Principles of agile marketing project management, Agile marketing is one of the most popular trends in the industry, but it is misunderstood and often implemented incorrectly. Using agile marketing correctly allows you to quickly react to marketing trends, identify new opportunities and capitalize on them before others take advantage of them.
Unfortunately, the term “agile marketing” itself has become a buzzword in the marketing industry, leading to a lot of misinformation and misconceptions.
In this guide, we’ll explore everything you need to know about agile marketing, including how to decide if it’s right for your business and how you can implement it successfully.
What is agile marketing?
Agile marketing is difficult to define in one sentence, which is partly why there are so many misconceptions about it. Part of this complexity is because agile marketing is not a single principle in itself, but a collection of principles applied to marketing processes.
Agile in the marketing context means using data and analytics to continuously find opportunities or promising solutions to problems in real-time, deploy tests quickly, evaluate results, and iterate quickly. At scale, a high-performing agile marketing organization can run hundreds of campaigns simultaneously and several new ideas every week.
Jim Ewell was one of the earliest and most passionate proponents of agile marketing in the early 2000s. He defined the Agile Marketing Manifesto by adapting the key principles of agile development and previous suggestions from developer and entrepreneur Scott Brinker.
The key principles of Ewell are:
- People and interactions rather than processes and tools
- Responding to change rather than following a plan
- Intimate customer tribes instead of impersonal mass markets
- Testing and data instead of opinions and conventions
- Lots of small tests instead of a few big bets
- Interaction and transparency instead of official status
- Exiting the building instead of formal market research
- Transparency and trust instead of official status
- Continuous improvement and engagement rather than large launch cycles
- Assessment and response instead of opinions and justifications
In general, these are good summaries of the key principles in agile marketing, but there are some specifics that are not as widely accepted; Like agile marketing doesn’t or can’t follow a plan.
Regardless, Jim Ewell’s Manifesto shows that Agile Marketing is a set of principles and also suggests that you need to decide what some of these principles mean for your business.
7 characteristics of agile marketing – Principles of agile marketing project management
The principles defined in Jim Ewell’s Agile Marketing Manifesto describe the key characteristics of agile marketing very well, but they are now a bit outdated and some of them are a bit too rigid to define modern agile.
So let’s take a look at the 7 key characteristics of agile marketing:
1- Adaptability
The most prominent characteristic of agile marketing is adaptability, where teams are able to respond to new opportunities, trends, and disruptions. The goal is to identify opportunities and seize them ahead of your competitors, predict which trends are worth responding to, and plan for disruptions that could harm your business.
At the campaign level,
Adaptability is a continuous process of measuring and testing to find what works, and what doesn’t, and testing new ideas, often with hundreds or thousands of campaigns running at once.
2- Accountability
An agile characteristic that is directly related to adaptability is responsiveness, defined by the speed and success of your responses to new developments.
Responsiveness means maintaining a balance between gathering enough relevant data to inform key decisions and implementing changes quickly.
3- Teamwork
Teamwork is a key feature of agile marketing teams that place a strong emphasis on digital collaboration to maximize efficiency and allow teams to work effectively across multiple locations.
Technology plays a key role in agile teamwork, and a large part of your technology stack includes software tools to help team members work better together.
4- Productivity
The constant goal of agile marketing teams is to maximize productivity, which enables them to react faster, achieve goals sooner, and waste less time on redundant tasks.
This is another case where technology plays a key role, and there are many team productivity tools that will help your team achieve more in less time.
Automation is perhaps the most important technology when it comes to maximizing productivity. However, to increase efficiency or free up more time for creative work that cannot be done by machines, you must adopt the right mindset to identify opportunities where tasks can or should be automated.
5- Testing
Another key principle in agile marketing is continuous experimentation to test new ideas, validate hypotheses, and disprove misconceptions. Conversion optimization and A/B testing are important parts of it, but testing in agile marketing is much bigger than conversion rate optimization.
You’ll also be testing campaign ideas, testing different channels, testing new tools, and optimizing marketing processes to reduce inefficiencies and reach your goals faster.
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