The Future of Marketing

As a marketing professional, you must focus on the future of marketing. In a world with evolving technology, changing customer preferences, and market shifts, the industry is unfolding in new directions. Agile strategies are replacing traditional methods so that marketing teams can become more responsive, customer-centric, and data-driven, allowing them to reap the benefits of new opportunities and avenues for reaching their audiences. Let's explore how agile marketing is shaping the industry's present and future.

Faster response to market changes

The world isn't slowing down anytime soon, and responsiveness to market changes is critical for your company to thrive in the future. With traditional marketing, long planning cycles have a fundamental flaw—they take too long! 

Many companies working traditionally have encountered the problem of their marketing plan becoming irrelevant before it's even executed. When this happens, those weeks (or months) of planning are wasted time, and the team can't respond quickly enough to pivot due to a change in product direction, consumer response, or other event.

With agile marketing, teams are empowered to respond quickly to real-time customer feedback, emerging trends, or competitor moves without cumbersome approval processes or perfect planning. Teams create a marketing plan at the last responsible moment—just in time to execute, but not so early that they risk a ton of re-work. 

Consider this hypothetical scenario: When the pandemic happened, two companies had wildly different outcomes. The company practicing traditional marketing had spent months perfecting plans, carefully noting every detail and getting approvals from several senior leaders. The pandemic caused them to throw out the plan and left them stumped on how to pivot. The agile marketers at another company weren't fazed by the pandemic because the way they worked allowed for change. With a quick team huddle on how to pivot, they seamlessly switched gears.

Customer-centric iteration

The very nature of agile fits seamlessly with the continuous feedback that marketers seek from customers. Marketers have always gathered customer feedback through A/B testing, analytics, and social listening. 

With agile, the key difference is that instead of waiting for post-campaign analysis, marketers respond more frequently to feedback and use that information to pivot, even if it goes against the plan. This method allows marketers to deliver value early and often so that they can learn from the results.

Customer needs are changing faster than ever, making agile marketing essential for businesses now and into the future. Marketers who want to thrive have found that iterating with agile marketing is one of the most effective ways to beat the competition.

Cross-functional collaboration

Marketing departments interact with many areas of the business—from sales to technology. With traditional organizational structures, these departments work in silos, which can cause work to be slow, redundant, and lacking in innovation.

Agile encourages cross-collaboration and structuring teams with members who have the skills and competencies needed to deliver value on their own with minimal handoffs and dependencies, pulling people together across traditional departmental boundaries. With cross-functional teams, silos are broken down, which speeds up decision-making and execution.

Companies can no longer afford for marketing work to pass from department to department. Cross-functional collaboration is essential now and in the future because marketers need to work quickly in today's fast-paced world, especially when prospects and customers react to what they're seeing in real time via social media and other channels, and decisions and pivots may need to be made in short order.

Data and testing emphasis

In a world full of data, marketers have more information than ever available to test campaign performance and adjust accordingly, but traditionally run marketing departments may have limited access to data or a lack of authority to make rapid decisions based on what the data reveals.

With agile marketing, data—and the response to it—is at the core of how teams operate. Agile teams run small experiments (sprints if you use scrum in marketing) to measure results and adjust strategies accordingly, minimizing the risk of poorly resonating campaigns.

Alignment with digital environments and technology

Digital marketing platforms (like social media, email, and paid ads) thrive on quick turnarounds and iterative improvements. If you're spending thousands of dollars a week on a LinkedIn ad campaign, but it's underperforming, it can cost way too much money to wait until the campaign ends to pivot. With an empowered team of agile marketers, they have the authority to adjust and experiment without a lengthy planning and approval cycle.

Learn how to increase your marketing agility

Agile marketing is an important skill for today's modern marketer. Learning the principles and values and how this mindset differs from traditionally run marketing organizations can set you and your team apart from the competition. Agile marketing will position you to tackle today's fast-paced world with ever-changing customer preferences with ease, plus set you up for success for the future of marketing

Gain the skills to succeed in Scrum Alliance's microcredential course: You'll be taking the right step toward future-proofing your marketing acumen, and you'll earn a lifetime microcredential badge.

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