Agile Marketing.
As an emerging trend, Agile Marketing is getting a lot of airplay but agencies, clients and marketers can struggle with delivery.
The concept of fully-formed, sequential marketing plans is incompatible with “agile marketing” in many areas, hitting real problems around planning and delivery. The concept of Minimum Viable Product is great tool to help.
As agencies and marketers grapple with the concept of agile marketing they run the risk of trying to do “this new thing” using traditional tools and approaches. The great liberator of agile marketing is that it allows agencies to throw away the old planning and delivery book and (largely) make it up as they go along.
If you recap the corners of an agile marketing plan:
- Real results over opinions and convention
- Embrace and encourage change and flexibility
- Work in chunks, called iterations or sprints
- Transparent and continuous engagement between agency, marketer, client and end-user throughout
For marketers and agencies struggling to adapt, a great way to encompass this is to think about minimum viable products.
Minimum Viable Products
If it’s better than what you have now, release it.
The temptation for marketers is to wait until the new product, offering, service, web-site, email etc is perfect before releasing it on the world. Even if you have created this using agile principles with engagement, testing and chunked work – holding it back until it’s perfect is really violating every corner of agile marketing.
- You can’t measure results until you release the product – so get it out there
- There is no way to work out what you need to change until it’s released
- If you’ve finished the iteration then you should deliver it – and that means releasing it
- To be transparent, the client, customer and end-user need to see the product, so get it released
There is an underlying principle of agile marketing that goes something like … “Standing still is going backwards – you must be continuously evolving your offerings if your want to succeed.”
So what are you waiting for?
