5 Characteristics of an Agile Marketing Team
As businesses adapt to a landscape of constant change, go-to-market (GTM) departments within these organizations recognize the need to be agile. Marketing teams, for example, are addressing the challenges inherent within the field by building agile teams with the skills, knowledge, and vision needed to match their company’s broader growth strategies.
Achieving status as an agile marketing team requires identifying specific qualities that most effectively move the needle toward change. Without these components, teams are likely to commit costly, time-consuming mistakes in strategy and execution — errors that can be avoided by paying attention up-front to fluidly engaging the right people for the job.
5 Characteristics of an Agile Marketing Team
Here are five key characteristics every agile marketing team should possess:
1. Organized
Rather than waiting on senior-level approval for strategic initiatives, a new emphasis on agility means that teams decide internally who should take responsibility for which project outcomes. For example, demand generation teams may take final responsibility for targeted advertising campaigns, while corporate marketing teams focus on broader brand image initiatives.
Working in tandem with internal growth strategists, agile marketing teams pinpoint, analyze and establish key goals for their companies and create specific plans to achieve those goals. In most businesses, especially those with a multilayered bureaucratic structure, this type of independent approach ensures a quicker route to success.
2. Analytical
Marketing teams rely upon compiling and assessing data to understand customer engagement, prospect conversion and sales objectives. Considering the avalanche of marketing data available through online analytics, they’re able to cull through the data and evaluate particular relevance within a real-time methodology.
Agile marketing teams incorporate independent marketing professionals and project-based boutique consulting who have specialized knowledge and can interpret customer-focused data in fresh ways and build upon the company’s legacy foundation.
3. Resilient
Agile teams understand the first iteration of any new innovation or idea may not be successful. As a result, they become adept at experimentation, assessing results and reinventing their strategies as needed.
From these experiments and iterations, agile marketing teams can move towards desired objectives and solutions, such as building out broadly defined customer personas and designing a marketing campaign centered on a forthcoming product upgrade.
4. Innovative
Back in the day, C-suite executives would determine marketing strategies without particular regard to changes in the marketplace, politics, technology, and competition. In our modern digital era, however, the one-size-fits-all approach is outmoded and ineffective.
The pace of change is so propulsive and never-ending that businesses must adapt to constant adjustments in customer demand. Agile marketing teams embrace change by anticipating the ebbs and flows and creating urgency around innovation to adapt successfully.
5. Collaborative
Agility is only as effective as the team members’ ability to communicate with each other. Agile marketing teams eliminate obstacles such as non-collaborative silos between departments. This requires team members to tailor their communications to a range of constituencies, from co-workers to customers to vendors and stakeholders.
The optimal road to success, says digital innovation specialist Alex Mari, is “a highly collaborative team that operates according to streamlined processes, elimination of redundant information and minimal interfaces.”
Becoming agile is the best way to address challenges and adapt to competitive pressures and an ever-changing marketplace. Adopt these key agile characteristics to avoid costly mistakes in strategy and, instead, achieve faster, more efficient results.