PPC - Pay Per Click Management

Agile marketing has become a buzzword in the online marketing industry and despite my deep disrespect for this kind of babble buzz word, here I am going to do you all a favor by explaining what the heck this agile marketing is and how you can be an agile marketer.

Before I go into the details, let me tell you straight that agile marketing is not a complex concept. It is about the ability of being able to adapt to the changes fast, really fast. I know how hard it can be for in-house marketers where their days start with small meeting with their co-workers, and end with big meeting with their seniors and several mixed sizes meetings with some other people in between. So, it is quite expected that it takes month to get a proposal approved or select a particular search term and go for the kill. It is frustrating but if your organization gives you the option to be agile, you can do the same thing in an hour or so. Just do a little research and then figure out some search terms or create a marketing plan that can do wonder.

This is the kind of mentality that you need to adapt to be an effective marketer, oh sorry, my bad, to be an agile marketer. So, if you really wish to be the next generation agile marketer and want to get through the bureaucratic BS, do share this post with your seniors and hopefully, they will appreciate your efforts:

They Spend more time on social media conversation

I know some companies where they have a complete documentation ready on what a social media marketer can say and what they cannot say while communicating with people in social media circles. Ok, I do not over ride the importance of having some sort of policies clearly laid out otherwise new recruits may create loads of troubles for the company. But man, you need to loosen up the thing a bit. There should be a healthy mix of on the spot judgment and guidance. Companies like City Printing has embraced the idea of agile marketing and the effect is quite palpable.

If you are to read the policies all the time before you can gather the muster to courage to join a conversation in Facebook or pressing the Retweet button, the campaign will never be able to make the most of the situation. You need to show the humane side of the company and crack some jokes time after time so that people stay connected to your brand and at the same time, you should be made them aware of the latest happening before your competitors do. So, the bottom-line of survival in social media is to be proactive and not being passive all the time.

Do Extensive research and then take actionable Decision

I hope being a knowledgeable marketer you know your worth. I mean you know how to measure how your campaigns are faring or how many goals need to be met before you can call the campaign successful. For say, let us imagine that you have set a target of reaching 100K visitors in this year. So does this mean that you will not be analyzing the visitors’ trends, sources, bounce rates and other metrics in the meantime.

Rather than looking at the big picture, an agile marketer will be looking at things in micro level. I mean they will be focusing on small things. Like they might be looking at things at micro level. Probably they might be looking at daily metrics and will conduct surveys on weekly basis to figure out which marketing plan is working, which one is not and where there are rooms for improvement.

For say, if you find that making slight changes in the headline in email body is causing more people opening the emails and replying, you need to implement that thing in all email marketing campaign to see significant progress. It is about making adjustment in the ongoing campaign without getting into another crazy series of meetings. Oh boy I am tired.

They Do Mistakes, a lot of Mistakes

My dad once said, do not make mistakes in the exam. Yup, he said it all wrong. Man how I can score 100 out of hundred when the question paper is set by person with whom I have no such intimate relationship. The same thing is applicable to agile marketers. Since they are doing things proactively and really fast, you simply cannot expect that they will be doing thing correct all the time. Moreover, they are diving into unknown reasons and therefore, unless they will make mistakes, they will not learn anything new.

So, if you are an agile marketer, you might be wrong sometimes but you need to learn how to correct and make a strong comeback. I remember how I have messed up the marketing campaign of my company when I was asked to manage the Twitter profile. I was about the ruin the profile by following all and sundry (from Tom Cruise to Sexy Cheeky). But those mistakes only made me strong and later I made a huge stride in making our profile stand out from the rest.

They Publish more Articles

You have got an excellent article but do you have the authority to publish that without consulting with an editor, an SEO consultant, your senior, the VP of the company and a lawyer may be. But agile marketing is not like that. It is about coming with great and sharable content right at the nick of time. However, I am not saying that you should dump the concept of quality and accuracy for the sake of publishing more content. Definitely I am not championing this, rather what I am trying to say is that the quality evaluation process should not be that gruesome.

When you can get the article checked my your smart co-worker in 2o minutes, there is no point in hiring an Editor who will take the whole day if not the whole week fine tuning the content. The need of the hour is to get the article publish so that your competitors do not come up with similar post and steal the thunder.