Marketers must embrace agile techniques to maintain relevance
To keep up with competitors, marketeers can no longer rely on traditional marketing methods. They must realise traditional marketing is dead. New methodologies must be deployed to keep up with the complexity and volume of marketing campaigns expected to be delivered.
Papinder Kailesh, Business Consulting Director at Teradata Marketing Applications, said, “A marketing campaign no longer exists for twelve months. Quarterly, monthly campaigns, weekly and even daily campaigns are now the norm for marketing departments.
“This means marketers must work harder to get campaigns out the door quickly, while learning from previous campaigns and keeping up with the competition. Failing to move quickly means organisations will lose their competitive edge and struggle to succeed.
“As a result of this increasing pace of marketing, it is no longer good enough to use traditional marketing approaches, such as Excel spreadsheets and emails to manage communication and track marketing expenditure and return on investments. Agile marketing has emerged as a way for marketers to keep up with the volume and complexity of campaigns and increased compliance and regulatory requirements. It uses technology to create more rapidly-deployed, highly measurable and relevant marketing programs.”
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“Companies must undertake two key actions to become agile, there must firstly be a shift in the mindset, this is particularly focused on the leadership team," Kailesh said. "Leaders must start believing in agile practices for the benefits to be realised by the whole organisation.
“Secondly, there must be a change in the methodology. There must be a change in organisational systems including how the organisation completes operations, and how it trains employees.”
Teradata has identified five key agile marketing traits:
1. Transparent. Full visibility means marketing spending can be tracked back to the business. Marketers can see the highest-performing channels in real-time. Return on Investment can be more easily identified.
2. Interactive. Agile marketing operations are streamlined to reduce processing time and eliminate review-and-approval bottlenecks that cost both time and money. Agile marketing operations create an environment where you can get more good ideas from more people and innovate more rapidly.
3. Iterative. The biggest focus in becoming agile will always be customers and their evolving expectations. Being able to change quickly to meet customers’ needs is vital to get ahead of competitors.
4. Responsive. To ensure sales and marketing messages are still relevant, organisations must respond to customers in real-time, and ensure messages are informed, relevant and timely.
5. Real-time. For best results, marketing campaigns must be able to adapt in real-time to reflect changes in the market. Marketing analytics and data management lets marketers adapt campaigns to the market very quickly.
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“Agile marketing isn’t for every organisation but it is certainly something which should be considered by marketeers to keep up with the increased pace of working," Kailesh said. "Once the change in mindset and the change in methodologies happens, the organisation will be well on the way to becoming more agile and adaptive to the market."
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