| Good morning Marketer, let’s talk about agile marketing.
If your marketing ops team is spending the bulk of their efforts putting out fires and managing new requests, it might be time to get more comfortable saying “no” to truly embrace an agile approach. “Agile systems can be immensely helpful here. The trouble is that if everything is a priority, nothing is. When we’re trying to do ten things at once, they’ll all end up taking ten times longer than if we were focusing on one thing until it’s done,” said founder of AgileSherpas Andrea Fryrear. Her team recently released its second annual State of Agile Marketing report, and found that marketers cited “current processes not working well” as a leading barrier to adopting an agile approach – second only to lack of education and training. She recommends taking one of two approaches to enable a more agile strategy: Identify a Team Lead to manage the backlog and determine which projects take priority, or enact “short sprints” that last for one to two weeks, where marketing operations teams are allowed to put up guardrails around their work efforts. In other news, Verizon reported it saw more than double the number of phone calls each day at the end of March. What does such a significant increase in call volumes mean for marketing technologists? That the “new normal” in terms of business communications may involve more phone call interactions between consumers and brands. To keep up with business insights, digital marketers may need to pay more attention to inbound calls as a marketing channel. If this is something your team is hearing more about — and you’re looking to add call analytics platforms to your martech stack — check out our Enterprise Call Analytics Marketers Guide. Take care, Taylor Peterson
Deputy Editor | 