Uncertain times are changing the leadership and make up of marketing teams. And it makes perfect sense. We’re all a bit cautious about the future. We have fast forwarded into a new world of working, and in some cases business have completely new customer experiences to deliver. As a result CEO’s and their leadership teams are rethinking the shape of their organisations, and marketing is one of the areas up for discussion.

Only yesterday I spoke to the leader of a scale up, just post-investment round, she was explaining “As well as the list of things we need to deliver, e.g. brand, UX and CRM deployment, I just need to feel like as a team we are launching things faster, and that we are being driven by data not opinion”. 

We went on to discuss  how developing agile marketing approaches can start to alleviate some of this frustration and there’s no better time than now to invest in changing the practices for delivery.  Here are some of the reasons why...

"Agile marketing is the deliberate, long-term application of agile methodologies to manage and improve the way a marketing team gets work done. It requires a strategic vision, as well as short-, medium-, and long-term marketing plans." (agilesherpas.com) 

Feel the pace 

The most desirable by-product of being agile is speed. Things start to ‘feel’ faster because your sprints and experiments are defined. The data points you track also enable decisions to be made quickly. Failing fast is as good as a success, from continuously testing messages to assessing product market fit with a segment of customers getting small samples of data quickly from test bed campaigns make the progress much quicker and lower the longer term risks that come with bigger marketing campaigns. Lots of companies are really having to understand where their customer’s heads are at right now and how to unlock the  conversion  journey to sale/sign up and retention quicker.  

See the action 

As everyone around us is adapting to new realities, seeing the progress and performance of the marketing function is crucial as you scale. Understanding how each part of the business is playing a role in your growth can be a challenge that arises as you grow anyway, but now we have the opportunity to strip things back and in some cases start again. Data again is the crucial ingredient to any methodologies employed to bring scale and predictability to your marketing. Having continuous transparent  conversations about data across the business is one of the first steps to really honing in on your growth levers.  

Create clarity 

Marketing a scale up can feel complex because the marketing function stretches right across the customer journey. We are in a period of time where clarity is important, not just for your customers but your teams too. Taking a move to an agile approach can help people with their mindset focus, rather than running around like headless chickens. For us, when helping clients deliver campaigns, an agile approach enables value to be seen quickly and changes to be made swiftly. That’s the same for the business too. The big take out from the team is everyone is clear on the 30 day sprint. Collectively with our client team, we won’t get 100% of the backlog complete but we will have a really clear understanding on what needs to happen and when.