanding
Any marketing approach won't achieve its full potential without deeply understanding your audience. This principle is particularly essential in agile marketing and involves extensive market research. One innovative approach is to study potential or existing customers' social profiles – such as LinkedIn. Done ethically, it can provide insightful data about client activity, demographics, and interests.
Knowing your audience's disc profiles and archetypes can yield information on their behavior, motivations, and how they might interact with your brand. It is a somewhat unconventional approach that can feel a bit intrusive – jokingly referred to as 'stalking' – but when done with respect and discretion, it can provide valuable insights.
Utilizing Available Data
Marketers are blessed with a wealth of data at their fingertips – leveraging these resources can give you a significant advantage. Analytics from sales calls can reveal pressing client challenges, their triggers, and the solutions they're seeking.
Even without dedicated market research teams, you can tap into a rich pool of information. Start by listening to past sales calls and then pay special attention to what your customers have to say. By realizing their challenges and triggers, you can easily fine-tune your marketing strategies for better resonance.
Setting Goals And Avenues for Improvement
When you implement an agile marketing approach, setting benchmarks is critical – a sort of 'finish line' that clarifies your marketing campaigns. Premeditated goals allow you to assess and measure the progress of your strategies throughout their execution.
However, remember the need for adaptability; goals are often set semi-annually, allowing the opportunity to reassess and adjust the strategy. This lends the agility that you need in the ever-evolving marketplace. The critical point here is to evaluate your performance from an egoless stance, valuing the essence of improvement over personal belief systems.
Implementing Agile Marketing in Small Marketing Departments
Small marketing departments or businesses that are strapped for resources can still implement agile marketing without a hassle. It starts by conducting a no-holds-barred evaluation of what's working and what isn't. Armed with both quantitative and qualitative data, you can identify areas where changes or enhancements can be made.
Discomfort often heralds necessary transformation – embrace it, and don't hesitate to make tough decisions based on your analytics data. Remember, sometimes strategies need to be scrapped, and that's okay. Marketing is as much a laboratory for experiments as it is a vehicle for promotion.
A Custom-Tailored Approach
No two businesses or audiences are the same. And this is why prescribed methods will rarely yield the most effective results. The process in itself should entail 'selective sampling' of different strategies, testing their efficiency, and eventually identifying the best fit. Even if something doesn't work, it's an opportunity to learn and adapt, which still constitutes progress.
While no one-size-fits-all methodology may exist, agile marketing principles can be adapted to your unique business needs. It’s about finding what works best for your business and customers and then optimizing for those outcomes.
Remember that taking the first step towards a more agile marketing approach is well within your reach, even if it seems daunting. Be bold, make the leap, and let your data do the talking. It may not be a smooth ride, but every step you take is a step forward.
So here’s to challenging conventions in favor of experiments in marketing because, after all, progress matters.
Janet Mesh, CEO @ Aimtal
Janet Mesh is the CEO + Co-founder of Aimtal, a fully remote integrated marketing agency. Born & raised in Boston, she then headed slightly north to the University of New Hampshire where she received her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Communication with a focus in Cross-Cultural Communication and Marketing. She is a marketing consultant, remote work advocate, and business leader that specializes in creating and executing marketing strategies and processes that result in marketing-generated ROI and success.In addition, and alongside her business partner and team, Janet has doubled the size and revenue of her agency year-over-year since its inception in 2018 and won the Sprout Social ‘Always Be Growing’ award in 2022 in recognition for this growth.In her free time, you can find her trying new restaurants around the world, reading historical fiction novels, sleeping in on Saturdays, and hosting happy hours at home for family & friends.
Highlights
00:04:00: Discussing LinkedIn and Networking
00:04:31: Introducing the topic of Agile Marketing
00:05:37: How the landscape of marketing is constantly changing
00:06:30: The philosophical level of marketing
00:07:01: Steps of their marketing approach
00:07:25: Importance of strategy and execution in marketing
00:07:57: Benefits of Agile Marketing
00:08:17: Values of Agile Marketing
00:09:56: Incorporating Agile Marketing in the workplace
00:10:26: Real life applications of Agile Marketing
00:11:00: Experience with an unsuccessful marketing activity
00:12:16: Pivoting from newsletters to video content
00:13:46: Planning to bring content back into email
00:14:37: Conclusion: Learning from Data and Adapting
00:15:12: Focus on audience through Agile Marketing
00:15:46: Personal experience with business leaders and audience engagement
00:16:07: Interaction with audience and client engagement.
00:16:22: The Intel marketing strategy.
00:17:34: Agile Marketing Approach at Intel.
00:17:54: Pod models and customer centric approach at Intel.
00:18:48: Challenges in Agency Turnover.
00:19:48: Building relationship value with the client.
00:20:56: Prioritizing marketing strategies.
00:21:09: Integrated marketing based on customer's perspective.
00:24:13: Executing marketing strategy into different channels.
00:25:05: Strategy vs plan in marketing.
00:26:07: The foundational work in marketing strategy.
00:26:34: Direct sales vs marketing as an investment.
00:27:04: Prioritizing sales
00:27:25: Quick hit things for sale boost
00:28:11: Importance of customer feedback
00:28:39: Importance of sales team
00:30:08: Discussing customer research
00:31:59: Tools for customer research
00:32:49: Identifying ideal customers
00:33:32: Utilizing customer's profiles and motivations
00:34:17: Using sales calls for customer insights
00:35:02: Agile marketing
00:35:27: Setting benchmarks
00:36:59: Implementing agile marketing in small businesses
00:37:40: Importance of data analysis.
00:38:14: Small Marketing Department Discussions
00:38:50: Learning Through Experimentation
