How marketing is entering the digital era with ‘agile transformation’

Real-world progress in digital marketing lags behind MarTech, the blending of marketing and technology. Why? Because marketers lack agility, a crucial piece to the puzzle. Digital transformation is dominating the marketer’s consciousness at the moment, there is a growing stack of marketing technology at their avail, but they will need more than that to complete the transformation.

The second piece to the digital transformation is the agile transformation, “The Agile Manifesto,” written in 2001, we posted here before, became the bible in software development, which owes much to the agile methods of continuous trial and iteration.

Marketers have an opportunity to take a page from that book, as, of course, marketers are managing more software than ever before.

Agility is more cultural than technological, with a rapid trial and iteration cycle based on empirical data and feedback is at its heart. The best marketing technologies a company can adopt are those that enable agility in the culture.

Technology can allow a company to do the wrong things faster and cheaper. And in some cases that’s bad; in marketing it’s awful. Marketers who bombard customers with annoying or off-putting propositions will find they’ve spent time and money effectively destroying their brand.

There are adaptive intelligence initiative aims to make marketers agile with automated technology that takes grunt work and plumbing out of their hands. With this out of the way, they are freed to use their talents innovating and reiterating solutions that actually drive profit.

It should be clear from available numbers that marketing practices are in need of serious rethinking. Research shows that most product launches fail and about 80 percent of leads go nowhere. The thinking is that data will move faster within companies, between businesses and customers and inside companies’ data models and algorithms. This allows agile data to work in tandem with agile, profit-minded marketers.

CMOs to play new role

Agile transformation revamped the role of product managers in recent years, making them stewards of innovation. It too can change the role of chief marketing officers. However, they will also need greater influence over customer touchpoints.

“One way to get that influence is to share the process of the people who have control over those things,” like product managers.

When the marketer has become the steward of customer experience, that’s when could say we’ve sort of reached a modern era.

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