This quote from a recent MarketingProfs article pretty much sums it up: "We are operating in an increasing social and real-time environment where things are happening faster and traditional approaches to marketing planning just can't keep up." —Frank Days, vice-president of marketing, Correlsense

With mainstream adoption of social media, the emergence of mobile marketing, and the ongoing proliferation of new marketing channels and technologies, the pace of marketing is constantly accelerating, and timing is everything: The quicker you can respond to changes in the market place, the better poised for success you’ll be. Agile marketing strategies can help organizations to keep a pulse on the dynamic digital environment and respond with speed and relevance. Here are three tips for staying agile and ahead.

1. Leverage social media. Social media can enable efficient and timely dissemination of news and updates such as blog content and press releases on a minimal resource investment. Social media campaigns can be timed in coordination with product launch events to create pre-release marketing buzz, distributed in response to competitive activity, or employed as a platform for managing crisis communications. Social media can also be used proactively in a broader, ongoing media strategy to build digital awareness and engagement with your brand. Additionally, if you set the parameters and share key company updates with them, your employees can serve as agile and passionate brand advocates in the digital age.

2. Be lean. Seek out marketing partners who can go beyond marketing strategy to help execute tactical marketing initiatives. Marketing partners can augment tactical execution in a time crunch or when changes in the market or plans for a big marketing push require a quick boost in output without increasing full-time staff, enabling companies to efficiently ramp up or downscale the volume of marketing support while avoiding taking on staff that may be underutilized after a big marketing push. Creative staffing models can also help to maximize your marketing effectiveness while extending your budget.

3. Deploy digital marketing technologies. Marketing resource management systems can help to minimize the time spent maintaining your library of marketing resources and templates and help to quickly locate and adjust materials when branding or messaging changes in response to dynamic market conditions or factors. Marketing resource management systems also empower your distributed sales force and channels to localize and customize marketing templates on demand while built-in workflows ensure efficient management of customizations and approvals.

Conclusion

To improve marketing agility, it’s important to employ strategies that help to stretch your reach and impact. Leveraging social media and seeking out marketing partners to augment staff and productivity on a short-term basis are excellent strategies for accomplishing more with less and in being able to respond swiftly to changes in the market place. Additionally, marketing resource management systems can help enable agile localization and customization of marketing messages and testing the success of various approaches over time. While A/B testing and measuring results across all marketing channels can help quantify returns and optimize the marketing mix, however, marketing leaders should avoid the pitfall of trying to accomplish too much without focusing on the critical few efforts that will have the biggest impact.

Is your marketing strategy optimized for marketing agility?