Beyond the buzzword: Make agile marketing hum with these 4 crucial shifts

Many marketers are beginning to adopt Agile methodologies as a way to manage marketing, hoping for boosts in productivity and the ability to handle disruptions like the current COVID-19 pandemic and flatlining economy.

This is a good thing. Adopting process management methodologies like Scrum and Kanban can help marketers improve their productivity and how they prioritize. But to achieve the full promise of agile, marketers and their organizations need to do more than simply adopt these processes.

Organizations that want to move beyond agile as a buzzword must make four crucial shifts in their beliefs and behaviors. Where should you start?

1. Shift your focus from outputs to outcomes.

Teams that focus on customer and business outcomes—and are rewarded for achieving those outcomes—produce better results than teams producing more outputs (advertising campaigns, content, events, etc.) and who are measured on throughput.

More marketing output doesn’t translate into better business outcomes. A study by Amplero Research and Globys confirmed this. After implementing a new targeting strategy—personalizing emails to customers—the average customer received just two emails per month, down from 17. However, the lift in average revenue per emailed customer grew from 0.32% to 2.8%, a 9× increase.