Agile Marketing Ops

Organisations already know agile product development is the way to go, and have their DevOps team working in sprints. As design is tightly coupled with development work, even designers have design ops frameworks. But what about marketing? Sometimes it feels like marketing is the last corner of the organisation that refuses to let go of old processes.

Agile marketing in a multi-vendor environment

It is very typical that marketing is a joint effort of several specialised vendors. There is an analytics agency managing tracking and reporting, a PR agency managing press and official communications, a branding agency managing the overall look and feel, a graphic design agency creating banners and other graphic assets, a trafficking agency managing all the different marketing channels, and a separate performance marketing agency managing search engine visibility. How could this combo ever be agile?

In this blog post, we share some things we have noticed to be crucial in making your marketing leaner.

The key components of agile marketing

The key to agile marketing is to constantly build on data and insights, gather and share core marketing assets, and question the old ways of working in marketing ecosystems.

These three points create efficiency, regardless of whether we’re talking about daily marketing operations, longer-term strategic marketing initiatives, or points of discontinuity in operations. Think onboarding new people: organisations’ key personnel, vendors, and vendor teams are always subject to change.

Does this sound like a utopia? Typically the bottleneck is not having access to all marketing and data platforms, or not having the internal competences to use those platforms.

Talk to your vendors about platform access, and start transferring ownerships to your organisation. Furthermore, request for the ownership of graphical marketing assets created for each campaign. This might require some adjusting of contracts in some cases, but it’s well worth it.

When you do have access or ownership of different platforms and assets, gather a team of people who are willing to get their hands dirty. There should be someone operating marketing platforms, someone looking into data, and someone to create marketing materials. This does not mean you can just kick out all the vendors! What it means is that you have created an agile marketing ops team, that has the required understanding and assets to work alongside vendors, and also to do quick campaign sprints internally when needed.

Interested in further learning how to optimise your processes? Learn how growth hacking can benefit your organisation and how you can incorporate it into your work and processes – Get your own copy of our popular Growth Hacker's Handbook below!