Agile Marketing: 5 Simple Steps to Drive Revenue Strategically

In the Redbooth offices, it’s not just about using our own software to manage projects — it’s also about thinking creatively about all of our processes and how we can make them more efficient.

Whether you’re part of an in-house marketing team, a marketing agency, or a stakeholder when it comes to marketing your organization, read on to discover how agile marketing approaches can help you be more impactful.
 

What Is Agile Marketing?

Agile comes from the world of software development. About a decade ago, development teams started using it to build software more efficiently and iteratively. However, it’s taken marketing a bit of time to catch up. When applied to marketing, agile is defined as follows:

“Agile marketing is an approach in which teams identify and focus their collective efforts on high value projects, complete those projects cooperatively, measure their impact, and then continuously and incrementally improve the results over time.”
– MarketingGizmo.com

Your team or agency can leverage agile marketing to ensure that everyone is efficiently working on the most impactful, revenue-driving projects. Here are the steps the Redbooth marketing team takes to use agile with our own projects:
 

1. Determine the Highest-Value Projects

No team has infinite bandwidth, budget or resources, so this agile prioritization process helps provide transparency for leadership, and helps teams focus on the most meaningful projects. The process is simple: sit down together as a team and get all the projects out of email threads and meeting minutes onto a list.

How projects are prioritized is up to the team members. Projects can be prioritized by urgency, level of difficulty, or by those most likely to drive revenue.
 

2. Track Ownership and Success

Once you’ve prioritized projects, put the non-urgent and low priority ideas in the backlog. This way great ideas are captured, saved and put in the queue. When the owners have worked their way through the highest value projects, they can move on to those in the inbox.

With Redbooth, nothing gets lost in email threads or in collaboration during meetings. We track projects to completion without daily standup meetings or progress reports. I know when my team is working on what, when they have blocks, and when they finish up a project.
 

3. Build It as Leanly as Possible

Before delving into a resource-intensive, expensive project, ask your team if there is a lean way to build it first? This iterative approach allows marketing teams to be agile, adjusting and changing campaigns with minimal effort.

At Redbooth, we call this practice Minimum Viable Marketing, adapted from the term Minimum Viable Product in software development. To implement, marketing teams can ask, “What is the minimal investment we can make to see success before scaling this project up?”

Unless you’re a huge company with tons of historical data, you may actually have little idea of what marketing initiatives will work or not. That’s why taking a lean, experimental approach to all new projects or campaigns is critical to success. Here’s what minimum viable marketing looks like in practice:

• Run a small campaign before scaling up
• A/B test your campaign first
• Use a landing-page builder like Unbounce or your marketing automation
• Ask your vendors to implement a small contract or extended trial first

4. Measure Success

Many teams I work with delve into resource-intensive projects without ever asking the simple questions “why are we doing this?” and “what is our hypothesis?” The answers to these questions will help focus on the desired outcomes.

Before your team begins creating campaigns, ask yourself, “What does success look like?” By determining the key success metrics at the onset, it’s easier to decide if you want to put more resources into a project further down the line. It also helps ensure that the whole team is on the same page.
 

5. Learn and Collaborate

Rather than spending much of our week in progress meetings, we have two primary marketing meetings a week. The first is a weekly standup, where we ask “What are the things we’re working on this week and what’s standing in the way of progress?” Standup meetings are a mainstay of the agile philosophy; however, I have found that they aren’t as useful in the context of marketing. Using Redbooth cuts down of the amount of time that we need to spend catching up, because we already know what our team is working on.

What’s more useful to our marketing team is our weekly growth meeting. We open the meeting with the experiment results we have from the previous week. We then explore if the experiment was a success according to our previously determined key success metrics. Then we determine what we’ve learned from the experiment and decide what the next iteration is going to be.

With this results-oriented philosophy of experimentation and iteration, we drive growth and revenue at Redbooth.

Want to learn more about Redbooth and Agile Marketing? Watch the on-demand webinar here >>