Which companies do flexible marketing?

Which companies are agile marketing?

With 51% of marketers using agile working methods in 2021, up from 41% in 2020, agile marketing is undoubtedly firmly established in practice. Moreover, the need for agility seems to have been exacerbated by the health crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, 38% of people surveyed by Agile Sherpas said this made them more willing to adopt an agile approach. For professionals already convinced, 84% found agility important or very important to deal with the uncertainties of 2020. It must be said that a key feature of agile methodologies is that they allow for rapid adaptation to change. This is why Deloitte has made agility one of its marketing trends for 2021, stating that it “can give the confidence to respond to uncertainty and continue to thrive.”

What companies do flexible marketing
Toucan Toco

Toucan Toco, a data visualization specialist, chose to extend the agile method of its product development team to all its services. However, to accommodate it, the marketing team had to make some adjustments. Given the best days to send marketing emails and publish articles, the week was reorganized to create sprints that run from Thursday to Wednesday. In addition, the Kanban method was used with the online project management tool Trello to more easily assess the workload associated with each task. To avoid losing time due to interruptions, a collaborative chat tool was adopted that allows dialogue to take place in a deferred manner. Finally, when planning its tasks for the week, the marketing team got used to taking into account unexpected tasks that would naturally complete the picture.

The results? “Marketing and sales performance has almost doubled. We have created a guideline that allows us to focus on one task at a time, leaving room for the unexpected. “There is no question about prioritization or interruptions, it is a revolution for us,” says Kilian Bazin, co-founder of Toucan Toco. Insisting on the peace of mind it provides, he also stressed that it makes it easier for teams to work together, “harmonizing best practices allowing all individuals to interact easily.”

Which companies do flexible marketing? Wrike

Wrike, a collaborative project management software company, has also been seduced by agile marketing. Its content team has opted for weekly sprints and “priority alignment meetings.” Convinced of the power of agility, the company sees itself as “better able to handle a large flow of work and deliver on time without losing control.”

Which companies do flexible marketing? Santander Bank

In 2017, as part of a campaign called “Unlock Your London”, Santander applied the principles of agile marketing to its marketing teams. Meetings were held every morning to set priorities for the day, and campaign performance was evaluated weekly so that adjustments could be made quickly. “We’re testing, testing, testing with consumers and gathering feedback all the time,” explained Keith Moore, head of marketing.

At a company level, Santander believes that adopting agile has revolutionised the way it works and is one of the biggest contributors to its digital transformation.

Benefits of flexible marketing for companies:

While agile marketing has undeniable benefits for companies, it is clear that there are obstacles to its adoption. Thus, professionals interviewed by Agile Sherpas point to a lack of knowledge or training in agile approaches, the absence of competent people to lead this transformation, the lack of support from management, and finally, the lack of tools and time. As for those who have adopted an agile approach, they admit to having faced four main challenges: the difficulty of managing unplanned work, the reversion of some team members to non-agile methods, the complex interaction with non-agile teams, and the very frequent changes to plans. .

To develop agility, companies must take these obstacles into account and work on three main axes in order to remove them.

Adopting an agile approach requires first of all to build a good team, with people who are open to change and eager to learn. Then, you have to provide them with the right tools, identify the knowledge they lack and determine the best way to transfer it to them. In addition, it is essential to ensure that the team is well organized so that it can work independently and find its own solutions. To remove the resistance that is likely to be encountered, the transition to agility will be managed by senior marketing managers.

If the agile method and its processes are clearly important, the human factor should never be neglected. In fact, agility is also expressed in the way team members work and communicate. It is a state of mind that, to be truly embraced, requires a fresh look at failure: it is an integral part of the process and nothing more than an opportunity to learn.

Other important factors:

Time
It is essential to give yourself time to adapt the agile marketing methods and adapt them to your organization. You have to test different approaches, combine them and keep only the practices that seem to be useful. Moreover, not all tasks can be planned, so do not forget to anticipate contingencies and allocate time to deal with them.

Finally, to cause as little disruption as possible within the team, it is clear that adopting an agile approach can be done little by little, through practice.

Communication:
It is essential to spread the agile marketing strategy within the company. According to Deloitte, “the marketing function, known for its communications, branding and, more recently, revenue-generating capabilities, is in a unique position to spread the agile approach throughout the organization.

Given its proximity to other functions”. The marketing department can use internal communication tools to share its experience,

but it can also invite members of other departments to discover the practices adopted and the results obtained for themselves. Obviously, we must not forget to involve all those interested in agility in the discussions.

As analyst Marcia Trask pointed out in a post on the Forrester blog, the beneficiaries of agile marketing are many.

There are, of course, primarily the marketing team members and their managers, but there are also other members of the organization “who have access

to the first results or new offers, as well as greater brevity and clarity” and external customers who “benefit from more interactive marketing solutions and concrete solutions to their needs.”