B2B marketers can Drive Marketing Performance with agile marketing strategies to gain expected results relatively quickly.
Agile marketing in the B2B industry is a strategic presales method that prioritizes producing high-value deliverables in small intense bursts to achieve goals. After every burst, known as a ‘sprint’ or an ‘iteration,’ marketing teams finish their outlined deliverables and start testing to identify opportunities to optimize during the next iteration. Gathering Data and analyzing it enables the presales team to redefine and enhance the results with time constantly.
Organizations that adopt agile marketing strategies will embrace failure. This marketing approach allows teams to fail, learn from their mistakes, and constantly make strategic changes to improve. It is crucial to bring an agile mindset to marketing operations to improve the effectiveness of the entire presales teams.
However, ingraining an agile mindset across marketing operations can be daunting and difficult.
The process of Agile Marketing
Agile marketing is not a one size fits all approach. Hence no presales team can follow the same Agile approach as other teams. A few prefer traditional marketing strategies, while others customize a hybrid model that fits their needs. CMOs can select a marketing strategy that suits their needs and helps to accomplish their goals. According to a recent report by Agile Sherpas titled “State of Agile Marketing 2022,” nearly 91% of non-Agile presales teams plan to embrace Agile within the year. Scrum and Kanban are two main Agile marketing methodologies that presales teams can leverage.
Also Read: Reasons for Businesses to Use Podcasts for Marketing
Strategies to Embrace B2B Agile Marketing Strategies:
Embrace Cross-functional Teams
One crucial factor that influences team behavior is organizational structure. An effective organizational framework will improve productivity or set limitations to achieve goals. Enterprises that embrace centralized leadership approach and have a functional team of experts with expertise in similar areas will have a controlled information flow leading to silos. Legacy team structures have become obsolete and cannot deliver the required productivity today. There are tremendous benefits for any B2B marketer by adapting to a cross-functional team approach to accomplish tasks.
Building cross-functional departments enables the creation of a cohesive team of experts with expertise in diverse skills to optimize marketing campaigns and reduce reliance on third-party vendors. Cross-functional teams that have expertise in all the areas required to make the project successful improve the productivity of the B2B marketing approaches. Predictability, pace, frequency of delivering value, and communication are important benefits of cross-functional teams for B2B agile marketers. Building a team with diverse skills minimizes the need to partner with consultants and other third-party service providers.
Skill diversity reduces the need for handover and waiting on third parties or other functional teams to accomplish goals. It is an effective strategy to improve the forecasting within the department and speed of work to ensure sustainability in the marketing operations.
Streamline Communication
Agile marketing teams must have streamlined and transparent communication to accomplish all the expected results. Decision-makers can ingrain workflows that support transparent communication and equal distribution of work to have sustainable operations. Presales teams that can work cohesively on various projects can be valuable contributors to frequent releases of marketing collateral.
Cross-functional marketing teams allow interaction about what matters, content reuse, and identifying unsuccessful strategies. B2B agile marketing reams can reduce low-value projects from the team’s docket to focus on projects that yield better results.
Transparent B2B Agile Marketing Teams
Many B2B marketing times heavily depend on emails or face-to-face conversations to assign tasks. However, this traditional approach to raising ad hoc requests has become obsolete because assigning tasks over emails pile a file of activities to individuals’ to-do lists, which no one has visibility into.
CMOs should consider adopting a visual task management approach to streamline their operations. Implementing Kanban boards is a preferred method for effective visual task management. Integrating Kanban is an effective way for organizations that do not have process transparency. Kanban board helps businesses visualize the process of making marketing requests into deliverable assets. Enterprises that embrace these tools can track the item flow through the board. To Do, In Progress, and Done are the three stages of a basic Kanban board. Depending on their state, this tool visualizes all the vertical columns and granular tasks included in the projects or a ticket list on board.
B2B agile marketing teams equipped with visualizing tools will help streamline the workflow and assign ownership to the task.
No agile marketers will deny the influence of visualization in their marketing operations. Visualization is an effective tool that creates a better understanding of workloads in the entire team and enables the decision-makers to spot all the improvement opportunities. Implementing the best agile marketing tools helps detect the problem and respond in real-time to minimize the impact.
Also Read: Powerful Growth Marketing Strategies for a Successful Business
Draft Iterative Plans
The needs and demands of every organization will constantly change because of the variation in the decision-makers’ priority. In the start, B2B agile marketers should have a complete roadmap of their plans and what results they expect from that marketing campaign. CMOs should develop an agile strategy that helps achieve the desired outcomes with less effort, time, and resources.
Test, Fail, Track, and Optimize Constantly
One of the significant benefits of embracing agile marketing strategies is that it allows businesses to fail fast and fail often. This approach focuses on testing, experimenting, failing, learning from failure, and embracing data-driven marketing operations. Marketing teams should always have campaigns running in a beta mode where B2B agile marketers closely track the performance and make strategic changes to optimize the deliverable assets.
Many businesses are leveraging A/B testing and multivariate testing through various channels like email, websites, advertising, and social media to improve the efficiency of the overall marketing campaign. Agile marketing goes beyond traditional metrics and is an effective way to transform data into actionable insights.
An ingrained agile mindset in marketing operations can be difficult and won’t be achievable quickly. CMOs of B2B enterprises can consider the ways mentioned above to have an effective agile marketing campaign.
For more such updates follow us on Google News TalkCMO News.
