Here at Triggerfish we strive to help companies form a Marketing Operations mindset.
This means moving away from a project-driven or “set it and forget it” way of thinking and evolving your marketing function to operate on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.
Your MarTech will never be “done”, so instead of reaching for the holy grail end result, think about identifying the right things to work on and making incremental progress over time.
To help organisations start thinking operationally with respect to their marketing function, or help them build a marketing operations team, we have created this 12-part blog series. We will be covering everything from Sales & Marketing alignment, growth marketing, digital strategy, creating ROI, cross-functional teams, and much more!
We think about agile marketing as an always-on type capability where we plan quickly, test quickly, get feedback quickly, and make changes quickly using data and analytics – usually while supported by cross-functional teams.
Agile marketing is at the heart of how we think about marketing operations. It is essential for organisations who want to implement always-on campaigns, who want to track movement against metrics, and who want to understand which segments are engaging and interacting with your assets. It also allows marketing departments to set up funnels, monitor customer journeys, and create a near real-time feedback loop that lets them test their ideas about customer interaction and put them into practice.
To get the real always-on capacity that you want, you need to make sure that other things don’t block you when trying to get to your big picture. You also need to implement new tools, new segments, new systems of record and engagement, and now marketing information tools. Harmoniously, you need to ensure that updates, configurations, and new features regarding these tools are implemented at speed, which means that you need to develop cross-departmental relationships with developers – or close relationships with vendors that help drive technology and allow you to deploy within minutes.
To summarise, agile marketing means more than running in sprints, having standups, and putting great minds together. It means having great infrastructure as well – and then using that infrastructure to develop an operational cadence. First, you acquire data, use analytics tools, develop a plan, deploy a software update, then launch a campaign, then get data from the campaign and start again. The more data you collect, the better you decisions you can make, creating more relevant offers and better engagement.
On the other hand, the faster you can lay the foundation for agile, the better.
Agile marketing implementations aren’t best served by doing a lot of planning beforehand. Instead, you fail fast, optimise, and then arrive at a solution faster. The best ways to get answers about an agile marketing strategy is to implement a hypothesis in the market and then get feedback.
At Triggerfish, we tackle agile marketing in two ways. First, we constantly think about the makeup of our cross-functional teams; campaign marketers, content strategists, marketing technologists and developers. We also make sure we have developers armed with the tools that allow us to deploy quickly, whenever we want, how often we want, and to make sure we're continually changing. There should be no such things as days-long content freezes for developers to push new changes live.
We also build that into ensuring we're looking at a quarter-on-quarter cadence where we're working against key business goals that actually are worthy of marketing and customer engagement. The objective is to have progress, not being perfect.
Finally, we start with being clear about our customer business goals. We make sure we go and speak to customers and get some customer insight. We then make sure that the value proposition is in line with what the customer is looking for, and what we're offering as a product or service. We make sure we're driving great customer experiences. We make sure that we're running tools and technology, marketing automation, marketing technology, to allow us to move quickly. At the end of the day, we want to ensure that our week-to-week plans are building towards our quarter-to-quarter goals.
Here at Triggerfish, we strive to provide companies with a best-in-class experience that can supercharge marketing efforts and realign them towards business goals. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you teams take an agile approach and create an operational rhythm with marketing and technology, get in touch with us today!