Marketing process development
We develop ways of working and agile processes for our clients across all aspects of marketing and ecommerce.
Two areas where a progressive approach can help most businesses significantly are adopting an integrated approach to marketing communications and embedding agile approaches to business planning.
Integrated Communication Planning
We are facing more fragmented media channels than ever before.
At the same time, opportunities for more precise communication targeting are constantly opening up. In this context, a strong Integrated Communication Plan is more important than ever.
Planning across a multitude of channels and audiences increases the risk of diluting the impact of your brand and media budgets.
We believe good Integrated Communication Planning (ICP) ensures that, at lower cost, you have a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
A good ICP will leverage and deliver synergies in stark contrast to the fragmentation which often occurs through old-world communication planning. In addition to giving a top-down business and brand perspective, it will take into account the behavioural segmentation of your customers, allowing you to create plans that maximise the impact of relevant touchpoints along the consumer journey.
We will help your team define some simple principles and a process that works for your business and brand, consistently delivering greater impact.
Our expert team have experience developing and embedding similar processes with some of the world’s largest and most progressive brands, including Unilever, American Express and Google.
Agile planning
Agile processes started in the tech sector but they have well and truly spread out to transform the way entire organisations operate.
Marketing teams have a huge opportunity to embrace this change and deliver better outcomes and increased value to their customers.
The Manifesto for Agile Software Development was created in 2001 by a group of visionary software developers who believed that “uncovering better ways of developing software” would require a replacement of some fundamental principles of 20th-century management.
The Agile movement they sparked values people, customers, collaboration and measurable results. It accepts the inevitability of rapid change in the modern world and provides a proven approach to deal with it.
Agile practices enable software development teams to achieve both disciplined execution and continuous innovation. Agile approaches have since been field-tested and proven in tens of thousands of organisations around the world. They are now used by industry leaders including Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. It is also now the default approach for developing software.
Progressive brands have been adopting similar principles over the last few years and baking in agility to their approach to communications and media planning.
Whilst building software, it is commonplace to deal with complex problems and constant change. This is now increasingly true for many parts of modern organisations. Customer demands and real time media are hard to predict and subject to constant change.
Agile enables organisations to master this continuous change. It enables people to flourish in a world that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
Agile Marketing
Agile, in a marketing context, means using data to source promising opportunities continuously, create solutions to customer problems, evaluate the results, and rapidly iterate and improve. The objective is to deliver maximum value in the minimum of time and continuously improve our ability to do so.
An agile team is a growing, learning, adapting organism that is in constant flux in order to exploit new opportunities and add new value for customers.
“The [marketing] industry has, unfortunately, been constructed around things like booking deadlines or production cycles and that is what we want to change. It has to change because that is not the way the world works.”
Keith Moor, (formerly CMO at Santander)
Prerequisites
There are a number of prerequisites for agile marketing to work:
- Clear Goals – A marketing team must have a clear sense of what it needs to accomplish.
- People – A small cross-functional team of motivated and talented people who can focus on delivering against goals.
- Sponsorship – Senior marketing leaders need to understand and support the move to agile working.
- Infrastructure – Three needs to be sufficient data, analytics, and the right kind of marketing-technology infrastructure in place.
Culture and Characteristics
An agile marketing team exhibits the following behaviours:
- Continuous Collaboration – The team works together daily with clear and measurable goals and a shared accountability.
- Speed – Big initiatives are broken down into smaller ones and worked on iteratively and incrementally, delivering value early and often.
- Embracing the Unexpected – The market will change and the needs of the customer will change. We accept this and take advantage of it.
- Data and Simplicity – We make decisions based on data and seek to simplify work in all its forms wherever possible.
- Customer First – The customer is at the centre of all we do. We work closely with them in order to understand clearly what they need, and work to deliver value in each iteration
