Editorial Articles

The importance of an agile approach to marketing 

As we come out of the recession and hopefully return to improved marketing budgets, there’s a huge opportunity for marketers to stop being reactive and more proactively plan marketing activity. However, the progress away from the recession should not really be the determining factor in driving marketing activity. In truth, good marketing practice and techniques have business value no matter what the economic climate.

While some consumers may have tightened their purse strings in the wake of the recession, others have continued to spend and changed their habits very little. Given the low interest rates feeding through to mortgages, a few may have even felt better off. In reality, what is important to recognise is that there is no universal truth when it comes to how customers and prospects behave.

Organisations need to be able to adopt an approach we describe as Marketing Agility. This involves identifying individual customers, understanding their history, highlighting service issues, calculating propensity to buy new goods and services, while also mapping and tracking response to key events and trigger offers. To help successfully adopt agile marketing, we have identified five key steps organisations should follow:

1. Join up customer insight, product and channel
Organisations need to live and breathe the concept of agility, making changes quickly and ensuring the speed at which this is done does not counter the benefit of change. Businesses that can identify where the overlaps in a business lie are likely to be far more successful at becoming more agile than those that do not.

2. Create a single customer view
Obtaining a single view of your customers is a vital step in becoming agile. This can be done by creating a marketing database to store all your customer data, whether it is an address, purchase history, a customer’s propensity to purchase new goods or how responsive they are to particular forms of marketing.

3. Get customer insight and make it work
Insight into customers enables organisations to create targeted campaigns that deliver real results, whilst improving the efficiency of marketing spend.

4. Embrace marketing automation
Marketing automation technologies can significantly increase the speed at which companies can react to changing customer habits and profiles, helping to ensure that customer communications achieve consistent relevance around both “message” and “moment.”

5. Get customer insight onto the boardroom agenda
What customers are doing is a far more relevant barometer of the financial and economic climate, than what the media often tell us. So, it’s vital to bring this knowledge into the boardroom so that marketing activities can be tightly aligned to wider business objectives.

Keeping Marketing Agility top of mind

Marketing Agility is about putting customers at the heart of their business and responding to their changing needs and behaviours. In reality, this requires businesses to be fast, responsive and flexible in their approach to marketing. Achieving this requires marketers to develop a single customer view, action customer insight and automate marketing processes. Perhaps most importantly, success requires buy in and an ongoing positive attitude from the team towards an agile approach to marketing that consistently drives successful campaigns that meet the need of the customer.

To calculate how agile your marketing is and download our Guide to Marketing Agility click here.

Jim Hodgkins
Director, Experian Marketing Services