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Does marketing agility really make sense, or is it like another buzz word? The question itself carries sagacity because it’s important to understand if this term really makes sense in today’s business environment or is just a fad.
The answer is – marketing agility is the real thing. It’s not yet another trend. Nor it is a new term. It is as old as organizational agility itself. In fact, it’s an integral component of business agility as a whole, and plays a crucial role acquiring nimbleness and flexibility.
However, before we dive deeper into it, let’s first understand what exactly it is.
Marketing agility is:
It’s an ability to quickly and efficiently act upon customer insights. Marketing agility involves:
It involves balancing chaos and order, ambiguity and speedy decision making, and short and long term plans. It is the ability of living in the moment without losing focus on long term gains.
Marketing agility can be acquired by:
It requires being opportunistic – but strategically. This helps in efficiently dealing with unpredictable changes. Though there are no standard practices or surefire ways to achieve marketing agility but a business can somehow manage to deal with external changes by combining customer insights, marketing automation and simplified operations. It’s a formal approach in an informal way and requires fluidity in structure.
Here are the steps to move in the direction of acquiring marketing agility:
Customer insights, product and channel are key components which you need to work upon immediately to take a step in the direction of achieving marketing agility. This may not require major changes in your organization’s structure. However, you will need to have a mechanism in place to gain customer insights on the products you offer through the channels where they are present.
For being able to do it, you will need to identify the channels, products and segment of customers that need to be involved in this exercise. Since each customer segment is different and behaves differently, it will be illogical to generalize the process.
It’s a vital step in consolidating all the available information and insights. Keeping customers records at one place helps understand their preferences, behavior and also track their history – purchase history, how, when and why they engaged with you, customers’ communications, events through which they engaged with you, information that they frequently need, etc.
Creating a database and updating it on regular basis is important because the information collected gives you significant insights into the past and present behaviors of your customers. It also helps in anticipating the change in their actions in future. The benefits of maintaining a database are:
Consolidating customer information seems easy. But it is not. In fact, it requires both technical and non-technical expertise and continuous effort to create and manage the system.
Yes. What’s the benefit of just consolidating customer information unless you use it? You must be able to use customer information to gain insights into customer behavior. This means you must be able to collect info regarding:
Collecting information is the first step. Gaining insights is the second. And making it work is the third step in being future ready. By gaining customer insights, you’ll be able to:
Well, almost all companies have automated their processes to some extent. But they need to relook at their automation software system to ensure if it is working optimally or they need to upgrade it. Traditionally, marketing automation is limited to just creating and managing customer database. And most other processes are performed manually, which is resulting in nothing but loss of precious man hours.
Remember speed is one of the most important aspects of agility. And automation helps in significantly increasing the speed at which the communication can be rolled out. The man hours can be freed up to plan the next move to drive or respond to the change. It allows marketers to:
Gaining and acting on customer insights is the responsibility and accountability of marketing department. No. It is not limited to just the marketing department. Rather it needs to be taken to the boardroom.
Why? Because unless it is a part of the boardroom agenda, nobody is going to take it seriously! It’s the top management that needs to make it a priority and act on it. In order to make customer insights work, your company needs to:
When customer insights are a boardroom agenda, chances are that you will do what needs to be done more diligently.
Marketing agility is not a one-time process. It’s a responsive, flexible, fast and ongoing process, which is about putting your customers and their behavior in your head all the time. It’s about working for them and making efforts to offer an experience that they aren’t even familiar about. It’s a long journey, which includes exploring the new ways to attract and retain customers in plentiful ways while also being flexible.
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