Agile is a technique that has been enthusiastically adopted organizations of all sizes and across every industry. No matter where your business currently stands with its goals, Agile Marketing can give your business the ability to use small tests to quickly understand what new tactics are most effective.
Don’t let 2017 end without understanding the following four Agile Marketing tenets. Once you put them to work for your brand, you’ll see why this methodology has become so popular all over the world.
As the name suggests, Agile Marketing gives marketers a lot of freedom to roll with the punches. This is possible because you set small, strategic goals. You then observe your team’s efforts to reach them and adjust accordingly.
Neil Patel recommends small goals as a “hack” that can transform your business. According to the world-famous marketer, you should attack big goals by turning them into little ones. Using the traditional Agile approach, you can then constantly check back on your progress and make changes to your efforts as necessary.
For example, your “big goal” may be to bring 100,000 unique visitors to your website every month. You may decide that the best way to do this is by investing in PPC banner advertising. As such, your marketing team produces the ads and pays for the space in volume.
Unfortunately, if this plan doesn’t work, and you’re not taking an Agile approach, it could be weeks or even months before you’re sure it won’t work. At that point, you’ve already wasted a lot of time and money
An Agile approach would mean looking at a much smaller goal. How many visitors could you hope to attract in just a month starting from your current baseline? Maybe it’s just 15,000. In that case, you’d take your PPC approach and aim at 15,000. Within a month, you’ll know if this approach is going to work, or if it’s time to try something new.
Marketers are fond of saying that “content is king.” While content is central to marketing, there is more to it than that.
Agile Marketing stresses the importance of balancing speed with quality. One without the other will result in poor content no one wants to read or view – much less share. While it’s important to publish content regularly, a company’s marketing efforts will suffer – immediately – if they’re not publishing quality content.
This becomes exacerbated when using Agile Marketing techniques. Since speed is key in this methodology, marketers need to ensure the content that is being published will give them the best chance at understanding whether their hypothesis is true or false. For example, a marketers may want to create a sprint to test whether video content on their landing page will increase conversion rates. The quality of that piece of content is as important to the learnings as is defining what metrics will define success. Without using the best possible piece of content, marketers will never truly know if the strategy will increase conversions or not.
An effective Agile Marketing campaign needs a flexible plan. According to the Harvard Business Review, this means a central plan that allows you to quickly adapt to new challenges in your environment.
This also means your plan can’t rely too heavily on current trends. Those trends can change, so your Agile Marketing plan must be ready to change with the market.
At the same time, once you’ve arrived at a concrete goal, you need to plan out the content you’ll use to reach it. Adaptability is still important, but without a goal, you don’t have a way forward.
With an overall content goal, your company can begin crafting smaller pieces, whether that’s social media posts, blogs, videos, brochures, etc. – anything that helps bring your business toward this larger goal.
Always ready with numerous small pieces of content, so your company can jump on any opportunity arises. They also warn that any topic that is already popular doesn’t matter, so this kind of content production needs to be done with an eye toward the future.
This isn’t to say that you’ll have content ready to publish the second an opportunity emerges. However, if you have a large collection of pieces to choose from, it will be far easier to develop them and take advantage of any new trend or opening the market.
A number of marketing trends in 2017 could hurt or help your company. However, by leveraging Agile Marketing methods such as setting small goals and creating quality content, you’ll be prepared to turn every one of these trends into opportunities and make the most out of each of them.
Thanks to Megan Totka for sharing advice and opinions in this post. Megan is Chief Editor for Chamber of Commerce. As a small business expert, Megan specializes in reporting the latest business news, helpful tips and reliable resources, as well as providing small business advice. She has significant experience with the topic of small business marketing, and has spent several years exploring topics like copywriting, content marketing and social media.
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