By Katrina Kirsch

In 2019, DoorDash was losing money on the average order and reported an operating loss of $616 million on $885 million in revenue. By the end of 2020, their revenue jumped to $2.89 billion — a 226% gain.

Why the sudden success?

For one, the global pandemic spiked the demand for food delivery. But DoorDash also responded to customers’ needs right from the start. They delivered COVID test kits and launched the #OpenforDelivery campaign to support restaurants by the end of March, made it easier to filter customer ratings in April, and released a Gifting feature to send loved ones food over the holidays.

Simply put, they figured out what customers desired and rapidly delivered.

Now more than ever, customers expect brands to understand and respond to their needs. In a survey of global consumers, 58% of people remembered a brand that quickly pivoted and 82% ended up doing more business with that company as a result.

But a lightning-fast response only happens if your team can handle abrupt change.

Agile marketing is a strategic approach that focuses on quickly executing projects by working in short sprints. It makes room for marketers to shift their focus, adapt to customer needs, and change priorities alongside expectations.

With Agile, what once took months to deliver can take weeks.

Adopting this approach takes work, but this post shares how to get started with Agile marketing by explaining the process, sharing examples, and showing you how to automate your efforts.

What is Agile Marketing?

Agile marketing is a strategic marketing approach that prioritizes creating high-value deliverables, working in short, intense bursts to achieve goals, and rapidly iterating.

By the end of each burst — often called a ‘sprint’ or an ‘iteration’ — teams complete their outlined deliverables and begin testing so they know how to improve during the next iteration. Data collection and analytics allow teams to incrementally refine and improve the results over time.

Agile marketing embraces failure. It also requires teams to learn from their mistakes and make adjustments to continuously get better. This mindset isn’t always easy for teams to instantly adopt. That’s why it’s important to understand the core values outlined in the Agile Marketing Manifesto before switching to this approach.

1. Validated learning over opinions and conventions.
2. Customer-focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy.
3. Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns.
4. The process of customer discovery over static prediction.
5. Responding to change over following a plan.
6. Many small experiments over a few large bets.

When these values play out in real-world projects, the impact can be massive.

Research by McKinsey found that digital marketing organizations using Agile have seen a 20-40% increase in revenue. Agile has also cut down the time it takes for companies to turn an idea into an offer — from multiple months or weeks to less than two weeks.

You may think this acceleration leads to sloppy deliverables and disappointment. It’s the opposite. Agile …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron