Why is agility important to your marketing?
Agile marketing unlocks new ways of working, borrowing many of the Agile principles and practices that have been long established in IT and moving them into marketing, in order to improve things like flow, time-to-market, and alignment. It also empowers knowledge workers, unleashing their full potential to apply their knowledge and expertise while having more autonomy over their work.
How has agile marketing helped you reach your goals?
Agile marketing emphasizes effectiveness over productivity. This ensures that marketing activity aligns to specific outcomes and goals. Many marketing organizations focus on outputs, measuring how much gets done over how well it gets done. This shift may result in abandoning well-loved templates in order to gain the ability to test-and-learn, be more responsive and deliver better outcomes.
What’s the single most important thing you’ve learnt during your marketing career?
The single most important thing I’ve learned in my career is the importance of alignment. There have definitely been times I’ve learned this the hard way! It’s so important to socialise ideas amongst your colleagues, peers and – where possible – amongst your target audience to uncover hidden hurdles.
Agile marketing focuses on effectiveness over efficiency and flexing to achieve desired outcomes.
What is the most important skill that makes a great marketer?
There’s not one skill that is more important than the rest. A recent report stated that there were 43 sub-skills within marketing, which highlights the multifaceted discipline marketing has become. The emergence of the ‘T-shaped marketer’ represents the future of agile marketing as it encourages marketers to be versatile, as generalist marketers with subject-specific expertise. When T-shaped marketers are put to action within an agile working hub, this allows different experts to work in harmony with each other and lean into each others expertise, resulting in an unblocked team. It takes time and experience to grasp the full breadth and depth of omnichannel marketing, so T-shaped skillsets are key to a fluid and versatile team, sharing responsibilities, continually sharing learnings and avoiding the ‘it’s not my job’ mindset.
Where do you turn to for marketing insights and news?
Conversely, I don’t go looking for news and insights, I have set up Google alerts, hashtag notifications and follow relevant groups to bring the news to me. This approach ensures that I don’t miss any major developments and am constantly kept abreast of information as it’s served to me. It also prevents me from wasting time scrolling to find what’s useful and relevant to me.
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