Chief marketing officers and other senior marketing leaders now recognize that agility has become a critical attribute of successful marketing. Several factors are driving the need for more marketing agility. The proliferation of digital communications channels greatly increases the number of ways that consumers and business buyers can connect with brands and one another. Technology has also changed how potential buyers access information about the products or services they may be interested in purchasing. Perhaps most importantly, buyers’ values and preferences are changing more rapidly than ever.
The growing importance of marketing agility is demonstrated by the attention it is receiving from professional organizations, consulting firms, and marketing solution providers. For example, the Marketing Agility Assessment service as part of its marketing communication automation solution.
How to make Marketing more agile The discipline of agile marketing is derived from agile software development. It encompasses several principles, but the primary focus is on rapid prototyping, small-scale experimentation and testing, and on breaking marketing activities into small tasks that can be managed on a daily or weekly basis. The ultimate objective of agile marketing is to make marketing more responsive to a rapidly changing customer and competitive landscape. In fact, marketing agility can be defined as the ability to rapidly adapt marketing activities to changing buyer preferences and behaviors.
Increased marketing agility results from having the right human knowledge and skills, using streamlined business/marketing processes, and leveraging appropriate technology tools. These three components are interdependent, and all are essential for agile marketing operations.
Technology supports agile marketing in two distinct ways. First, technology enables marketers to collect, aggregate, dissect, and analyze data regarding buyer preferences and behaviors. Without this data and analysis, marketers have no rational basis for adapting marketing activities or programs. Second, technology enables enterprises to rapidly implement the new or changed marketing programs that the incoming data indicate will be effective.
This rapid implementation is critical because in today’s marketing environment, relevance is perishable. The information or message or marketing channel that is highly relevant and interesting to a potential buyer today may be far less relevant and interesting to that buyer a month from now.
This post was previously published on the ADAM Software blog. .
.
