Going Agile: Five Organizational Changes to Boost Your Marketing
Digital-first, contextual marketing requires an organizational paradigm shift which often scares businesses into paralysis. Here are the steps you can take to ease your business into a new era in marketing.
Pivoting From Waterfall Marketing to Agile
In today’s day and age, marketers aim to conduct personalized, one-to-one marketing with their customers – a goal that requires businesses to act with speed and agility. Unfortunately, for many businesses, marketing is still very much a case of the old assembly line: designing and executing campaigns is a multi-departmental mission that demands the participation of multiple company functions cooperating in a linear work flow.
The waterfall approach affects not only speed of execution, but the essence of marketing itself. Instead of interacting with many customer segments in campaigns that are personalized, relevant and effective, marketers are stuck with the old “Big Campaign.” The old assembly line paradigm and personalized marketing at scale are mutually exclusive. The cumbersome workflow kills all initiatives that don’t involve large groups of customers, and inevitably leads to a stunted ideation cycle and customers who are chronically underwhelmed.
From Paralysis to Control
In order to get to personalized, spot-on interactions and enhanced relationships with their customers, businesses must learn to conduct agile marketing. Intimate, one-to-one communication endows brands with an aura of emotional intelligence, sensitivity and customer-centricity that wins over customers’ hearts. In this sense, advanced, data-driven marketing is geared at generating a strategic uplift for your business.
Agile marketing requires an organizational paradigm shift, which often scares businesses into paralysis. Here are some steps you can take to overcome this stagnation and ease your business into the new era in marketing:
1. Cross-train
Just like in a manufacturing assembly line, marketing production cycles rely heavily on the presence and schedules of the individuals involved in the task. Cross-training workers to perform multiple tasks mitigates this difficulty by allowing greater flexibility. The method, often referred to as “skill chaining”, increases productivity by creating a skill overlap that streamlines the work process.
2. Hire talent
Art and science play equal parts in the modern marketer’s skill set. Fluency in data science and analytics are paramount, and so are creativity, digital savviness and business know-how. Recruiting well-rounded marketing talent is sometimes the best next step you can take in order to boost your marketing results. A marketer that is equally at ease with the creative team and the analytics team can consolidate the marketing cycle and speed up both ideation and execution.
3. Take the technological leap with CRM solutions
With the new generation of data-driven CRM solutions, marketing can manage hundreds of distinct customer groups and ensure that each one receives the most relevant and effective campaign. With robust data and predictive analytical capabilities, these marketing tools allow small, integrated marketing A-teams to manage workflows and execute campaigns from start to finish, without the need to outsource campaign components to a host of other departments in the company.
4. Bring in professional services
Many companies out there have perfected the art of agile marketing through technology and training, and offer consulting services to help you achieve the same. In the age of high professional demands, it may be worthwhile to aid your organizational transition by bringing in the experts.
5. Outsource
At times it’s easier to make a change after experiencing its benefits. If you’re still weary of agile marketing, you may want to outsource parts of your marketing efforts to businesses that offer these services. Deep customer segmentation, campaign performance analysis, campaign optimization and report creation are all services that can be obtained from external sources.
In order to stay relevant, marketing in customer-facing businesses needs to become the agile, effective, creative and responsive powerhouse that it can be. It’s about changing the way you operate, getting more from your data, and increasing engagement with happier customers.
As a CMO or marketer, it’s up to you to make sure you get there.
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