This is part one of a two-part blog series on agile marketing for B2B.
If you are a B2B marketer, there is a good chance your current marketing strategy and tactics are slightly different than they were a year ago. They might even be different than they were six months ago.
These type of fast-paced adjustments reveal an underlying movement in the world of marketing toward greater adaptability and agility. “Agile marketing” is the new buzzword floating through the B2B blogosphere, and in order to stay ahead of the game, you need to know what it is and how to do it.
“Agility means that you are faster than your competition. Agile time frames are measured in weeks and months, not years.” ~ Michael Hugos
For B2B marketing, agile marketing is ability to observe your industry, listen to your market, and look at internal metrics in order to quickly respond with incremental modifications to your strategy and tactics. It’s really about using observations and data to constantly refine your process based on your overall goals. This is most easily done using marketing automation, which gives you a “behind-the-scenes” view of your sales and marketing process from start to finish.
B2B agile marketing starts with research and observation. By looking at industry data, market reports and your competition, you get an understanding of the overall landscape you are trying to sell in. Taking that into consideration, you then listen to your current customer-base and your prospects to understand how they view their problem and what they want from a solution.
For the second half of this blog series click here.
For an in-depth look at why agile marketing is now a required strategy to stay competitive, you can download our white paper on “New Rules for B2B Sales & Marketing in 2013”.
