Over the weekend I came across a pretty cool article from Hubspot that everyone (particularly if you work in marketing) should take a look at. In an age where everyone is talking about the importance and desire to become more agile, Hubspot offers up five great tips to help jump start your marketing department. They also mention an awesome book by Eric Ries, The Lean Startup, which if you are wanting to learn more about agile and it’s a must read.
Five agile tactics marketers can leverage:
Create a Feedback Loop
This might seem fairly obvious, but sometimes those are the things most overlooked. One of the main themes of agile marketing is the ability to iterate. Don’t keep shooting yourself in the foot, by creating the same content over and over. Instead, measure your content, learn from it, and produce new better content.
Measure the Right Things
It’s really easy to find metrics that make you look successful but have little business meaning. This doesn’t help anyone. Instead of focusing on Twitter followers or blog subscribers, try and focus on numbers that measure the progress of your core business. For example, tracking leads and customers by campaigns.
Learn from your experiments
When conducting experiments, make sure you track them appropriately so you’re able to learn from them. If you don’t set up proper recording and stress learning from these tests, you are your team will repeat the same mistakes. So, what’s a good learning system? Hubspot suggests the Five Whys System, a collaborative process for teams to assess past mistakes and take steps to prevent repetition.
Expect to always be fine tuning
It’s difficult to figure out the right mix of blogging, social media, SEO, and email marketing right away. Expect to tweak these as you try to find what resonates best with your audience. Successful companies are the ones that live and breathe this process, always altering their mix until they get it right.
Be Innovative
Just because you’re at a large company doesn’t mean you have to keep doing things the same way because “that’s the way it’s been done”. It’s up to you to cultivate innovation for your team.
Your Turn
Have any agile marketing tips of your own that you would like to share? Share them with us in the comments section.
