The sudden arrival of the coronavirus and the subsequent social distancing mandate has shown businesses the importance of using agile marketing. Back in the day, advertisers committed months ahead of time to TV ad campaigns and magazine page spreads. With the quick response of digital formats, marketers see that they can instantly change messaging and strategies. If your clients don’t embrace agile marketing, they risk falling behind their competition.

Benefits of Agile Marketing

McKinsey analysts explain: “Agile, in the marketing context, means using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly iterating.” The agile concept got its start in software development but has now expanded into other parts of business operations. Aprimo and AgileSherpas recently teamed up to study agile practices among 400 marketers and found that 41% of businesses already employ some of these principles. Another 42% of businesses indicated their intention to ‘go agile’ when it comes to marketing.

Teams that are already using agile report the following benefits of having made the change:

• Faster time to release of campaigns/​content 53%
• More productivity for the team 53%
• Better prioritization of work 53%

Customizing and Using Agile Marketing

While some organizations may try to convince your clients that there is only one way to do agile — such as Lean, Scrum or Kanban — the truth is that 54% of marketers use a hybrid approach. At some companies, having a daily short stand-​up meeting to discuss what’s holding them back works well. At other organizations, a sprint review that shows the progress being made toward a goal helps keep all interested people in the loop. These short, but high-​touch, interactions allow marketers to complete a campaign or quickly shift focus as business conditions change.

Your clients need to be ready to change their focus when the economy begins to emerge from the COVID-​19 crisis. In addition to helping them become more agile, you can let them know about upcoming business opportunities highlighted every Monday by AdMall from SalesFuel.