How to take an agile approach to digital marketing

Our Head of Delivery, Gwen, recently wrote about Leapfrogg’s move into an Agile way of working across our digital marketing.

She wrote: “An Agile approach to campaign planning and delivery enables us to further adopt the growth hacking mind-set of data, creativity, and curiosity. The heart of growth hacking is the relentless focus on growth as the metric that matters.It fosters greater future focused analysis, opportunity spotting, adaptable plans (that can move at the speed at which the digital landscape changes) and it allows us to overcome any barriers and blockers to hitting targets in a proactive and flexible way.”

Working in a more agile way means that we are no longer tied to delivery of a longer term plan but are now equipped to redefine our scope of work as needed in much shorter intervals to maximise success. It means we are fully focused forward at all times and we deliver results not work. We are able to move with the same speed of the wider digital sector and stay ahead of the curve at all times.

Agile has been around in the technology and development sector of digital for a long time, but it’s now being more widely spoken of in mainstream marketing circles.

There is a growth hacking movement in the USA that is hitting our shores. Marketers are breaking down traditional approaches to campaign planning and working in a far more flexible way.

Instead of planning a six-month programme of work across multiple tactics, they are breaking down the plan and focussing on one area at a time to maximise its impact.

For example, instead of putting together a full eCRM strategy they will focus first on the priority which may be growing the number of email sign-ups as quickly as possible.

Step 1 – Analyse what is required to encourage sign ups and develop idea to test
Step 2 – Test the concept in a short sprint period
Step3 – Measure the impact
Step 4 – Roll out if successful

Then move onto the next priority, which may be improving email click-through-rate.

Once that element is improved they then may move onto landing page UX or email personalisation – whichever they feel will get them to their target quickest.

By working in this way, marketers are always focused on the end result, moving forward, failing fast, and most importantly they are able to keep up with the fast pace of the digital landscape.

Multiple sprints can be running at the same time to ensure that different areas of the marketing mix are developing. The main differentiator in working in this way is that if an activity does not yield results in an agreed amount of time, the team are able to move on quickly to the next tactic or revise the approach to the current one.

Although this approach is faster and harder than a long-term strategy, basing your activity on strong insight and data is still absolutely fundamental. How else will you be able to prioritise the work required effectively?

This level of analysis beforehand means you can pick the activity that will give you the biggest return first, improve it and use the increased success to give you the resource to move onto the next priority.

For agile to work effectively marketers must be constantly using the cycle of analysis, test, measure, then roll out.

This will inevitably mean a change in internal structure and process and the level of investment upfront will reap quicker and deeper rewards across all of your marketing activity.

Start thinking now about how you can be more agile with your approach to digital marketing, or speak to us about how we can help.

Image credit: VFS Digital Design on Flickr

Leave a reply

What do you think? Please leave a comment below

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *