What is agile marketing:
A high-communication, low-documentation, rapid iteration
process designed to provide more frequent, more relevant, and highly
measurable, marketing programs. Ultimately the goals are speed and innovation.
An approach to marketing that takes its inspiration from
Agile Development and that values: 1) Responding to change over following a
plan, 2) testing and data over opinions and conventions, 3) numerous small
experiments over a few large bets, 4) 4ngagement and transparency over official
posturing and 5) collaboration over silos and hierarchy.
Term used for marketers that handle/adjust to the dynamic
(ever-changing) shift or change in attitudes and behavior among various target
markets due to changes in the environment, technology, economy, and
competition.
Example of agile marketing
Facebook acknowledges the value of instant messaging and
videos that can be uploaded within minutes.
Principles of agile marketing:
1. Remarkable Experiences. Agile software development puts
“working software” as its primary objective — everything else about the
principles of agile development is pursued with that purpose in mind.
In marketing, the primary objective is remarkable customer
experiences. Are the expectations of prospects, customers, and partners being
met (or exceeded!) in the interactions we deliver online, in person, on the
phone, over mobile devices, and directly through our products and services?
This applies from early awareness building and demand generation efforts
through to lifecycle customer service. Because in an age where all prospects
and customers are connected through digital networks, everything is marketing.
This focus on customer experience touchpoints is one of the
key reasons that marketing is becoming more strategic. Forrester calls it The
Age of the Customer. Seth Godin calls it The Purple Cow.
The whole raison d’être of agile marketing is to better
enable the delivery remarkable experiences to customers. All of the other
principles below stem from this purpose. How can we change the way we manage
marketing to be better at this?
2. Responding to Change. Agile management overall is based
on the simple fact that projects, marketing, business, life, etc., are dynamic,
not static. You make plans, but things change.
The best teams and organizations are able to respond quickly
to such change and capitalize on it. It might be deftly handling a social media
crisis, leveraging an unexpected opportunity in current events, or simply
learning something about your customers or market that was different than you
expected (or different than how it was yesterday).
You should still be driven by an overarching vision,
mission, and strategy — which provides clarity in how you react to change — but
your tactics are adaptive and responsive. It’s the balanced blend of intended
strategy and emergent strategy.
Agile Marketing Pillars
Four agile marketing principles that change the game of
marketing management.
3. Individuals & Interactions. One of the original values
of agile development is the belief that individuals and interactions are more
important to success than processes and tools. Of course, processes and tools
are valuable — but the contributions and interactions of people are where the
real magic happens. Process and tools should enable and facilitate great
interactions, not hinder them.
In the context of agile marketing, this has three
interpretations:
Internal marketing operations should be managed in a way
that facilitates better interactions between team members, giving them the
ability to act and react with greater speed and creativity.
Collaboration between different marketing and business
groups — e.g., corporate marketing, geo marketing, product managers, agencies,
sales teams, IT, etc. — should be more open and fluid. Organizational structure
can’t be an excuse for failing to deliver remarkable experiences.
Interactions with individual customers matter. A lot. Thanks
to social media, any customer can be a champion or a holy terror. Again,
process and technology should enhance — not detract — from individual
interactions. This is a huge change in the dynamics of business and marketing,
and this new value needs to be deeply absorbed into the DNA of modern
marketing.
Getting the balance right between process/technology and
individuals/interactions is particularly important with the flood of marketing
technologies multiplying in marketing’s ecosystem.
4. Testing & Data. Data is the “star stuff” of modern
marketing. It is the digital body language of our audience. We use it to
analyze performance (analytics), to uncover new opportunities (data mining),
and to dynamically tailor customer experiences (personalization). It’s both the
input and output to marketing processes.
Testing has become the quintessential data-driven marketing
process: running controlled experiments to determine what resonates best with
prospects and customers. A/B testing and multivariate testing are now
frequently applied in advertising, email marketing, landing pages, web applications,
pricing and bundling, etc. Marketing’s new operational mantra is test, test,
test.
Agile marketing uses data for the objective metrics by which
to measure the efficacy of marketing activities. It uses testing to engage in
continuous improvement. What’s important to us and how do we know if we’re
doing better or worse? It makes testing and data an integral part of
marketing’s culture.
IMPORTANT: Marketing as a science does not mean marketing is
suddenly all left-brain. Real science is a creative endeavor! Data exploration
inspires creativity through the discovery of interesting customer patterns.
Testing gives us the confidence to try more bold and creative ideas, quickly
and with low risk.
5. Numerous Small Experiments. In old school marketing, companies
were often forced to make a small number of big bets because the vehicles for
reaching customers were primarily “mass media” in nature and had long lead
times and high costs to produce. The new digital environment is largely free
from those constraints though — it’s feasible to execute very targeted
marketing very quickly.
Leveraging the value of testing and data, agile marketing
therefore seeks to run numerous small experiments — trying many more ideas at a
much higher velocity. As Linus Pauling famously said, “The best way to have a
good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” In 2009, Google ran approximately 12,000
experiments, with only about 10 percent of them leading to business changes.
But 1,200 proven-to-be-good improvements is impressive. By quickly trying lots
of ideas, in a small and controlled fashion, scaling the ones that succeed and
jettisoning the ones that don’t, marketing can greatly increase the number of
brilliant ideas it “discovers” and deploys.
There is still opportunity for big bets — but now they can
be informed by a lot more empirical evidence from pilot experiments that
provide “proof of concept.”
6. Customer Collaboration. In agile software development,
it’s considered far better to collaborate directly with customers in building a
product — iteratively working through designs, prototypes, implementations
together — than to get too hung up on specs and contract negotiation at the
very start of a project.
The agile marketing interpretation of customer collaboration
retains the spirit of working with customers, not merely trying to sell
something to them from an abstract market plan. Agile marketing collaborates
with customer by:
Tuning into the voice of the customer, both implicitly from
data and testing and explicitly by listening to what they say through feedback
channels and social media.
Engaging with, supporting, and amplifying our best customers
who become our champions, advocates, and influencers in the social media
sphere.
Bringing customers into the loop of product/service
development — tapping into user-generated innovation — to shape market
offerings higher upstream in the organization.
Agile Marketing Essentials
Four essential elements that make agile marketing actually
work.
7. Transparency. Agile management methodologies of all
flavors — agile marketing included — emphasize a culture of transparency. The
individual tasks that people are working on are out in the open, as is their
daily progress, and ultimately the metrics by which those investments of time
and energy are measured. This openness helps remove impediments, reduce
bureaucratic drag, and promote direct collaboration across the team. However,
this is probably the single biggest cultural challenge for organizations to
address. But it’s what makes everything else in agile marketing possible.
8. Rapid Iterations. In software development, the agile
mantra is: “ship early, ship often.” The marketing equivalent is similar. To
take advantage of data, testing, and numerous small experiments, it’s important
to produce marketing concepts quickly — and where possible, get them out into
the real world. You can then iteratively improve them based upon feedback. A
popular agile mechanism is the sprint, 1-4 weeks during which the team produces
work and then pauses to evaluate and dynamically re-prioritize the next set of
iterations. Short sprints rev up the cycle speed of marketing.
9. Feedback Loops. Agile marketing isn’t just about
producing a lot of things quickly. It’s about listening to direct and indirect
sources of feedback to learn how tests and initiatives are performing, and then
using rapid iterations to adjust and improve accordingly.
Every project that marketing engages in should have some
sort of feedback metric — quantitative or qualitative — to provide a benchmark
by which the team can evaluate iterative improvements. The tighter these
feedback loops are, the better.
10. Break Out of Silos! Over the years, marketing
organizations have fractured into many different silos to deal with the
explosion of customer touchpoints, audience segments, and new marketing
tactics. In digital marketing alone, there are often separate teams for search
marketing, social media marketing, the web site, email marketing, display
advertising, etc. However, customer experiences naturally span these boundaries
— and to make them remarkable, these previously independent teams need to
coordinate and collaborate at a whole new level. Agile marketing methodologies
encourage cross-silo teams to come together on projects quickly and easily and
to dynamically reconfigure as needed from cycle to cycle.
For many organizations, adopting these principles will mean
adjustments in culture as much as the implementation of specific management
techniques. However, in our rapidly changing marketing environment, it’s not
hard to see that the single most valuable marketing capability today is
agility.
