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Have you ever worked on a marketing project for your company, only to realize at the end that you’re missing critical elements? Or, when you realize there’s a better solution halfway through the project but it’s “too late to change” what you’re already working on? Or have you ever made the deadly mistake of “realizing there’s more to do” when you’re finally wrapping up a project?

These are common issues that come up when working on any marketing campaign. These are expensive issues for your company, because they push deadlines and result in a rushed jobs because “there wasn’t enough time to test.” If any of the above has ever occurred to you or your marketing team, you need to implement an Agile project management system.

What is ‘Agile’?

‘Agile’ is the project management method that works in contrast to the traditional ‘Waterfall’ methodology. Even if you haven’t heard of these terms before, I’m sure you’re seen it in action. What does your typical project look like? If you break up your company’s marketing projects into parts, you’ll probably end up with segments similar to these:

Waterfall Project Management

1. Identify & Analyze the Issue
2. Design the Solution
3. Code/Create the Solution
4. Test/Review

Pretty straightforward, right? Do you see any areas where errors could occur? Let’s say you find a bug when testing your solution. Uh oh! That’s extra time you didn’t account for, and it came up at the end of your project. Now, you have no budget, no time, and nothing to show for your work. That’s only one of many possible scenarios for failure using a typical project management model.

What if you come up with a brilliant idea while coding or creating your solution? You’ve already spent so much time analyzing the issue. Do you drop everything you’re doing to work on the new solution? You can’t. You’re already invested, you can’t give up now! That’s another trap that you set yourself up for.

Agile Project Management is a process of continual iteration. It allows for innovation through daily testing, modification and tracking of progress. Unlike Waterfall, testing is done in phases throughout the entire process, and you have results to show at every step of the way.

Avoid costly mistakes when managing your monthly marketing campaigns by employing an Agile method of marketing improvement!

Agile in Action

An Agile method of marketing relies on continuous growth, through daily updates and changes. Let’s take a typical marketing campaign for a retail clothing eCommerce company and see what happens when switching to Agile:

Facebook Campaign – Waterfall Approach

1. Analyze – You notice a growing trend of users who want to buy leather jackets and fingerless gloves from your online clothing store.
2. Design – You go through your company product catalog and pick out 3 leather jackets and 2 gloves that you think will be “best sellers” this season. You draft a few taglines, and send off a quick proposal for your CEO and marketing peers to review. It gets approved.
3. You send the request to your copywriters to write 3 blog articles on leather jackets and gloves. Your designers get to work on new ads for your PPC campaigns. You update your social media copy and profile picture to match your new sale on leather jackets and toques. As your backend developer works a 20% sale on leather jackets into your system, you get to work on an email blast to promote the event to your subscriber list.
4. You wake up on Monday and, after browsing Twitter for a few minutes, realize that it’s going to be the “coldest winter since 1945” and everyone is preparing for a big storm by buying ski jackets and toques.
5. You try not to cry, but you cry a lot anyways.

Facebook Campaign – Agile Approach

1. Analyze – You notice a growing trend of users who want to buy leather jackets and fingerless gloves from your online clothing store.
2. During your morning meeting, you bring up the trend to your peers and they think it is a good opportunity. You ask your designers to draft a quick update to your Facebook PPC ads. They go ahead and create one new creative for you in the early afternoon.
3. After reviewing the item for quality, you update your Facebook PPC ads with the new ad.
4. The next day, you see 3 sales come from your Facebook PPC ad. You’re happy with the results, and decide to write a quick blog post on “What’s Hot in Season? Leather Jackets!” After having the blog post reviewed by your peers during an afternoon meeting, you post the blog on your site and social media channels
5. Your blog gets 40 Likes and 17 shares on Facebook. Not bad. You consider launching a site-wide sale on leather jackets, and work on an email blast to promote your bestseller products.
6. You wake up on Monday and, after browsing Twitter for a few minutes, realize that it’s going to be “the coldest winter since 1945” and everyone is preparing for a big storm by buying ski jackets and toques. You scrap your leather jackets campaign, and ask your designers to draft a new creative for ski jackets.
7. Your boss and coworkers are really glad that you didn’t give them any projects to complete which you may or may not have scrapped at the last minute.

Fresh. Cool. Grow.

So, what does Agile look like at Cucumber Marketing? Every morning we have a daily huddle to discuss our Fresh, Cool and Grow of the day. We start every single day with this huddle, which guides our focus for the rest of the day and encourages collaboration and feedback between our staff. The staff at our marketing company works to achieve personal and professional growth every day, so the Agile method of marketing works perfectly for our curious minds!

The key to a successful Agile system is flexibility and constant communication. While Agile may look different in all organizations, the most important component of the system is a Daily Review. Through this daily review, you can bounce ideas off your peers, address topical issues and plan your day’s work and announcing whether or not you need other departments to play a role in advance. Not only does a Daily Review promote good communication between departments, but it also allows you to prioritize your tasks for the day and allows your marketing to stay flexible with the ultimate goal of sales in mind. The market changes on a daily basis, so you have to be just as fast to catch up with shifting demands!

There’s a saying that Rome wasn’t built in a day. We like to think of it further. This is how we view growth through Agile marketing:

[Tweet “Rome isn’t finished being built. It never will, but it improves every day, brick by brick.”]

We hope you got  fresh perspective from this post on Agile systems development. If you had any “Aha!” moments, or if any tips stood out to you, please share your thoughts with us on Facebook or Twitter! You can also reach out to us at our marketing company in Vancouver. We always have chocolate.

Think Fresh. Keep it Cool. Grow!