As a marketer, the key to success rests in developing agility. Marketing trends can change within a moment. This accelerated pace calls for marketers to be agile, adaptive, and ready to pivot at any moment. The blog takes a closer look at how your team can cultivate an agility mindset and start building on your successes.
The Agility Advantage
Agile marketers are better at riding the waves of change and navigating the twists and turns of indecisive or market-reactive stakeholders. When agility is baked into your processes and workflows, you're posied to act fast and adapt quickly to changes in everything from consumer behavior to new tech or major market shifts.
5 Steps for Cultivating Agility
Stay curious
Keep your eyes peeled for opportunities to learn. Whether it's webinars and workshops, conferences, or even internal trainings from experts, make sure you and your team have regular access to the information that will keep them up to day with what's new and next.
Diversify skills
Whether through hiring or training, aim your skill-building plans on understanding and harnessing emerging technologes, data analytics, and social media trends that can create balance and efficiency for your marketing team. Don't be afraid to put out a call for Agile-certified experts in your organization, who may be able to come in and help shape your skill-building strategy.
Collaborate across functions
Silos can create a lot of frustraion, and they cost your marketing team time and efficiency. As you're building out your marketing strategy, make sure you're building IN ways for your marketers to work seamlessly alongside your social team, sales, product, PR, and anyone else who can help.
Take risks
Don't be afraid to experiment with new ideas, and take risks when it comes to your marketing. Part of the innovation process involves failures, which are a big part of the learning process and should be seen as just another way to gather data.
Put people first
Agile marketing won't work if it isn't based on how you provide customer value and what your user experience looks like. But truly agile teams don't just put their customers first. They also prioritize the insights, feedback, and experiences of their internal teams to create a well-rounded approach to strategy and tactics.
Agility, for marketers, is about creating a collaborative environment where your teams have the space to iterate on great ideas, respond to feedback in real time, and optimize your approach based on actual data. While Agile methodologies may have come from the world of software development, today's marketing teams are seeing real benefits when it comes to implementing agile-focused workflows and pathways.
Structuring Your Agile Marketing Team
Building the perfect agile marketing team doesn't come with a blueprint. Several organizations have seen a huge impact from implementing a pod structure in their marketing teams to encourage collaboration and bring together a cross-functional team aligned to a single purpose.
The key to making pods work is having buy-in across all teams, and creating teams based not only on function but on work and communication styles to make sure your pods are ready to work smoothly together and don't waste time on just trying to make it work. And don't forget that each pod should, ideally, have a project manager assigned to help keep things moving in the right direction.
The catch with pods? You can't just take your small marketing team and spread them out so that everyone is in 2, 3, or more pods. It dilutes the impact of the pod structure, locks previously diversified marketers into defined streams that impact their job satisfaction, and makes it impossible for each pod to truly focus.
If you're not ready to staff up to support the complexity of a pod structure, what works well for most marketing teams is to focus less on structure and more on culture.
Creating a Culture of Agility
Continuous improvement is the name of the agile game. To make it work, leadership needs to make sure that workloads remain manageable and teams have time for the retrospectives that allow agile teams to pinpoint wins, examine losses, and use the data from past work to continuously optimize as they move forward.
A key part of this agility culture is making sure you have an Agile-certified team member on staff to own the move to agile marketing. This could mean finding an existing employee who is already certified, pinpointing someone whose growth plan would benefit from becoming Agile certified, or bringing in an outside expert to help drive the shift.
Having an identified and well-qualified owner of your move to an agile marketing organization helps keeps expectations clear, and keeps your team from being overloaded by trying to take on ownership of the agile shift on top of their day jobs.
Agility for the Future
Focusing on bringing agility into your marketing strategies and wokflows works the same way that any other shift to your marketing perspective does. You'll need to have patience, be ready for roadblocks to arise and make sure your team has the right support to solve them, and have the right people and skills at hand to set your team up for success.
An agile marketing team is an incredibly powerful thing, as long as you're setting it up with the best of frameworks and intentions. Where we see failure is when teams run with "agile" as a buzzword and try to bandaid it over existing processes and sturctures without really understanding what agile marketing teams should be built on.
This blog is your guide to taking on the move to marketing agility the right way, with a focus on the right people, processes, and pathways to drive your growth.
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