How to Apply Agile Marketing to Your Go-to-Market Strategy
The global pandemic, rapid digital transformation, shrinking budgets, and the ever-changing talent market have made it increasingly difficult for marketing teams to reach, engage, and convert target audience members and impact ROI.
As a marketing leader, it’s critical your team responds to these challenges with agility. Without an agile marketing strategy, you run the risk of falling behind competitors, producing materials and content that aren’t relevant or valuable to your target audience, losing your best talent, and wasting budget and resources.
What is agile marketing?
Agile marketing refers to your team’s ability to tailor marketing materials to your target audience, respond to market changes quickly, adapt to emerging industry trends and opportunities, and make decisions that improve ROI.
Why Use an Agile Marketing Strategy
By applying agile marketing to your go-to-market strategy, your team will:
- Adapt to market changes quickly.
- Experiment with new and existing industry tactics and trends and respond accordingly.
- Share high-quality and well-optimized campaigns tailored to your target personas.
- Customize content for your audience.
- Improve collaboration, communication, and transparency among the marketing team and with cross-functional teams.
- Make data-driven marketing decisions.
- Justify marketing plans with hard data to hypothesize impact and ROI.
- Mitigate marketing spending.
- Gain a competitive advantage within your industry and market.
To use an agile marketing strategy, your team needs access to an agile business problem-solving tool like Catalant. This purpose-built and digitally-enabled platform gives enterprises to manage specific business problems in an agile and controlled way. It also provides access to a marketplace of highly-skilled and experienced problem-solving experts who are ready to help you manage your business problems and provide value efficiently. Let’s look at more of the benefits associated with an agile marketing strategy next.
3 Benefits of Agile Marketing
Marketers can plan campaigns, ads, social media posts, content, and events months in advance. However, in today’s business environment, it’s not easy to predict the future — you could lose talent, your budget may shrink, your product messaging might change, or the business’s goals may be adjusted without notice. What your team needs in order to respond to these changes both quickly and effectively is marketing agility.
Agile marketing ensures you will be ready to pivot if and when necessary and roll out quick yet enduring solutions. The strategy will also help your team stay top of mind among target audience members in a competitive environment, apply the latest industry trends, and stay on (or under) budget.
Here are three major benefits Marketing leadership will get from deploying an agile marketing strategy.
1. React to unplanned or urgent marketing needs with quick, high-quality, and enduring solutions.
Imagine your marketing team’s only search engine optimization (SEO) expert decides to move on from the company. Soon after their departure, the marketing team notices a substantial amount of content on your website starting to decline in traffic. You now have an urgent need for an SEO expert who can quickly audit your site and its content, identify and relay the problem to the team, and provide actionable feedback about the best ways to combat the issue.
Through Catalant’s expert marketplace, you find a highly-skilled SEO expert with the necessary experience to efficiently dive into an SEO analysis on your website. In only about two weeks, that subject matter expert will be hired and able to provide the value and solutions you need.
The key is how important it is for your company to respond to the issue at hand with agility. You don’t have time to waste trying to find the right full-time hire. You also don’t have time to sit back and guess the best ways to resolve the problem. The most effective solution is to turn to an agile business problem-solving platform like Catalant to identify and hire the right SEO for the job. Once they’re hired and they provide the value you need, you can choose to extend their contract.
2. Adjust your marketing mix with a data-backed approach.
Traditional marketing strategies take a long time to plan, create, and implement. But today’s business environment, wrought with change, is better fit for a test-and-learn approach. Modern marketing tech stacks have made this possible now more than ever before.
Today’s marketers have access to an unprecedented amount of data. Observing channel performance can happen by the week, day, or even hour. Marketing teams have the necessary knowledge to stay agile by adjusting and fine-tuning your marketing mix with incredible accuracy. This type of agile marketing approach rooted in analytics allows you to pivot quickly when something is not working across any of your projects. You are never locked into strategic marketing decisions long-term when you have an agile approach — rather, you can confidently experiment, learn, and adjust in real time.
Partnering with an agile platform like Catalant matches flexible talent resources to this consistent process of real-time testing, learning, and adjusting. Flexible strategic marketing talent enables your team to pull from different areas of expertise as needed, assign projects to the right experts quickly, and implement data-driven business decisions faster.
3. Increase ROI across your marketing projects while using resources wisely.
An agile marketing strategy requires smart business decisions that result in high-quality work and the efficient and thoughtful use of talent and budget resources. According to Gartner, global CMOs are reporting their marketing budgets are shrinking. Agile marketing allows your team to invest in the right areas and pull back on marketing resources as needed and leverage talent and time more wisely to help you efficiently increase ROI.
One focus area for growth among many B2B and B2C marketing leaders is their content marketing engine. Analysts predict the global content marketing market is poised to grow over $400 billion during 2021-2025, as teams start to lean heavily on a dedicated full-funnel content marketing strategy. However, there may be a significant skillset gap among your existing marketing team that is proving difficult to fill. Rather than asking your Product Marketing and Demand Generation teams to patch together a content plan for the year, or spending time searching for a full-time content marketer to join your team, leverage Catalant as an agile business problem-solving partner.
Catalant will help you quickly bring on a qualified subject matter expert who will devise the right content strategy for your business. This type of agile approach results in improved ROI due to high-quality outputs from your hired subject matter expert. It also ensures your other marketing team members are staying focused on their responsibilities and that your team is not making a full-time hire that you do not currently need.
Implement an Agile Marketing Strategy
With an agile marketing strategy, your team will be empowered to produce personalized marketing materials at scale, adapt to inevitable and rapid changes within your industry quickly, and identify opportunities that will result in major returns on investment across your enterprise.