Agile Marketing-Applying the Practice

Like software development, Marketing efforts must balance a customer-focused approach together with the power to reply quickly, continuously improve, provide shorter delivery timeframes, capture feedback, “fail fast” and learn from mistakes early. In a trial to deal with this need, many marketers began experimenting with Lean and Agile practices. Through the success of those endeavors, a gaggle of marketers compiled what's now the Agile Marketing Manifesto. The Agile Marketing Manifesto consists of seven core values, which are elaborated by ten principles, and encourages marketers to specialize in creating value for customers while discovering new approaches to marketing operations. The Agile Marketing Manifesto values include: 

• Validated learning over opinions and conventions 

• Customer-focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy 

• Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns 

• The process of customer discovery over static prediction 

• Flexible versus rigid planning 

• Responding to alter over following a concept 

• Many small experiments over some large bets 

As the Agile Marketer explains, there are many traditional approaches employed in marketing campaigns and efforts that ought to be modified to avoid potential delays and/or adverse impacts. As marketers examine current practices, taking a more Agile approach can help them overcome such challenges. 

1. Agile marketing

Agile marketing is a term coined by James O’Connor in his book “Agile Marketing”. He defines agile marketing as “the art and science of developing and executing marketing programs based on customer feedback.” In essence, agile marketing is about being responsive to customers and adapting to their changing needs.

2. Customer-centricity

Customer-centricity means understanding what customers want and need and then delivering products and services that meet those needs. To do this effectively, marketers must understand the customer journey and how they interact with brands across different touchpoints.

3. Customer experience

The customer experience (CX) refers to the total experience customers have with a brand and its products and services. CX includes the product features and design, service experiences, communication channels, content and advertising, and interactions with employees.

4. Customer insight

Insight is defined as the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data to create meaningful insights. Marketers use various tools to collect data, including surveys, focus groups, interviews, analytics, and sentiment analysis.

5. Data-driven marketing

Data-driven marketing is a type of marketing where decisions are based on facts rather than assumptions. Marketers use data to make informed decisions about market segments, target audiences, and product/service offerings.

6. Digital marketing

Digital marketing is now considered a subset of marketing communications (or simply marketing). Digital marketing encompasses activities using digital technologies to promote goods and services. These activities may involve online search engine optimization, email marketing, social media marketing, mobile advertising and apps.

7. Integrated marketing communications

Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is a concept that combines traditional marketing methods with newer digital ones. IMCs allow companies to reach consumers at specific moments in time and in ways that were not possible before