No-code Brings Agility to Marketing

Do you also feel like the pace of life is picking up? Like you are having more and more trouble keeping up? Like the tricks that had served you so well at work or in your daily life for years no longer seem to work, forcing you to change? That’s because the pace of life is really picking up. The sheer amount of information we have to process and the number of decisions we have to make have increased by orders of magnitude compared to a few decades ago. The speed of communication has multiplied the amount of information we have at our fingertips at any given moment. This meant that we would either change the way we work or risk falling behind.

Marketing, too, had to adapt. The old ways of long-drawn-out marketing campaigns, linear funnels and one-way message delivery no longer work because the customer today is more connected and better informed than ever. He is no longer the passive object getting bombarded by messages; he interacts with the marketer, takes short cuts in the funnel and poses more of a challenge for anybody willing to impress him.

The social media revolution completely changed the marketing landscape: It put the marketer in direct contact with the customer and rendered the impact of a marketing campaign much more visible and measurable. Having become the contact patch between the marketer and customer, social media has produced an incredible amount of data that could inform future decisions, only if you could gather and correctly interpret it. The new situation in a way forced marketing to get inspiration from the “agile” philosophy. Instead of sticking to a plan until everything falls apart, the new game plan requires marketing people to make constant adjustments in light of the data collected.

The agile mindset is best summarized by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. In the book, Ries introduces the “Build-Measure-Learn” feedback loop idea, which truly embodies the agile mindset (Ries, 2011). According to this model, once ideas are turned into products and offered to customers, customer reactions have to be quantified and necessary lessons need to be taken to either stay the course or pivot. The Learn part here actually stands for validated learning, an empirical technique used to find out what the customer truly wants (Ries, 2011). It replaces the guesswork or gut feeling with hard data drawn from a series of experiments. In order to make validated learning the basis of progress at your firm, you need to formulate your ideas as hypotheses and run a series of small experiments to test them. As Scott Brinker, the marketing guru from HubSpot, succinctly puts, there should be many small experiments instead of rolling the dice on a few large bets.

The need for validated learning is what makes the no-code technology the premium tool in a marketer’s toolbox. No-code platforms reduce the time needed to develop software and shorten the iteration cycles, making it possible for people to tend to underserved tasks that were previously neglected— because they did not justify the time developers would spend on them or the investment management would have to make. Do you want to test two different color schemes for your landing page? Do you need to run an A/B test to learn which one of the two features you are planning to ship will be received better by your customers? Are you in need of a CRM tool but working under a management unwilling to commit significant resources before making sure that it will work? A marketer with a no-code tool will be empowered to take care of such tasks instead of waiting for assistance from the IT or allocation of resources by the top management. Giving employees autonomy, achieving a flatter organizational structure and a faster response time have become the holy grail today, but these do not happen on their own: No-code technology makes it possible for the employees to form hypotheses, validate them and make informed decisions based on these experiments, in the meanwhile bringing about significant gains in time-to-value and time-to-market.

If you are a marketing professional, you are probably witnessing the pace of change in your industry more closely than anybody in your organization does. It takes a different kind of organization to succeed in the age we live in: Vigilant, nimble, conscious of the change it needs to master. Does yours have what it takes? If you are not sure, do not fret—there is no-code for you.