To stay relevant, marketers need to be adaptable and agile, as well as listen and respond to customer needs quickly—Covid-19 has driven home that business imperative. To reach customers across their shopping journey and to help grow their brand and business along the way, advertisers need the right insights to make quick, informed decisions about their advertising strategies.
Amazon Ads recently hosted a webinar with Tina Moffett, principal analyst at Forrester, to discuss current trends in consumer behaviors, marketing measurement and analytics, and data-driven planning strategies. Moffett is an industry veteran with 10 years’ experience in customer and marketing analytics across brands, agencies, and marketing consulting firms. Prior to joining Forrester, she was an associate director at a major digital advertising agency, where she managed marketing and customer measurement and analytics efforts.
As you can imagine, a huge part of her job involves strategizing and thinking about how agility is imperative in today’s world. Below, Moffett answers questions raised by participants during the webinar.
Massive social and economic disruption has caused consumers to adjust their core values and needs, creating what Forrester refers to as the “empowered consumer.” What would you say are the top ways consumers have evolved over the last couple of years?
Tina Moffett: Consumers lived with uncertainty over the past two years which resulted in shifting spending, and overall massive behavioral changes. As a result, the characteristics of the “empowered customer” have changed. Consumers now “experiment” with new solutions that fill their needs in unconventional ways or make their lives easier.
In Forrester’s “The Future of the Empowered Consumer in the U.S.” report, technology perception and reliance has increased over the past few years, and the pandemic drove consumers to feel more connected to their personal devices. But the drastic isolation also created some resentment for digital experiences, with 31% of U.S. adults indicating they are more negative about social media. Consumers crave the integrated digital and physical experiences, as the pandemic indicated that digital-only tools like social media don’t make them feel as connected to their friends and family.
Apart from the core marketing team, who are usually the key internal and external stakeholders, such as agencies and publishers, that are crucial to the success of agile marketing?
Agile ways of working push responsibility for decisions down and out from marketing managers to teams that support customers and customer journeys. This is inclusive of marketing’s key partners: agencies and publishers.
A key ethos to agile marketing is iterative testing and continuous improvement, which requires publisher and agency partners to be flexible and provide support to smaller projects to be developed over multiple periods. It will require publishers and agencies to support an advertiser’s agile planning and review process, reducing idle time in the marketing strategy process.
While learning agenda helps to tie marketing activities to business value, there’s oftentimes difficulty in attributing business outcomes back to market activities, due to the data challenges described in the Forrester Global Marketing Survey you spoke about during the webinar. What’s your recommendation to organizations that are facing these challenges but are interested in practicing agile marketing?
Advanced analytics teams and marketers can collaborate and apply agile methodologies to build better data-driven marketing measurement models. These agile methodologies can help streamline and accelerate the data prep and normalization process and data workflows that often bottleneck measurement and analytics efforts.
Is agile marketing suitable for all? Are there any circumstances where you see the traditional waterfall approach being more appropriate?
Firms don’t need to adopt a formal agile marketing process with specific roles, like Scrum Master, but they can adopt best practices to help improve their business processes and workflows. A best practice from the agile marketing approach is for the marketing owner to review and prioritize the backlog of projects, determine how much can be completed in a specific timeframe, and identify “smaller projects” within the bigger scoped project.
For example, a team working on engaging prospects may test ad or SEO strategies to see which strategy is most effective in generating website visitors and conversions. Each component, as well as the delivery mechanism, content, and call to action, can be tested before a broader deployment.
What role do you think mar-tech and ad-tech solutions play in facilitating the practice of agile marketing?
Marketing and advertising technologies play a crucial role in facilitating testing and activating marketing requests, and quickly measuring impact. These technologies must have the speed and flexibility to quickly access data, change direction of campaigns, and provide advanced measurement capabilities and metrics of success.
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