Ensuring Client Collaboration Through Agile Marketing

Ensuring Client Collaboration Through Agile Marketing
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Posted by Mackenzie Fogelson

I’m probably a little late for the agile marketing train. It’s only in the past few weeks that I’ve been reading everything I can about the concept, and I've been working to integrate some of the ideas I’ve discovered into our existing daily practices at my company, Mack Web Solutions; I can already see that it is going to be a very powerful approach for us. Agile has been such a huge part of my last few weeks that I'd like to share my newfound appreciation and takeaways, and hopefully you'll fall just as hard as I did for this wonderful practice. 

Agile marketing is not rocket science

Maybe I’m missing some hidden depths, but I think the simplicity of agile is the point. It’s meant to be extremely practical, easy to grasp, and begging for you to take it for a spin. Who doesn’t want a company that can adapt quickly to change, provide amazing experiences for their team and their clients, measure the results of their efforts with actual data, and efficiently create remarkable products?

When I first started reading about the concept, I realized that Mack Web was a natural fit for agile marketing. At our current size of four, we are inherently collaborative and can be extremely flexible with how we work. I can certainly see how it will play a significant role in shaping our company in the years and team members to come.

What the heck is it?â?¨

Simply put, agile marketing centers around the customer. It’s a small shift in focus and perspective, but it really does mean big changes for how you work with your team and your customers.

10 Principles of Agile Marketing

Based off the methods of agile software development, agile marketing pulls together a variety of different elements to create a sleek, flexible, data-driven approach to any project. There are a lot of technical aspects to it: shorter production cycles, continual testing, lots of analysis and feedback. But the underlying philosophy of the thing is, in a word: people.

Agile marketing forces you to break down the barriers that normally come with departments, systems, and processes. Instead of letting your processes drive (as I have now realized we are guilty of doing), the agile process is people-oriented, both internally and externally. It is the interaction among these people that contributes to success (which makes a lot more sense than asking that of a systematized process).

 

Agility in marketing centers on the understanding that clients and employees are people with different skill sets, different outlooks, and different limitations. Agile encourages groups to find a way to make differences work in a complementary (as opposed to adversarial) way, and then ground the process in the indisputable facts of solid data. All you’re left with is pure win.

Encouraging the individuals on your team to collaborate fosters creativity and communication, allowing them to deliver exceptional products, services, and valuable results each day. That collaboration, along with the transparency that true teamwork requires, is what makes agile successful.

See...Agility. Teamwork. They go together (except that there's no Denzel).

Being agile is using what you've gotâ?¨

The beauty of agile marketing is that it is, by definition, very adaptable. The entire intent is to enable you to run things smoothly and efficiently with the pieces you have in place.

That means that even adopting agile as a new method can be done with agility. Our company has long been process-driven because we got both results and peace of mind that way. But as we’ve grown more self-aware, we’ve realized that part of the reason our processes work is that we were subconsciously enacting some agile principles almost by default.

Now that we’ve come to this realization, we’re slowly transitioning our conscious process to match. This approach is working because, honestly, throwing all of our current systems out the window at once was very much a baby-bathwater situation. It’s also a great way to make sure that business tanks, that our clients feel insecure and unsatisfied, and that our office descends into chaos. Not good.

And definitely not agile.

So, slowly but surely, we’re using the principles of agile marketing as a filter for our internal processes: does this method actually work for all clients? For the individuals on our team? Does it allow us to easily change course mid-stream or does it put us between a rock and a hard place?

So far, so good.

Agile and your 'team'

With agile marketing, even the concept of your ‘team’ takes on a new meaning. For example, instead of maintaining the walls of separate departments like SEO, design, link building, social media, and content generation, everyone works together as a unified whole. And, not just your team, but with your client’s team as well. For us, this was extremely important.

My discovery of agile marketing came at a perfect time. As we transition our clients away from their traditional understanding of SEO, we’ve also started looking for new clients who understand that the work we do is demanding and goes beyond just keyword research and link building. To actually deliver real company stuff, help them build relationships in their online community, and work towards their business objectives, we rely on their involvement in the process.

Internally, we’ve established a highly collaborative environment; we thrive as a team. Our ideal clients embrace the spirit of participation and are willing to engage with us, to be active and responsive, and to grasp the magnitude of what it will take to succeed.

What we have found (and there’s no surprise here) is that in order to achieve results, the client has to be on board. We truly integrate ourselves into the client’s world. We learn everything there is to know about their company. We become familiar with their customers’ pain points and challenges. We solve issues that save them time and money. We can’t do this without complete participation from the client. For us, client collaboration is imperative for customer satisfaction and success. It’s also a fundamental principle of agile marketing.

How agile is helping to solve client collaboration challenges

â?¨Agile has helped us to solve a common problem that we were having when it came to things like ongoing implementation of our content and social media marketing efforts. At th