Is agile marketing fit for industrial companies?

Based on our experience, most of the challenges industrial companies face when trying to apply agile marketing strategies, is the lack of an agile mindset.

Before trying to enforce an agile strategy, take the time to educate your teams on the agile concept of work.

Below is a set of 6 questions to answer, while assessing if your teams are ready to move to an agile mindset:

1. Teams understand that they must communicate more often,

2. They are used to work in cross-functional projects,

3. They feel comfortable to be open about the problems they face in execution,

4. They understand agile requires working on shorter timelines than traditional workstreams,

5. They are ok being treated with skepticism by other functions and/or management,

6. And most important of all, they are willing to regularly report on failures, the same as they report on achievements!

Agility makes industries more adaptive to turmoil

Agile marketing can prove to be beneficial for all types of companies and industries, as it entails a different mindset that fosters innovation and can help an organization adjust faster to rapid and unforeseeable changes.
Covid-19 pandemic and the recent European energy crisis are great examples of how agile marketing strategies could help industrial companies.
Both events have created an ongoing turmoil to supply chains and have largely affected consumer behaviours. It is no surprise that smaller companies and start-ups found it easier to change their business model and adjust to these adversities.
Several industrial brands, especially those that produce what we call commodities, chose radio silence, pausing PR and marketing campaigns and imposing heavy reductions on their budgets. They did so because they felt that their customers were less active, as they had suspended operations or rescheduled orders for a later date.
If they were applying agile marketing strategies, they could easily validate if their customers were indeed “listening”, adapt and iterate their campaigns and make small experiments with consequently small budgets to test their offering, instead of staying offline for a long period and leaving room for competition to flourish.