Things move quickly these days, as you’re no doubt aware. That means your marketing strategies need to be able to move even quicker. Spend too long preparing a campaign and you could miss the boat or fail to respond to changing market conditions and risk wasting your budget. But how do you get the agility you need without breaking the bank? The answer lies in marketing as a service with month-to-month contracts. Keep reading to learn why.
The agile advantage
The ability to seize immediate opportunities, adjust course and pivot as the need arises is a powerful advantage for a marketing team to have. An agile approach to marketing emphasizes collaborative and iterative processes. It relies on a team’s ability to source real-time data and insights, “rapidly making sense of market developments and executing marketing decisions in an iterative manner,” as described by the American Marketing Association (pdf). As opposed to rigid long-term plans, agile marketing is all about embracing change, optimizing and keeping pace with a world in flux.
Marketing agility can be described, essentially, as the degree to which a business can iterate as information and insights come to light. It’s also about the ability to experiment with new ideas – to try new approaches and put innovative concepts to the test.
And the importance of innovation in marketing is no secret. “Chief marketing officers (CMOs) see innovation as the path to growth, with marketing innovation now making up more than 20% of overall marketing budgets”, according to Gartner.
The MaaS advantage
To unlock the advantages of agile marketing, a business needs access to the technology tools for gathering data, the skills for making sense of it, and the capacity to implement changes at speed. For smaller in-house teams, that’s a tall order. It could mean having to invest in more resources and hire more staff – an expensive remedy that can result in less flexibility, especially in terms of scale. Requirements fluctuate for most businesses and additional capacity or specialized skills may be needed for a once-off campaign and become a costly burden thereafter.
The marketing-as-a-service (MaaS) model solves that problem, but, even then, organizations can find themselves trapped in an inflexible long-term partnership with a marketing agency.
The month-to-month advantage
The highest degree of agility undoubtedly comes from implementing a MaaS solution with short-term contracts. A MaaS agency that offers month-to-month contracts with bespoke solutions can neatly augment the missing elements of a marketing team – the skills, know-how and capacity – for only as long as they’re needed. This also allows organizations to evaluate and adjust their marketing strategies at a much quicker pace.
The benefits include:
- Rapid experimentation
Inherent to this approach is the flexibility to try out new ideas, tactics, and channels without being tied down to a long-term strategy.
- Responsive optimization
Rapid iterations based on up-to-date insights allow for campaigns to be seamlessly optimized in response to performance metrics and changing market conditions.
- The ability to quickly capitalize on new opportunities
The MaaS model with month-to-month contracts allows an organization to respond immediately to new opportunities as they arise and get ahead of slower competitors.
Making the most of MaaS
Agile planning and strategy focuses on identifying and achieving short-term goals. Clear communication is a necessity to remain aligned, but by getting it right, those long-term goals inevitably fall into place. It supports continuous improvement and growth through iteration. And with the support of a team of marketing experts, organizations can take a more dynamic approach to internal resource allocation with the ability to quickly shift their focus to capitalize on opportunities as they arise, or to try something completely new.
Agile marketing strategies are at the forefront of modern marketing practices, and the marketing-as-a-service with short-term contracts enables their implementation for even the smallest SME. To avoid being left behind, organizations need the kind of full-stack marketing agency that emphasizes flexibility. For that, they need look no further than CODESM.
