The Agile Marketing Journey
With a decade of helping companies grow their businesses online, we’ve solidified the processes that ensure success. More often than not, we find that companies struggle with their digital marketing because they attempt to jump directly into execution rather than taking the necessary steps.
Digital Marketing Transformation
Marketing transformation is synonymous with digital transformation. A data study from PointSource – Executing Digital Transformation (DX) – reveals that data collected from 300 decision-makers in Marketing, IT, and Operations highlights the struggles businesses face in improving with the end-user in mind. They found that companies:
- Lack clearly defined goals and direction: Only 44% of businesses say they’re highly confident in their organization’s ability to achieve its vision for growth, and 4% aren’t confident at all.
- Struggle to unify cross-channel digital experiences: Only 51% of businesses say their organization addresses specific user needs across all platforms.
- Have legacy mindsets that create barriers 1tments compete with other departments within their organization for resources and/or budget.
- Operate on outdated systems that hinder the ability to improve digital experiences: 84% say their organization has disparate legacy systems that impact the speed of development of new digital experiences.
These are the threats to your organization as you hope to transform your digital marketing. We have a large retailer in the region that wanted assistance with its digital marketing. We saw an incredible opportunity for them to implement a new e-commerce system that was integrated with their point of sales (POS). However, the leadership balked at the expense of having built a proprietary inventory and point-of-sale system that had cost them tens of millions of dollars over the years. They said that any investment in a new point-of-sale, inventory, and fulfillment system was out of the discussion.
The result was that there could be no synchronization or integration between online and offline sales. We walked away from this prospect after several promising meetings – there was just no way we could achieve the growth results they wished given their systems’ severe limitations. I have very little doubt that this was a huge factor in their struggles – and they’ve now filed for bankruptcy after watching their business decline over the years.
Agile Marketing Journey
If your business hopes to adapt and overcome these challenges, you must adopt an agile marketing process. This isn’t news; we’ve been sharing agile marketing methodologies for a few years now. But as each year passes, the impact of an inflexible marketing process continues to impair businesses more and more. It won’t be long before your business is irrelevant.
Key Performance Indicators have expanded for digital businesses, including awareness, engagement, authority, conversion, retention, upselling, and customer experience. In our latest infographic, we’ve diagrammed the journey that we take our clients through to ensure their success. The stages of our Agile Marketing Journey include:
- Discovery: Before any journey begins, you must understand where you are, what’s around you, and where you’re going. Every marketing employee, hired consultant, or agency must work through a discovery phase. Without it, you don’t understand how to deliver your marketing material, how to position yourself from the competition, or what resources are at your disposal.
- Strategy: Now that you have the tools, you can develop a baseline strategy to achieve your marketing goals. Your strategy should include an overview of your goals, channels, media, campaigns, and a clear plan for measuring your success. You will want an annual mission statement, quarterly focus, and monthly or weekly deliverables. This is an agile document that can change over time, but has the buy-in of your organization.
- Implementation: With a clear understanding of your company, your market positioning, and your resources, you’re ready to build out the foundation of your digital marketing strategy. Your digital presence must have all the tools necessary to execute and measure your upcoming marketing strategies.
- Execution: Now that everything is in place, it’s time to execute the strategies you’ve developed and measure their overall impact.
- Optimization: Notice the cool wormhole we’ve included in the infographic, which takes our growing strategy and transports it right back to Discovery again! There is no completion of the Agile Marketing Journey. Once you’ve executed your marketing strategy, you must test, measure, improve, and adapt it over time to continue to maximize its impact to your business.
Keep in mind that this is the overall journey, not a tactical guide to implementing and executing agile marketing strategies. 1
We wanted to illustrate the relationships between the core phases of your journey and the factors that must be explored as you navigate the digital marketing landscape. I hope you enjoy this infographic as much as we enjoyed creating it over a month! It’s the foundation of every one of our client engagements.
I’ve also developed a Marketing Initiative Worksheet to help you plan out your marketing efforts and ensure alignment with your overall corporate goals.
Download the Marketing Initative Worksheet
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