The Future Trend of Marketing Automation: Agile Marketing
If you can follow the basics of listening to your user base to come up with good ideas, and then execute these ideas, you can become a best-of-breed marketer.
If you can follow the basics of listening to your user base to come up with good ideas, and then execute these ideas, you can become a best-of-breed marketer.
Marketing automation is new to many companies, and yet old hat for many others. Regardless of whether marketing automation is a fresh or familiar concept to you, learning about and understanding the benefits of agile marketing can change the shape of your department and easily increase the impact of your marketing automation tool. The benefits of agile marketing lie in being able to execute more campaigns with greater efficiency and with less time and effort. So how do you become an agile marketer?
First off, let’s define agile. Agile is a term borrowed from software developers who created this methodology to help them solve the problem of building complex pieces of software under constantly changing conditions. If you work for a software company, it is highly possible your development team uses agile methodology to build your products. Agile software development includes a lot of buzzwords like Scrum, burndowns, user stories, sprints, and so forth. Agile for marketing will use some of these words, but not all. Adopting agile methodology for marketing needs to be conceptualized differently, so let’s begin by going through some steps on how to become an agile marketer.
Step One: Listen
Listening to your user base is the first and most fundamental thing you need to do. If you think you do it already, I can promise you it’s not enough. I get so frustrated with marketers on a daily basis because they fail to use their most effective marketing tool: their telephone! Yes, that antiquated piece of technology that most marketers feel only has a place on the desks of salespeople. Marketers who do not communicate directly over the phone with their prospects, current customers, and other constituents are just plain lazy – and afraid. Focusing on social media, tracking trending keywords, and conducting surveys are all useful strategies, but none are nearly as impactful as the direct communication you get with the phone.
Discussions with your user base will yield plenty of actionable data. Listen for key pieces of information such as:
We will call these pieces of information “user stories.” These will be the basis for building out future campaigns.
Step Two: Execute
One of my favorite quotes on marketing is from the book “The One to One Future” by Peppers and Rogers: “Operate in realities, not abstractions.” Most marketers operate in their abstractions of what they think is the case. This was proven to be the case in ExactTarget’s report, “Marketers From Mars.” The report highlights the massive disconnect between what marketers believe to be the case and what actually is the case. This disparity between perception and reality causes many marketers to invest in programs based on their guesses rather than the reality of the situation. This is why it’s so important to start out by listening.
Once you’ve listened, you need to execute in order to test your ideas. Only through testing your assumptions will you arrive at realities. Also, remember the mantra, “Better, not best.” Don’t stress over every little detail. There will be time for analyzing later.
Here are some great ways to start your execution on a small scale:
Tip: “Stand-ups” are very important. Stand-ups are daily meetings that take place first thing in the morning. They typically take no more than 15 minutes and require everyone in attendance to answer three questions.
Step Three: Evaluate
When evaluating your campaigns, start by making sure you are looking at the appropriate data for your campaign. With marketing there are a host of reports to use to evaluate different aspects of your campaigns. The most overlooked and overused reports are:
Step Four: Repeat
Adopting marketing automation will greatly increase your ability to execute campaigns, which work. Execute, then evaluate what worked, and repeat the best ideas and stop the bad ones. What’s more, staying true to agile principles when combined with marketing automation will put you at the forefront of all marketers. Good luck, and remember: listen, execute, evaluate, and repeat.
If you can follow the basics of listening to your user base to come up with good ideas, and then execute these ideas and let the best results drive your future efforts, you can become a best-of-breed marketer. Scott Voigt, founder of agile marketing platform Homebase.io, puts it best, “Agile works well because you can adapt and stay relevant as the future unfolds. You deliver consistent incremental results instead of a few all-or-nothing bets, and you have an opportunity to get better with each iteration.” The benefits of agile are the future of marketing in a modern world and need to be considered if you want to consider yourself a best-of-breed marketer.
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