Agile marketing
Agile marketing: a strategy that helps you win in 2021
Introduction
Digital technology is continuously changing the face of businesses. This calls for the implementation of strategic, agile marketing strategies.
Top 5 marketing trends to win 2021
1. Agility - Successful marketers need to invest more resources in agile marketing strategies. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic and its negative impacts on most businesses, marketers should imagine and innovate new ways to match the changing consumer behavior.
2. Human connections - Organizations should strive to create authentic connections with consumers instead of concentrating on profit maximization and speed-to-market. They should concentrate on delivering high-quality goods and services that satisfy the needs of customers.
3. Trust - Trust from the consumer to a business is realized when what is promised by the business is what has been delivered to the customer. Communication must be transparent, consistent, and reliable. Marketers should shift their focus on upholding their core values instead of impressing demographics when exchanging messages with customers.
4. Participation - As a marketing team, endeavor to take customer engagement to a deeper level by upgrading from passive responses to their demands to more engaging activities in digital marketing. These include writing online reviews, creating content that is relevant to your brand, participating in social media conversations, and advising customers on the best way forward.
5. Fusion - This is a trend in strategic marketing that recognizes the significance of business partnerships. For instance, ExxonMobil collaborated with a global technology company and a local car care brand to generate a digitally-set up car maintenance experience.
The data platform that was created through the ecosystem allows customers to get maintenance recommendations and make their online reservations to have their vehicles serviced. This also enables ExxonMobil to fuel vehicles and ensure that they are operating effectively and safely.
What is agile marketing?
Agile marketing is a planned organizational long-term utilization of a particular agile methodology to manage and improve the way marketing teams accomplish their tasks to meet the changing customer needs. It focuses on deliberate experimentation, frequent releases, team efforts, and a strong commitment to customer satisfaction.
Moving to agile trend
The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a recession and has forced enormous rapid changes in customer behavior since customers are focusing more on digital channels instead of brick-and-mortar stores. Businesses need to cope with this change by concentrating on an agile digital channel strategy that satisfies the changing customer needs or risk losing relevance in the already competitive marketplace.
The foundation for agile marketing usually necessitates one unified organizational view of the customer. Organizations should develop a single customer data platform (CDP) that connects data from various channels, such as social media and e-commerce, and devices like tablets, mobile phones, and laptops alongside customer relationship management (CRM) systems to trace out customer journeys.
This helps organizations to form a more holistic customer experience.
Why it's important for businesses to apply it during the pandemic
•Anticipating the conversation - A holistic CDP coupled with "predictive sensing" technologies that are powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, enabling organizations to answer the call of a customer by sensing and understanding customer needs.
•Engaging with customers - By embracing social CRM, marketers operating in B2C and B2B markets can leverage their social media platforms as an avenue to offer "one-on-one service" at scale.
Three tips to start applying agile marketing:
•Lead through the customer - Marketers can be bold with their aspirations now that CDPs are becoming common and better supported by major technology. This begins with understanding customers and their needs.
•Collaborate on channel strategy design - The Chief Marketing Officer and the Chief Information Officer can better position their agile strategy by bringing key members of the C-suite, such as the Chief Sales Officer, early into the fold. They then can incorporate their needs and insights into the channel strategy design that works in concert across the customer journey in 2021.
•Rapidly prototype-and launch-new offers - For the success of agile marketing, speed is of great importance. Organizations need to leverage customer feedback to rapidly prototype new offers. Considering the importance of relevant messaging, combined with a clear understanding of the customer journey, the time is always right to lean on sensing technology and social CRM to embrace rapid execution.
Conclusion
Agile marketing is an essential strategy that helps brands to win. The necessary tools to favorably execute agile marketing are readily accessible to organizations. It's now up to the Chief Marketing Officer to assist the C-suite in articulating a vision that brings these tools to life to engage with and respond to customer needs as they emerge.