We talked in our recent blog about the strategic importance of a Marketing Operations Roadmap. Here, we look a little more closely at how a roadmap can effectively combine your long-term strategic vision with the agile approach you need to run your marketing operations on a day-to-day basis.
An agile marketing operations roadmap
As we’ve previously discussed in our series of blogs on agile marketing, implementing agile approaches to marketing – or indeed any other discipline – doesn’t happen overnight. It requires buy-in from multiple stakeholders, adjustments in team mindset and a gradual approach to implementation.
This is exactly where a Marketing Operations Roadmap becomes invaluable, enabling you to chart both the ‘end goal’ of your activities and the evolutionary steps and adjustments you need to make over time to get there.
Contrary to popular belief, being agile does NOT equal a plan-free approach to marketing. Quite the reverse: planning is an integral part of true agility. An agile marketing operations roadmap allows your team to see the larger goal they’re working towards, while understanding the proactive steps they need to take to achieve it.
Planning and agility are perfect marketing operations partners
Planning will always be fundamental to marketing and its role in helping to deliver key business outcomes. After all, it’s only through planning, research and analysis that an organisation can identify and understand its audience and develop value propositions to meet their needs.
To be effective, your marketing operations roadmap must include this bigger picture view, while also detailing the realistic and actionable steps you need to take to achieve the overall objective. This approach allows you to tie together multiple marketing initiatives into a broader marketing or business goal, such as delivering a new product, increasing market share, or driving new revenue streams.
Critically, the roadmap can also help pinpoint the capabilities and limitations of your marketing resource and the additional input that’s needed to deliver initiatives, ensuring you can plan ahead and implement contingencies as required.
Robust yet flexible marketing planning
A robust roadmap, then, ensures your marketing operations team has a clear view of direction, works in alignment with other stakeholders, and can work to contingency plans when needed.
But robust shouldn’t mean rigid. To cater for changing market demands, new technologies, evolving customer needs and competitor challenges, your marketing operations approaches must be agile. Your roadmap must keep a focus on the bigger picture – your ‘end goal’ – but you must be open to adjusting your tactics to tackle change head on.
By ensuring your approach to planning is flexible and adaptable, you also make a clear statement to the marketing operations team that they are empowered to experiment and adapt their approaches to suit changing demands. In turn, this can instil an open mindset that encourages creativity and problem-solving.
A proactive approach to marketing strategy
A truly agile, strategic marketing operations roadmap is one that combines long-term thinking with near-term adaptability. It allows organisations to focus on their core goals, while still being able to respond quickly to change.
Of course, finding this sweet spot is no easy feat. But by embracing the principles of agility, you can take the first steps towards a new kind of roadmap development. As with marketing initiatives themselves, you’ll need to adapt and tweak as you go – but the result will be your ability to innovate while delivering long-term success.