Agile Marketing

Agile Marketing is an organizational effectiveness strategy that drives growth through focusing team efforts on those that deliver value to the end-customer. This emerging practice in marketing applies key principles of agile software development to increase speed, quality, flexibility, and effectiveness of a marketing department. Ownership and execution of work is managed by self-organizing, highly iterative, cross-functional, and flexible teams empowered to identify and deliver customer value.

At a high-level, agile marketing may be described as a group of teams organizing around the question “How can we best deliver value to our customer?” Teams collaborate across an organization executing a set of high priority tasks over a recurring short (1-4 week) period - adapting direction, objectives, and processes as needed.

Changes in the Market

Organizations are competing in faster and more connected markets than ever before. Traditional marketing practices are quickly becoming obsolete as quicker and nimbler challengers transform the ways organizations identify, engage, and transact with their customers. Established organizations are exploring ways to “think like startups” and replicate small teams’ seemingly innate capacity for innovation by improving their own flexibility and customer focus. Some are looking to the application of agile software development principles to their marketing department – both the agile tools and the mindset the process stresses.

Drawing value from increasing access to data and technology tools is both an opportunity and pain point for marketers. Embracing technology is not just about adopting new tools and platforms. Agile Marketer's practitioners believe that advantages can be tapped by embracing changes in mindset and methodology.

Distinctions from Product-focused Agile Methods

Agile methods and tools developed for product-focused Agile are relevant to Agile Marketing, but important distinctions exist. Agile Marketing's complexity reflects the complexity of supporting marketing's deliverables, which:

a. typically have an aesthetic/design component

b. reflect/respond to multiple stakeholders in an organization (engineering, legal, strategy, product)

c. need to appeal to consumers at different stages in a buying journey

d. require frequent reference to competitor messages and offers

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