One of the major benefits of being a digital marketing agency is its ability to adjust to ever-changing markets rapidly. However, one can only capitalize on this kind of agility by learning practical methods for being quick on your feet.
‘Agile thinking’ is a popular term for describing this approach to business. Rather than attempting to launch one very big thing, you’ll focus on small feature sets with incremental improvements at every stage. This enables you to adjust to consumers while always moving forward, ideally increasing the chance of building something your customers love.
In this article, we’ll review the concept of agile thinking, then offer you three practical ways to apply it within your digital marketing agency.
Why Agile Thinking?
Agile thinking is an aspect of lean business development. The goal is to reduce activities that don’t add direct value from the product development process, thus increasing customer value.
In the Agile Software Development Manifesto, there are four cornerstones, which are easy to extend to the context of a digital marketing agency:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Self-organization and motivation are important, but so are collaborative efforts and regular interaction.
- Working software over comprehensive documentation. A working product is more useful and welcome than only offering documents to clients in meetings.
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Requirements cannot be fully predicted at the beginning of the creation cycle, therefore continuous customer involvement is important.
- Responding to change over following a plan. Agile methods focus on quick responses to change.
Agile development is incremental and this style of development can be traced back to 1957. Over time, new methods were developed and refined to eventually become the Agile Manifesto in 2001.
More recently, marketers have taken note in hopes of enjoying the flexibility and productivity that agile thinking provides developers. It increases speed-to-market and ultimately enables them to create more successful end-products.
These core values applied in marketing is simply called agile marketing.
Agile builds in a feedback loop, so you know immediately whether your solution is meeting the customer’s needs. The feedback loop allows you to iterate, so that even if you don’t hit the bull’s-eye on the first try, you can make changes until you succeed.
~ Jim Ewel, publisher of agileMarketing.net
Being agile in marketing enables companies to focus on small experiments, rather than placing large bets on untested ideas. By putting customer collaboration at the core, the focus is on validated learning rather than opinion or hierarchal convention. This customer discovery process helps businesses ditch static plans in favor of strategies capable of handling change.
Ultimately, agile thinking helps your company keep up with the market, have a better scope of your work, and maintain happier and more productive teams. The question is how to apply it within your own digital marketing agency!
With that in mind, here are three ways you can adjust agile software development tools to your advantage.
1. Employ constant testing
Agile testing gives you feedback on your product or service.
There are a few elements involved, the first of which is specification by example. This is a collaborative way to define requirements for a product, transforming abstract ideas into concrete ideas by using specific examples. This closely ties into the second tool, which is behavior-driven development. This uses specific stories or scenarios to directly test the success or failure of a product.
When launching a new campaign, it is a good idea to get quantifiable feedback to figure out which tactics work before going full-scale. This could be as simple as testing the user experience from ad to purchase. If there is any point they get confused along the way, you’re creating an unnecessary chance to lose leads.
In fact, you may already have testing data without realizing it. Take MarketerGizmo, who had search data from their potential customers that defined what they were interested in seeing. By responding to this feedback and producing the content their customers were searching for, they increased their conversions for SurveyGizmo by 810 percent!
2. Implement scrum
‘Scrum’ is a term from rugby, representing a group of players working together to gain control over the ball. It was chosen because Scrum is a method for many teammates to work together effectively within a project.
Scrum is carried out in incremental stages, or ‘sprints’. These sprints rely on the following values:
- Commitment: Members individually commit to achieving team goals, each and every sprint.
- Courage: Members have the courage to work through conflict and challenges together – to do the right thing.
- Focus: Members focus exclusively on their team goals.
- Openness: Members agree to be transparent about their work and any challenges they face.
- Respect: Members respect each other to be capable and to work with good intent.
There are three roles in scrum: product owner, scrummaster, and team. The product owner maintains vision and communication with everybody. The Scrummaster acts as facilitator, removing any blockages preventing the team from moving forward. Meanwhile, the development team self organizes to complete the work assigned for the sprint session. Each sprint is set in advance with a time restriction, which is most often two weeks.
You can learn more about the workflow here.
Strict scrum schedules may not apply to every scenario, but you can certainly use scrum-inspired techniques. These help build happier and more effective teams, while opening doors to new ideas.
Focus on defining concrete goals for your team each sprint. This keeps your team on track and ensures your business only spends resources on value-adding activities.
Gogo’s marketing team uses Scrum-based techniques by blending them with other lean methodologies. Mark Verone, Director of Marketing at Gogo, says “When you can visualize the steps in your workflow, you can immediately start to find areas for improvement or ways to eliminate wasteful steps.”
3. Focus on Minimum Viable Offers
A minimum viable offer or product (MVP) is one with just enough features to gather validated learning about it for further development.
Rather than working on a huge product or service behind the scenes, focus on the smallest possible thing that can be delivered at a time. An MVP is one way to treat new ideas as experiments, rather than betting the bank on a huge investment.
The MVP approach is a well-defined usage of validated learning. By putting out an MVP quickly, you can get your customers involved at an earliest practical stage, ensuring you are addressing a real pain point. This may even help you find highly scalable micro-services to attract a whole new customer base.
Consider, for example, LKR Social Media – a digital marketing agency that focuses on social. Internally, they developed an app to reschedule social media posts in the future to help them deliver better results for their clients. This means their features and tools were directly connected to the needs and wants of their clients. After a while, they realized it might make a great service on its own, so they launched MeetEdgar. This project was so successful, it is now its own independent sister company!
Conclusion
As you can see, agile thinking isn’t strictly for software development. Applying these ideals and concepts within your digital agency will help you stay ahead of the competition and deliver higher quality work with less risk.
Let’s quickly recap the three agile strategies, discussed above, that you can implement within your own organization:
- Constant testing: to catch and resolve problems early on.
- Scrum-based team organization: to quickly produce new ideas.
- Minimum viable offers: to resolve customer pain points in the simplest ways.