The people who work inside the social media circle are acutely aware of its ever-changing facet. While such quality poses a constant challenge to many marketers, it can also create opportunities for brands to build equity and grow audience base. As social media hits it maturity phase, the demand for new approach and strategies rise. There are numerous techniques that marketers can deploy according to the goals and objectives of their businesses.
You have heard about how the digital media technology alters the marketing platforms. Marketers and business owners can now engage with customers through innovative ways and collectively meet their needs. However, taking advantage of these digital-enabled possibilities demand a much quicker and bias actions from marketing organizations. In short, they need to be agile!
The Philosophy of Agile Marketing
Agile Marketing, at its core, is a tactical marketing approach that uses data and analytics to source for solutions to problem or opportunities, employing tests, evaluating the results, and fast iteration. The beauty of this tactic is that can run hundreds of campaigns and multiple ideas simultaneously every week. It also provides brands with many advantages that integrate content marketing and social media implementation. Suffice to say that it’s not just a sexy buzzword in the digital vocabulary, but it’s one that lives up to its reputation.
Agile Marketing and Its Principles
The best thing about Agile marketing is that it welcomes failures so long as it comes with lessons and creates important projects in the future. The way Agile marketing works will become apparent as you check on the values that these marketing cherish. See the list below:
- The collaboration focuses on the customer over silos and hierarchy.
- Welcoming and responding to change over sticking to a plan.
- Iterative and adaptive campaigns over big-bang campaigns.
- Validated learning over conventions and opinions
- Customer discovery over unchanging predictions.
- A lot of small experiments over a few large bets.
- Flexibility on planning over tight planning.
Why does It Work For Social Media?
There are certain conditions that you need to meet for Agile marketing to work. For example, you will need to undergo continuous change, ability to experiment, segmented analysis, and availability of steady feedbacks on experiments. The ever-moving conditions, quantifiable nature, and instantaneous feedback loop nature of social data make the social media platforms a wealthy ecosystem for agile philosophy. When it comes to taking the structure of social media into consideration, you need to remember two important principles:
- Constantly use an audience-first method. Think about what the audience wants to achieve and what value to add through testing. Do not just attempt to improve your marketing for the number’s sake.
- Use plans as guides. Utilize your methods to guide tests and use these tests to inform strategy. Don’t cease to look for ways on how to upgrade your plans in the same manner that developers upgrade apps by updating the versions.
How to Incorporate Agile into Your Social Media Strategies
When it comes to social media marketing, you will need an overarching strategy to establish your methods. Although, strategies are something that every marketing department focus on regardless of how they plan to use it.
Even if you use top-down or collaborative methods to create a good strategy, you can still bring it to life by using Agile-based techniques. So, below are the ways that you can incorporate into the concept of ‘agile philosophy’ to your social media marketing and go about it in a foolproof and flexible way.
Create a Customer First Policy
The phrase “Customers are always right,” “Customer is king.” are just a few of the marketing cliche’ that exist for a reason, and they are unlikely true. And this a fact that marketers validate for a long time.
An agile social media takes note of this vital fact. From marketing the right audience to conjuring useful and relevant contents, your customer is the crux of all your social media marketing decisions. The most successful brands use social media as a medium to establish a connection with their customers on a personal basis. Reaching out to distraught customers, responding to their queries and troubleshooting through social media are the approaches that brands take seriously in the name of ‘customer-centricity.’
Measure the Figures
It is imperative to track where your marketing efforts are heading and how they’re doing. It helps you respond to changing situations before they become crises for your brand. This timely action and alertness will only happen if your analytics and data measurement is in place.
A good agile social media team knows what goes on in the system and what results to expect. In other words, you can control your ROI in social media which enables you to make a response to the slightest changes in your stats, both internal and external.
However, in the real world, ROI from social media marketing is still an elusive and inclusive figure. According to Social Media Examiner report in 2014, 92% of marketers treat social media as an important factor for their businesses, while 37% of marketers managed to measure ROI on their social media engagements. These stats only goes to show that it’s difficult to gauge the influence of social media to your brand awareness and other conversion metrics.
Test and Test Until You Succeed
While it’s possible to create solutions for problems, it’s not mandatory that all of these solutions will give the results that you desire. Hence, testing is a must. In this case, the mechanism of social media marketing is comparable to software development. The primary motivation behind a social media campaign does not change for a brand on a regular basis. But still, you need to test the approaches to make sure they will yield the right results.
Experimenting or testing the contents of a new post to publish that bring maximum engagement and two different images to accompany a significant post are both justifiable results that you can run.
Scale and Iterate
When you start with experimentation, you will need to look into constructs and broad ideas. But, these constructs will become narrow as you take more projects, which require the establishment of a foundation that you need to build. Scale and iteration are both by-products of this natural development. Both of which come to life from enterprising, successful tests, harnessing precision and standardizing and successful processes.
However, you need to be mindful as the processes of testing, reviewing, and questioning takes a considerable amount of energy, mainly as experiments grow in size. Pay attention to the scale and search for opportunities to incorporate efficiency and automation to keep the growth of mature experiments.
Embrace and Keep Up With Changes
From the introduction of long form content on LinkedIn to organic contents on Facebook to ‘Buy’ button on Twitter; social channels continue to reshape the landscape of marketing to enhance user experience. The tight competition in social media is another niggling concern. All of these factors don’t just affect social media, because they also influence the entire brand strategy, in the same manner when you print business card.
Fortunately, the solution is simple: Do not make ’rigid’ social media strategies. You need to create strategies that respond to the changes of the customers, your competitors, and your platform. You need to stay within the curve and give relevant contents to your audience.
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Takeaway
Social media is a dynamic medium, and most brands struggle to keep up just because of this quality. It’s not just a simple matter that is as easy as printing affordable business cards. The point of agile marketing here is to enhance your social media marketing to provide superior brand experience for your audience. Induct it to your strategic processes, and you will be one step closer to producing top-of-the-line results.
