Agile marketing — latest fad or the future? — Part 2

Now that we’ve gone over some basics in Part 1, let’s look at how the Agile methodology can work in your agency.

Assemble your team of T-shaped people.

As with any project, your team members are your most important assets. Agile doesn’t call for the smartest, fastest or most specialized team members available. Instead, it works best with T-shaped people. I know what you’re thinking: Great, let’s add another piece of jargon to the mix! An uppercase T has two parts: the horizontal top bar and the vertical stem. The top bar represents a broad range of skills from left to right, and the stem represents the depth of knowledge in a specific skill. T-shaped people — those who specialize in a specific skill but have a broad range of knowledge across multiple disciplines — understand how all of the different skills work together to ensure the project is compatible across all specialties.

You’ve assembled a skilled team of T-shaped people; now let’s jump into a real-world example. Using Agile marketing, your team can produce actual measurable results, which should propel your marketing efforts to new levels of success. A good example is creating online landing pages. The first step is to design two landing pages templates that vary in either text, call to action, color tones or main image. Run both for a period of time to the same audience. This will enable you to see, in real time, how each ad performs based on the qualities of the ad. For example, if you used two different calls to action — “Click here to learn more” and “Connect with us to learn more” — and the rest of the ad stays the same, the data should tell you which ad did better, and you can attribute that to the call to action. If the results are not conclusive, then you know that the calls to action made no difference and you can test a different attribute of the ad. Once you have that data, you can begin on the next set of landing pages with a different image to see which image resonates with the audience the best. See where I’m going with this?

With just a simple change in thinking and shorter marketing periods (or sprints), you can understand which techniques work best for a particular audience. Now, I know many of you are thinking, “What client would pay for so many ads?” My reply: “What client can afford not to understand which techniques work best for their audience?” By using the Agile approach, you can create multiple ads, determine what works and what doesn’t, and then relaunch ads that have the right combination for the particular audience — all in a short period of time.