Agile Project Management meets digital Marketing

In the digital world, rigid plans have one major drawback: they become obsolete as soon as they are made. What if you could combine planning and flexibility? With adapted agile project management techniques, we help our clients achieve faster project success with greater market agility.

Where does agile project management come from?

Agile project management has its roots in software development. In the early 1990s, a group of developers was looking for a rational and adaptive way to manage their projects. At the same time, they wanted to create more flexibility and make decisions faster. By 2001, the Agile Manifesto was written, outlining the basic principles of agile project management. The many benefits of this approach were soon discovered by other departments and adapted as needed.

How does agile project management apply to marketing?

Agile project management focuses on the ability of organizations and teams to make meaningful changes quickly and continuously. It promotes the ability to bring innovative ideas into the project through regular, short coordination and sharing of ideas between different departments.

One of the biggest benefits of agile project management is that it eliminates long lead times for implementing ideas by delivering measurable deliverables at short intervals. As a result, the overall project moves faster and new ideas are implemented more frequently. This in turn means that more testing can be done and customer feedback can be incorporated into the project more quickly and efficiently.

Agile project management is particularly suited to digital marketing because the digital world, with all its innovations and trends, is changing at a rapid pace. Rigid project plans often fail to deliver the results expected at the planning stage. In contrast to conventional project management, the agile method reflects more frequently on individual partial results. If external conditions change, the project can be adapted flexibly without losing time. This results in higher quality marketing campaigns and increased customer satisfaction.

In short, these are the benefits of agile project management in social media marketing:

1. Agile project management supports the continuous learning approach to social media marketing.

2. Agile project management enables teams to respond to the dynamic nature of social media marketing.

3. Agile project management enables continuous remote monitoring of social media activities.

4. Agile project management methods provide the flexibility to quickly adapt to changing market conditions.

5. Agile project management improves productivity and performance by creating more time for experimentation in the world of social media.

A simple example from the field

Let's take content planning in a social media project as an example: You are probably familiar with annual content plans. Typically, topics are pre-formulated for the entire year and detailed on a quarterly basis. The number and type (image, story, carousel, reel, ...) are determined in advance and a budget per post is defined. This approach does not allow much freedom to follow current trends or to quickly implement the lessons learned from the last posts. It makes more sense to take short steps and evaluate them regularly.

💜 Has a post worked particularly well? Then the target group would surely like to see more of it.

💜 Is there a new trend that fits your company? This should be implemented immediately.

💜 Has there been an innovation in the platform's formats or algorithm? Immediate adjustments can increase the quality of your posts.

This is not to say that planning ahead is not possible, but there should always be room for innovation. Regular evaluation, trend analysis and exchange between employees and customers are the basis for rapid changes.

The actual implementation requires a highly motivated team and the ability to evaluate and coordinate. For the former, we use various social media management tools and set ourselves markers and alarms to monitor performance on each channel. It has also proven effective to set aside time each week for analysis. The sub-goals of a project are worked through in weekly sprints. Short daily meetings (max. 15 minutes) give all team members an overview of the overall projects. Weekly meetings, which are also kept short, serve to deepen the project.

In this way, concrete next steps are defined: These can be partial developments of new ideas based on previous results, small modifications or further developments. Fixed coordination appointments with the customer round off the model. Tools such as Slack have proven to be useful for quick, small-scale coordination and thus ensure rapid implementation.

Agile project management also has advantages for campaign planning. Instead of defining a campaign from start to finish in advance, multiple ideas can be tested on small groups of customers in partial results. In this way, it is possible to find out very early on which idea is most appealing to end customers. Based on these findings, further work is done to achieve the best result for the customer, step by step.

Conclusion

Agile project management is not only suitable for software development, but can also be adapted to digital marketing projects. The benefits of flexible, communication-driven teams are enormous. However, this method cannot and should not be applied to every project. Depending on the ability to communicate with customers, or even the size of the project, agile may not be the best fit. In many cases, however, it leads to faster and higher quality results.