Develop an agile marketing strategy

1. Audit your current and upcoming projects for opportunities to break them down into smaller, iterative work.

Look for processes, tactics, and outputs that are not working particularly well or are highly impacted by change and will most benefit from the agile methodology.

2. Define agile workflows for your most common marketing project types and specify each stage the project will need to move through from start to finish for that workflow.

Include clear definitions of complete for each stage. Configure tools to track and transparently report status.

3. Run a pilot program using using agile methodologies to get executive buy-in.

Before executives are convinced, they also need to understand how an agile methodology works. Choose a marketing project and team to test your agile methodology before implementing it on a massive scale. This will provide learnings and results to use to get approval from stakeholders in your organization. Engage an executive early to sponsor your ideas. The more support you have, the easier it becomes to persuade the rest. If your team needs software purchases, budget allocation, or other tools to start the agile process, procure these as part of the buy-in process.

4. Choose a suitable agile framework, align on goals for your agile marketing strategy, and define team norms for your agile marketing process.

Whether it’s Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, or Lean, the chosen framework needs to be suitable for the market you are in, how your team works, and your marketing goals. Choose a sprint length that is most suitable depending on the resources you have and how fast your team can launch an experiment. Typical sprints last about two weeks.

5. Identify the real-time data that you will use to quickly deploy tests, evaluate results, and iterate rapidly.

Don’t get overwhelmed by the number of metrics available. Pick the ones that best help you measure continuous improvement.

6. Create a backlog of hypotheses, and choose what to test next based on the ICE score framework.

Analyze your data to find insights that are worth testing. To best make use of your limited time, evaluate the following questions on a scale from 1 to 5: What will be the impact of this test on the goals if it works? How easy is it to implement this test? How confident are we that this hypothesis will work? Compare the combined scores for each hypothesis and add the hypotheses with the highest scores to be the next sprint to focus them.

7. Launch the experiment, collect data, and analyze results to see if your hypothesis works. Repeat the cycle until you can verify that your hypothesis is correct.

Make note of what works and what doesn’t, and then implement changes in the next sprint.

8. Scale by expanding agile marketing beyond the pilot.

Once your pilot project is refined and performing well, it’s time to scale up to other projects or teams.