According to McKinsey, “Agile, in the marketing context, means using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real-time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly iterating.”
An Agile marketing strategy particularly helps to manage offshore marketing teams. It allows quick and efficient coordination with teams to complete several disparate marketing processes simultaneously.
The best part of offshore agile teams is clear communication. You can assign roles and targets to your offshore teams and monitor them on an ongoing basis via Scrum meetings.
In this article, we will discuss how you can build your own offshore Agile team for marketing right from the scratch.
Well, you can divide your marketing teams into five groups, like:
This team works with everything related to the content of your campaigns. This includes text, audio, video, and images. You will need a great copywriter, a blogging team, and a social media team.
Sales team:
They are responsible for everything related to lead acquisition and making sales. This team may also have marketing professionals involved or if you want to create a separate marketing team to develop campaigns, you can do that too.
This team is responsible for converting leads into customers by taking on multiple roles. This could be client-servicing, customer service, or plain old sales.
You should prioritize hiring people who are good at data and analytics. Agile marketing depends on data and you will need people with a strong IT background to work with analytical tools that can derive market insights.
The strategy builders should be multi-disciplinarian in their approach and should combine insight with creativity to come up with marketing and sales campaigns. Hence, they should also be experts in Agile management and should be able to conduct daily and weekly Scrum meetings.
Well, there is no specific answer to this question. Because It depends on the size of your own company and also your marketing goals.
Agile marketing revolves around the idea of scalability. It makes sense to keep the team(s) as small as possible.
There are cases where just a single team manages all the functions we described above. Sometimes, just 2 to 3 members can form your offshore Agile marketing team, and their roles may overlap.
In other cases, you can have multiple teams with as many as 10 to 15 members in each team. And respective ScrumMasters will lead these teams.
To build your high-performing offshore Agile marketing team, start small and identify your marketing approach. The crux of agile methodology is scalability.
A good vendor will only assign those members who will work on your project. This can be as few as just two individual members, one of whom could be the ScrumMaster.
As your marketing requirements grow, you can add new members to your team. Because the prospects of dividing your team into multiple ones increase with each additional member. At this juncture, you can refer to our guidelines regarding a full-fledged marketing team.
Agile leadership varies across organizations and there can be different kinds of leaders. Some of the leadership roles that companies often hire externally include
The one who leads the team should have a decent intellectual capacity. And he or she should be able to arrive at solutions in a creative manner. These are the primary qualities you need to look for in an agile marketing team leader:
If the marketing leader has all these qualities, he or she can play the role of the Scrum Master as well.
As you can see, building an offshore Agile marketing team is not a cakewalk. So, it’s important to consult with vendors who stick to Agile philosophy strictly and build your team slowly.
First, start with identifying your marketing goals. And fill roles that suit your strategy. Then start working with ScrumMasters and regularly receive updates about Scrum meetings and conduct reviews.
Learn from iterations and scale up/down depending on the situation. Agile marketing provides you with the perfect methodology to put order into a chaotic marketing environment. Also, it helps you to leverage seeming chaos to your benefit. Starting small and scaling up or down as per your growth requirements is the perfect recipe for a successful offshore Agile marketing team.
