Agile methodologies have significantly impacted the way traditional management strategies used to operate. Earlier, the Waterfall methodology had its roots in the management of operations, but as we move towards a distributed and rapid management ecosystem, the traditional Waterfall approach seems to be replaced by agile practices. 

Knowing the power of agile and the benefits that it offers, the digital world has integrated agile approaches to everyday management operations. In fact, we are already living in a post-Waterfall era, and the practitioners have accepted it. 

Like any other management-oriented field, agile execution has also impacted marketing channels and inspired the birth of a completely different domain called agile marketing. 

In this article, we will briefly discuss agile marketing and agile CMS, particularly the role that agile CMS plays in facilitating the growth, development, and impact of agile marketing. 

What is Agile Marketing? 

Agile marketing is an incremental approach in which marketing teams collectively identify high-stake and high-priority projects and apply their efforts towards a common goal. Most of the time, agile marketing teams follow the Scrum methodology and divide the deliverables into short sprints. 

By design, each sprint focuses on developing new marketing strategies or tweaking existing frameworks as per the feedback received from the target market. 

Following are some of the critical benefits that agile marketing offers over traditional marketing schemes.

• Revisit the market, analyze its trends, and take necessary actions to respond to the changes effectively. 
• Identify the market gap and introduce fast-paced campaigns to fill that gap. 
• Collaborate with other teams at organizations to formulate new marketing strategies. 
• Use real data and statistics to produce fresh insights and predictive outcomes. 
• Experiment with ideas and re-iterate them until the marketing funnel fits the requirement block at its best. 
• Build small and focused teams with an aim to critically think and engage in market analytics and eventually convert them to produce organizational gains. 

What is an Agile CMS?

Agile CMS is relatively a new moniker in the content management space. As the name suggests, it gives an agile perspective to content management systems by employing shared tools across multiple teams within an enterprise. 

An agile CMS brings together different stakeholders and provides them with a common platform to pitch, suggest, and negotiate ideas that are best suited to the needs and requirements of the project under consideration. 

According to Forrester, almost one-third (30%) of the software decision-makers and stakeholders plan to replace their current CMS with a new agile one. This is indeed a revolutionary change in the sphere of content management systems where the thought leaders have clearly understood the power of employing agile practices to scale content and its effective management. 

Role of an Agile CMS in Agile Marketing

Agile marketing, together with an agile CMS, is a conceptual package that can disrupt the marketing ecosystem in a variety of ways. Agile CMS has a ready-to-go infrastructure that is welcoming to address new scalability and performance challenges. 

The nature of the enterprise marketing sector makes agile practices and an agile CMS a must. Marketing teams are highly exposed to real and large volumes of data. It makes sense to leverage the power of an agile CMS to speed up the strategic, planning, and management processes. 

Following are some of the fascinating ways in which agile CMS can aid agile marketing and eventually leverage the potential of effective marketing strategies. 

Fast-paced Marketing

Being a content hub, an agile CMS is by definition a centralized place where marketing teams can rely on putting strategic and promotional content. The expectation does not stop here, but it expands to sharing of content as well. Multiple marketing teams can unite on a single platform and share ideas, suggestions, opinions, and insights that cumulatively make up an entire marketing lifecycle. 

With an agile CMS, the content is organized and reshaped continuously because the market evolves rapidly. Hence, an agile CMS provides an ideal environment to respond to the rapid changes in the market trends with mutual collaboration and understanding among marketing decision-makers and stakeholders.

Continuous Feedback

For a marketing team that cares about the customer experience and product growth, feedback is essential. A professional marketing team should figure out how to gather continuous feedback from the target audience. An agile CMS makes feedback possible and enables marketers to incorporate consumer feedback, significantly improving the speed-to-market. 

The platform enables marketers to gather customer feedback on a centralized platform and share it across relevant channels. It also has integrated tools and options that can allow marketers to go a step further and figure out pertinent insights of a collaborative manner with collective efforts. 

Continuous Delivery

Gathering continuous feedback using the potential of an agile CMS surely helps agile marketers discover new trends within their audiences, but it is just one part of the overall picture. Similarly, it’s equally important to work towards integrating consumer insights into marketing channels and strategies. 

For this to reflect in action, agile CMS has again a significant role to play. Due to its multi-stake involvement ability, agile marketing teams can quickly figure out new solutions and deploy them to their fullest potential in future marketing strategies. This helps solve the root cause of the problem and involves customers as an essential part of the entire marketing lifecycle. 

Rapid Experimentation

Achieving your goals and accomplishing your strategic outcomes can be hard in the first attempt. For that reason, agile marketers need to experiment as much as they can to make sure that they hit the nail in the head. Plus, sometimes, customer feedback is not clear enough, and therefore it cannot be interpreted correctly. If that’s your case, an agile CMS can give you the tools you need to start experimenting. 

Having said that, experimentation is a vital component of marketing initiatives; it does not mean that a single experimentation cycle can live for a longer period. Experimentation has to be rapid and effective. The market does not wait for marketers to improve, but it goes at its own pace and keeps on introducing new challenges. 

In this situation, an agile CMS plays a crucial role in managing the experimentation processes and eventually enables marketers to take up new challenges and seamlessly integrate their solutions in a collaborative working environment. 

Easy Adoption of Market Trends 

We have constantly been talking about consumer feedback, its continuous evolution using a continuous delivery model, and how agile CMS plays its part at the core of everything agile marketers do. However, consumer feedback is not the only metric that agile marketers need to look for. An effective agile marketing strategy is one that also takes into account the market trends and closely monitors them. 

The success or a failure to adopt market trends can add to the enterprise profits and losses, respectively. The structure of an agile CMS allows marketers to take advantage of collaboration and collectively take up the challenge of monitoring market trends and formulate necessary action items accordingly.