How Agencies Can Engage Agile Clients

Your clients are transforming to agile, so as an agency partner, you’ll need to work with them differently.

If you work at a marketing or advertising agency, you know how important it is to stay ahead of trends and continually offer your clients new and in-demand services. With more than half of corporate marketers already adopting agile marketing, they want to hire an agency that understands how to work with agility.?

What is Agile Marketing?

If you’re unfamiliar with agile marketing, it can be a really confusing term! While it’s often thought of as a software development process, that’s not exactly true. While software developers were the pioneers in the early days of agile and created ways of working to be more agile, the agile movement was really about short work cycles, quick feedback loops and team work. Today, agile has expanded into most business functions, with marketing being one of the fast followers.

NavigateAgile defines agile marketing as, “An approach for modern marketing management, reshaping how we think, work and share to create customer value. We do this through embracing agile values & principles to establish a powerful new mindset.”

Benefits of Agile Marketing

Marketers have come to discover that while marketing has drastically changed in recent years, how marketing operates to keep up with the change is lagging behind.

With agile marketing as a mindset and approach to operations, marketers are able to rapidly experiment with new ideas, quickly get work delivered, use real-time data and feedback, effectively prioritize work and pivot easily when marketing underperforms.

Agile marketing can save companies millions of dollars! If you’re following an annual marketing plan, it’s quickly outdated since consumer and market conditions can change at a moment’s notice. The ability for speed and agility is more important now than ever in a world inundated with consumer choice.

Change the Way Contracts are Written

I’ve seen firsthand Fortune 100 companies dropping their agency of record when they transitioned to agile marketing because the agency’s approach clashed with the agile approach. This can cost you a lot of money as an agency, so it’s best to learn how to work with your clients in a new way before someone else does.

One of the first things you’ll want to do is reframe how you write your service contracts with your clients. Traditionally, contracts are written with specific scope and deliverables. While this works well with traditionally run departments, agile marketers need to have flexible scope. Here are a few changes to make:

Traditional

• All deliverables are listed in detail, such as specific article topics and the quantity.
• The contract has fixed pricing based on the work deliverables.

Agile

• Contracts are written with flexible deliverables and are outcome based, such as “Obtain 100 new leads in three months through paid media and earned media initiatives.”?
• The contract uses agile iterations (typically two week increments) and will give pricing based on the number of agency team members involved and cost per iteration, with an estimated range? of how many iterations the work will take.

Create a Strategic Partnership with the Marketing Owner

As an agency partner, you’re used to presenting a really polished marketing strategy to your clients, but with agile clients, you’ll work side-by-side with the team’s Marketing Owner to develop a high-level strategy. Rather than getting into the specific deliverables you’ll help to formulate desired outcomes with your client.

From there, you’ll work with the Marketing Owner to create a Blueprint of deliverables for the quarter. These should be the main focus areas for the team that you’re thinking about at this point in time, however, they are subject to change as new information is learned.

The agile team’s Marketing Owner is responsible for a prioritized Marketing Backlog of deliverables. Unlike contractual deliverables, the backlog is flexible and emergent and can change constantly until the agile team begins the work. As an agency partner, you’ll help ideate new backlog items, but it’s ultimately the Marketing Owner’s decision as to which ones the team will deliver

Become Part of the Agile Marketing Team

Your agency will engage team members that deliver work directly onto the agile marketing team. Those people include copywriters, graphics designers, SEO specialists, analytics, developers and anyone else that needs to contribute to the client’s work.

In an agile marketing team, it’s important to keep team members consistent and ideally, fully dedicated to the work of the team. So instead of putting five different people on the account, you may want to look for one or two people that have the skills that the client’s team is lacking. If there’s a heavy reliance on copywriting, trying to dedicate a full time copywriter to the team is ideal. This person embeds themselves onto the team, attending Daily Huddles and other team meetings.

If the client work you’re doing is going to take several people of different skill sets, choose one agency team member to be embedded on the team and that person will coordinate with the rest of the agency team members that are only doing a small part of the work.

Conclusion

As an agency, it’s important to adapt to your client’s new ways of working. If your clients are transforming to agile marketing, you’ll want to change your working relationship before they change to an agency that’s already agile. With agile clients, it’s important to remember that flexibility in deliverables is key. Rather than presenting perfectly researched ideas, you’ll partner with the team’s Marketing Owner to create desired outcomes, a Blueprint and a Marketing Backlog. On the delivery side, it’s ideal to fully embed an agency representative onto the agile marketing team.

Learn about Agency Agile, our new training program that allows you to incorporate agile services with your clients.

#agile #agilemarketing #agency #marketing #marketingstrategy NavigateAgile