Olive & Co
Search
Close this search box.

Using Agile Marketing to Respond and Adapt With Confidence

Agile Marketing

Is your marketing moving at the speed of business? 

Before answering that question, pause for a moment and really consider how your organization plans, implements, and analyzes its marketing. 

Many organizations invest a great deal of time and effort into developing a marketing plan. But in reality, how good can a marketing plan be? How well can your organization foresee the future? How wisely can it envision what competitors may do? How sure is the marketing team that what it predicts will happen, actually comes to fruition? 

This isn’t to suggest a marketing plan is a worthless endeavor. Quite the opposite. A marketing plan is foundational to successful operations. But we suggest using a marketing plan for what it is—a high-level forecast of what’s predicted to occur. 

A marketing plan lays out how much will be spent, and how, when, where, and ideally, why. But like so many things life and business, the moment the spreadsheet gets approved, it’s outdated. Things move quicker than any 3-, 6-, or 12-month strategy can accommodate.

So what can a business do? Simple. Move quicker. We mean it. Read, react, and adapt your marketing efforts on the fly with agile marketing principles. 

Agile Thinking for Better Marketing Results 

Agile marketing principles provide a mindset and platform that allows your organization to be responsive to changing conditions in the market, industry, or economic landscape.

Read, react, and adapt your marketing efforts on the fly with agile marketing principles. 

It shifts the focus of marketing team operations from implementing a plan to continually re-evaluating results and modifying actions. 

The goals of agile marketing practices are things any organization would aspire to achieve. They include:

  • Rapid to respond to change
  • Get campaigns and assets running quickly, and then optimize
  • Focus on continuous improvement and testing
  • Measure and analyze everything
  • Use data to inform and justify decisions
  • Collaborate and share insights across multiple teams 

In every way, agile marketing practices are dealing with what’s happening now. Where a marketing plan is set in stone, agile marketing practices are in-moment insights and reactions. It underscores the idea that what works today may not work tomorrow or next week. Agile marketing practices take nothing for granted and demand performance is proven or the application is tossed away in favor of better-allocated resources. 

Agile Marketing Is Only Smart If It’s Achievable 

We’ve all heard advice that we can agree with, or even find brilliant at the moment. But we also know when the advice is utterly worthless because it is impractical to implement. 

What works today may not work tomorrow or next week.

We’re here to tell you the adoption of agile marketing practices is smart advice you can likely begin to implement in short order without significantly altering budget or resources. 

The easiest and most common area to begin applying agile marketing practices is your digital communications. Why? 

One, they are the most accurately measured and have the greatest quantity of information tied to them. 

Two, they are the most flexible medium. Unlike broadcast campaigns that require significant time and money to produce, digital marketing can shift, change, and evolve far more quickly and for less investment. Plus, digital media contracts and schedules are much easier to amend. 

How can your organization begin applying agile marketing principles right now? Try these to get started:

Monthly Performance Dashboard Reporting and Analysis

A comprehensive review of data and performance statistics encompassing all digital marketing efforts. 

Monthly Sprint Meetings

Use current performance data to plot the next 3-6 months of action items with defined priorities set for each month. 

Continuous Website Improvement

Ongoing updates, additions, and revisions to content, navigation, design, and accessibility based on organizational changes, newly gained insights, market changes, and more. 

These three suggestions, while seemingly simple, actually shift your entire marketing paradigm from yearly projections to month-by-month analysis and adjustment. But be warned, it is possible to become too reactive and yes, potentially, too agile. 

Just because you are evaluating information more often doesn’t mean every decision should be made in the moment. 

Trends take time, messages must be allowed to take root, results might not appear instantly. This is incredibly important for marketers to remember.

In many situations, the true causes of data results aren’t always immediately apparent. That’s how marketing works. Often, what you are looking for with an agile marketing practices approach is not only the bottom line outcome but the seeds of change along the way. Little blips, subtle bumps, unexpected upticks, all of these nuances that can ultimately form major shifts can often be identified and acted upon sooner. That’s another benefit of agile marketing practices: it can act like a Doppler weather radar for your marketing efforts.

Today’s Economic Downturn Is Temporary

Intrigued by the opportunity and idea of agile marketing practices? So are we. That’s why Olive & Company has made it a cornerstone of our digital strategy and planning. And, as agile marketing practices would suggest, we continue to evaluate and refine our own applications. We constantly fine-tune and adjust our behaviors and processes to deliver improved results. 

If you’d like to learn more about melding agile marketing practices with sage analysis, strategy, and creative work, we can help. We’ll fill in the blanks, answer your questions, and improve your understanding. Let’s connect and get your marketing moving forward.

Dave Hruby
Dave Hruby
Dave Hruby is brand strategist, writer, thinker, maker, and doer that challenges the status quo, shares wisdom freely, and happily asks tough questions to arrive at better than expected outcomes.