In a high-tech world where search engine rankings, effective social media campaigns, and once proven marketing techniques can stop working at any time, developing agile strategies and tactics is absolutely crucial to success. The agility of your company, whether you have five or fifty employees, is affected by your ability to collaborate, adapt, and replicate. Here are five strategies that emphasize these qualities:

1. Your Marketing Blueprints Can and Must Change

Let’s say you own a restaurant and just developed a big PPC campaign to let locals know about your new type of pizza. Unfortunately, a few days before launch, your chicken supplier’s factory gets invaded by foxes and you have to change to a sausage pizza. Would you still follow your original marketing plan targeting sausage lovers? As conditions shift, either with your own business or with search engines and social media sites, you’ll need to find out if the work your teams are doing is effective. You don’t want to find out that a year or more of work and lots of money has failed to deliver results.

2. Start Each Project Brick by Brick

Instead of creating one big plan for 6 months or the entire year, start with a few small pieces like you would with a set of building blocks. The value of finding out if a small component of your plan works before its buried with hundreds of other parts can be very rewarding, but more importantly, learning what doesn’t work can save you hundreds of man hours and countless dollars. Working with just a few pieces at a time will help you be more agile as larger plans take shape.

3. Results Matter more than Opinion or Convention

History is filled with political and military strategies that failed because certain opinions were overvalued and convention held too much influence. Success with digital marketing trends can be measured in clear, quantifiable results, so basing your plans on opinions when the facts don’t match is a losing strategy. It’s tempting to blindly trust the highest paid person in the room, but repeated testing will uncover the true value of any tactic and give you the agility you need to find success.

4. Avoid One-Size-Fits All Tactics

Many professionals in digital marketing use the same tactics over and over again hoping for different results. For example, you’ve probably deleted countless generic requests for link backs in your email or through your website but they keep coming anyway. People respond to things that they feel are personalized and have value, and its impossible to create a one-size-fits all strategy that matches that criteria for everyone. Your ability to cater each campaign to your target audience will drastically improve your chances for success.

5. No Marketing Individual or Team Should Be an Island

Lack of communication is endemic to troubled businesses and departments. In order to be agile, each part needs to know what the other is doing. For example, you couldn’t play tennis well if your feet, arms, eyes, and hands weren’t all working together to hit the ball. Whether the goal of your company is to simply grow sales or expand in a new market, the digital marketing people need to communicate openly with other departments so that everyone knows how to shift strategies together.