Planning in Agile Marketing is like taking a trip using Google Maps. We know the destination and when we’d like to arrive, but how we get there efficiently and safely is influenced greatly by the dynamics of driving with a digital guide.
Have you ever used one of those paper fold-out maps on a long road trip? Sure, the path is there, but a static map cannot update you on construction or traffic, or even accidents on your journey. So instead of following a planned route on a static map, we now use the automation and intelligence of crowd-sourced information and historical metrics about traffic to allow software analysis to give us the best routes to our destinations. Using turn-by-turn instructions based on available data of possible routes, we now arrive where we want to go without needing to know the exact route before we begin the journey.
Agile Marketing & Google Maps
Agile Marketing is a lot like Google Maps for planning the customer journey and marketing workflow.
Agile Marketing gives us step-by-step metrics based on available data to discern the next steps on our digital journey. — Anthony Coppedge
In the digital marketing profession, our software tools provide us with the insight to make informed decisions based on relevant, timely data that greatly influence the changes to our desired outcomes. Without these tools, we often can assume too much about what should happen before we have the supporting data to verify our choices.
Agile Marketing believes that we will achieve goals that are in line with our objectives when we plan in small increments, execute and validate our results, and iterate changes to adjust our course — and then we do it all again, and again. This is how Google Maps uses relevant data to help us know how to avoid traffic and accidents, or even to avoid or take advantage of toll roads so that we get to where we’re going via the best available routes through constant updates and optimal suggestions.
Planning looks less like knowing exactly how, where, and when to execute on digital deliverables and more like knowing our desired destinations and timelines as they relate to our editorial calendars.
Planning in Marketing isn’t Anti-Agile
It’s not cheating to have a plan. The difference between traditional marketing planning (waterfall method) and Agile Marketing planning is that the plan is not static, but dynamic. Pivoting makes your team not only faster but focuses on delivering value, not just delivering more stuff.
The shared definition of planning, according to the crowd-sourced minds of Wikipedia, is as follows: “In organizations, planning is a management process, concerned with defining goals for a company’s future direction and determining on the missions and resources to achieve those targets. To meet the goals, managers may develop plans such as a business plan or a marketing plan.”
Academically, planning is a management process. In Agile Marketing, however, planning is a teamwork exercise to ensure deliverables and the path to publication are estimated, valued, and measured. Like using Google Maps, Agile Marketing takes input from multiple sources, verifies them against real-world metrics, and gives marketing teams the just-enough, just-in-time planning to focus work on short-term deliverables against the longer-term deadlines of the Editorial Calendar.
When the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain of change, Marketing teams can look to Agile Marketing for the framework to guide their decision-making process and empower the entire team to influence Marketing deliverables and outcomes.