What exactly is Agile Marketing, and what benefits can your team see from implementation?
No doubt, “Agile ” is the buzzword for marketing, and many marketing teams are being told they need to implement Agile processes in their workflow. But what exactly does that mean, and what are the benefits a marketing team can expect to see after implementing a new Agile process?
A recent “Whiteboard Friday” from Moz featuring Jim Ewel, founder of AgileMarketing.net discussing the 6 values of Agile Marketing and 4 ways becoming Agile benefits marketing teams.
The 6 values of Agile Marketing are:
1. Responding to change over following a plan
2. Rapid iterations over “big bang” campaigns
“Well, we take a very different approach in agile marketing. We take an iterative approach. We start out with a little strategy. We meet for half an hour or an hour to figure out what do we think might work. Then we figure out how to test it. We measure the results, and this is very important, we document the learning.”
3. Testing and data over opinions and conventions
4. Many small experiments over a few big bets
“I like to talk about here the 70:20:10 rule. The idea behind the 70:20:10 rule is that we spend 70% of our budget and 50% of our time on the things that we know that work. We do it broadly across all our audiences.
We then spend 20% of our budget and 25% of our time modifying the things that we know that work and trying to improve them. Maybe we distribute it in a little different way or we modify the content, we modify what the page looks like. But, anyways, we’re trying to improve that content.
And the last 10% of our budget and 25% of our time, we spend on wild ideas, things where we fully expect that only about 2 or 3 out of 10 ideas is really going to work, and we focus those things on those creative, wild ideas that are going to be the future 70% and 20%.”
5. Indviduals and interactions over one-size-fits-all
6. Collaboration over hierarchy and silos
The 4 benefits of Agile Marketing are:
1. Get more done
2. Get the right things done
3. Adapt to change
“Part of our life today in marketing is that things change. We know that Google is going to change their PageRank algorithm in 2017. We don’t know exactly how, but we know it’s going to happen, and we need to be able to adapt to that change quickly and accurately, and we put processes in place in agile marketing to make sure that happens.”
4. Improve communications