The world of marketing involves dealing with many stakeholders, collaborating on projects, developing new strategies and correcting mistakes quickly to limit damage or losses of business to competitors. Programmers and project managers began applying the steps used in Scrum and other agile methodologies to their advertising efforts with remarkable results. Agile marketing takes a review-and-adapt approach that syncs perfectly with fast-moving social media topics, linking strategies and experimental marketing initiatives.Imagine teams of two marketing experts tasked with working out a marketing idea in an hour. In the first half hour, one marketer organizes the plan while the other look over his shoulder and makes helpful suggestions. The marketers switch roles in the second half hour. The synthesis of the two approaches draws from the best features of each marketer’s plan. Later, the plan is presented to the sales department and customers for their reactions. Agile marketing, at its heart, works just as simply.

Agile marketing focuses on the following tenets to expedite plans, take advantage of ideas that work and change failed initiatives without investing lots of time and effort in them:

Collaboration
Customers come from dozens of areas and not just focused advertising. Sales leads might come from a blog, social media platform, help desk or other source. Lines are blurred, and traditional marketing often drops the ball by failing to track nontraditional sales opportunities. Agile marketing aligns sales, business development and customer service in a feedback loop where each group learns from every other stakeholder.
Brainstorming
Agile marketing encourages making lots of little improvements instead of trying to create one master approach. After all, you could spend years on a perfect marketing plan only to discover it has become outdated before it’s ready. Change and optimization are built into the agile process so that marketers can respond quickly to social media opportunities and changes in markets, focus or customer needs.
Engagement
Modern marketing demands high levels of engagement from companies, and traditional media campaigns have long lead times, set-in-stone deadlines and contractual obligations. Agile techniques encourage interaction and communication among stakeholders within an organization, entertain suggestions from all stakeholders and promote the sharing of information through social channels to capitalize on the short attention spans that trending topics generate.
Customer service
More than 62 percent of social media browsers use their social platforms to resolve customer service issues according to Zedensk. Customer service applications provide a rich source of leads, upgrade opportunities and marketing ideas.
Results
Marketing should focus on results and not what the highest ranking person in the room recommends. Agile techniques focus on incorporating small gains instead of trying to create a fully tested Google-type initiative to overwhelm the competition. Using a strong feedback loop, marketers can keep what works from many small initiatives and abandon unsuccessful ideas or fine-tune them in the next iteration.

Key considerations for your organization

Responsive marketing adapts and refocuses tactics for traditional media promotions and experimental ideas that are perfect for trying in various social media outlets. However, established companies should understand that experimentation carries risks and put safeguards in place that prevent going too deeply into uncharted territory. A good rule to follow is to use 70 percent of the budget on proven promotions while testing new ideas regularly with agile techniques. You can use agile methods to test and critique all company marketing plans and replace the weakest performers with the most effective new ideas that agile marketing identifies.

Reserve 10 percent of your marketing budget and resources to build a rapid-response team to take advantage of current opportunities. Your company will also need to put structures in place that are programmatic in nature, which makes 20 percent of your marketing a cross between planned and fast-response actions. Mostly machine driven, these initiatives are automatic responses to certain stimuli like selling upgrades and accessories after a sale, responding to inquiries in all departments and tripping automatic alerts from website visits, blog responses and social media initiatives.

Key considerations for implementing agile marketing in your organization include:

Consideration	Description
Getting the right people	Success depends on retraining part of the staff or hiring new team members who are willing to take risks. Agency veterans are a good choice because they’re used to working rapidly and accommodating different views.
Investing in time-based strategies	Don’t be afraid to set time limits to foster creativity. Create some time-based problems, and assign key people to develop solutions.
Collaboration tools	Your company needs some collaboration tools for sharing insights through video conferencing, impromptu meetings, remote collaboration and user-friendly applications. Unlike traditional Scrum, you might lack a clear client position, so you need to assign an alternative collaborator to serve in this capacity.
Fostering a new attitude	If you can’t change the company mindset of needing to work out all the bugs before signing off on an idea, then agile marketing won’t work. Consider how invested your company is in traditional approaches and how flexible key corporate players and clients are before implementing dramatic changes in approach.
Learning from the past	Schedule a retrospective review to analyze past successes and failures before planning actions for the next quarter. Key reviewing points include observing, reflecting, interpreting and deciding.
Adjusting	Adjust agile methodology to meet realities instead of preconceived ideas. You can prioritize and plan, but don’t become too invested in any single approach.

Improving your ability to respond quickly and realize immediate benefits from promotional ideas doesn’t require formal agile practices. You can use Agile marketing techniques when you need them without committing to systemic change. If your company is willing to try agile marketing on at least some of your marketing endeavors, the company will need to eliminate fears of reprisals for failed ideas, foster a “let’s try it” approach and commit to not committing six months in advance to every new initiative that the company adopts.

Best agile marketing practices generate custom results

Best practices for agile marketing depend on your company’s goals, resources and circumstances, but some general best practices will help the company respond faster, analyze more effectively and implement incremental gains immediately.
Best practices include the following agile techniques:

Best practice	Description
Create a marketing task board.	List your quarterly commitments, and assign each duty to a team. Include any essential support work like maintaining websites, posting content, writing blog posts and sending out press releases. List arguments or wish lists of initiatives your company wants to accomplish and break them into manageable jobs that only take a day, a week or 30 days maximum. In Scrum methodology, these iterations or wishes are called stories and are the backbone of agile marketing.
Schedule daily, weekly and monthly meetings.	Unlike traditional project management, agile marketing consists of many initiatives with shorter half-lives, so regular meetings are essential to give other stakeholders chances to ask questions about each story, provide suggestions and get briefed on where the project is headed.
Update your board continuously.	Success will generate new stories, and these iterations should be considered and added to the board.
Seek ideas from all the company’s stakeholders.	Seek story ideas and feedback on initiatives from other company departments, vendors, clients and stakeholders. You can use Google resources to rank these requests and fit them into the quarterly board or long-term company goals.
Review and adapt at regular intervals.	You can choose your own schedule for reviewing progress, incorporating successful ideas and updating your goals, but remember that rapid-response teams need the freedom to act quickly while marketing opportunities are available. You might want to schedule daily reviews for these teams to ensure best results.

Using Agile marketing makes sense for staying in tune with trends and changes while ensuring that you gain those benefits that are most critical for your company as soon as possible. If you win enough small battles, you inevitably win the marketing war by realizing solid achievements along the way. The agile process is iterative and allows you to conduct short experiments, respond to major changes in marketing conditions and get immediate feedback.