Andrea is CEO and cofounder of AgileSherpas, the leader in Agile transformations for marketers and other cross-functional teams.
Whether it’s a worldwide economic downturn or just a slow revenue quarter, budget cuts will eventually come for every marketing leader. If you’re a senior marketer with less funding than you’d like, it may seem like your marketing strategy is at risk. After all, when times are lean, how can we make big, strategic moves? Isn’t it better to narrow our focus, keep things simple and stick with what we know will probably work?
There are indeed times when this is the right approach, but in my experience, those times are few and far between. Especially during larger economic contractions, the organizations that reach customers in new, creative ways can capture market share from those that are playing it safe. I believe the way to accomplish this feat is by turning to an agile marketing strategy to help you keep delivering results even in the face of serious budget constraints.
What is an agile marketing strategy?
First of all, agile accepts that we can’t know everything up front. It encourages leaders to set a strategic direction in the absence of perfect understanding.
This can be scary, especially if you’re making bets that take away pieces of a limited budget. But if you design small experiments on which you can iterate over time, I have found that the risk of your marketing work actually goes down. Instead of putting all your eggs in a single basket—whether that be a campaign, channel or customer segment—you can invest just a little budget to find out whether you’re on the right track. This way, if it’s wrong, you’re not also out of budget.
Traditional plans may feel safer, but in my experience, they come with greater risk. These strategies can include elaborate Gantt charts and project plans that give the illusion of certainty, but there’s often little reality in these artifacts. One delayed component, unresponsive stakeholder or unplanned illness in a critical team member, and the entire strategy can be at risk. Some of the “business as usual” work may continue, but it may be basic and unlikely to produce much impact. Marketing can end up looking like it’s not doing much, which can catch the notice of budget-conscious CFOs, and the vicious cycle of cuts continues.
An agile marketing strategy can free leaders from this cycle by helping them identify smaller ideas that can deliver strategic value without breaking the bank. If the ideas work, you invest more. If not, you move on quickly with most of your budget intact.
Continually test your strategy.
Of course, just because you don’t know everything about a plan up front doesn’t mean you don’t want to learn. And only hard data can tell you if you’re on the right track or not.
The ability to measure is especially critical when exploring new territory, such as a new channel, new messaging or a new audience segment. Even the most seasoned marketing leaders get things wrong, and if you’re making critical strategic decisions based on opinions instead of metrics, you can reintroduce a lot of the risk that you tried to take out by using an agile marketing strategy in the first place. That’s why tests need to be run all the time; if weeks of low performance go by unnoticed, you could be wasting valuable budget.
The best marketing strategy is a focused marketing strategy.
Marketing leaders who want to enjoy the benefits of a more agile strategic approach typically have to get comfortable with leaving some work undone. The productivity of agile teams is well-known, but it’s not the daily standup or the snazzy project management tools that make this possible. Agile’s productivity actually comes from focus.
A common phrase among agile workers is, “Simplicity is the art of maximizing the work not done.” When an agile marketing team is spending most of their time and effort on just a few things, those things get done faster, with less rework and waste and at a higher level of quality. But the only way teams can achieve this focus consistently is if senior leaders avoid the temptation to make everything a priority.
Sustainable pace is a strategic advantage.
Focus is key because it also allows marketers to keep a sustainable pace of work. If you want to keep your top talent around, they need to be well-rested and free from the mania of multitasking. Trying to spread their attention across a dozen different strategic initiatives makes this impossible. Eventually, they’ll get fed up and either do the bare minimum to get by or jump to another organization entirely.
What’s more, marketers who aren’t multitasking make fewer mistakes. This means less waste and rework, which can further increase the velocity of the work and cut down on turnover.
Last but not least, I’ve found that fulfilled marketers are creative marketers. They’re more likely to come up with innovative ideas than their counterparts who are grinding out twelve-hour days feeling overworked and underappreciated. All of this can translate to a strategic advantage, especially if your competitors are trying to squeeze every last minute possible out of their marketers in the midst of industry-wide budget constraints.
Trade up to an agile marketing strategy.
It’s tempting for marketing leaders to look at budget cuts as the cue to play it safe. They rely on traditional strategic approaches, look for safe bets and try to spread their marketing teams across as much work as possible. All of this might seem like it’s reducing risk, but it can actually make it less likely that marketing will be able to show an impact. Work can take longer, team members can burn out, and marketing may be first in line when budget reductions come around again.
All of these reasons are why I believe it’s time for more leaders to embrace an agile marketing strategy. By releasing smaller pieces of work in the face of imperfect information, testing continually while the work is underway, and then iterating quickly on successful experiments, an agile strategy can help you deliver big wins even under big budget constraints.
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