I have seen a lot of “new and improved” marketing POVs –guerrilla marketing, disruptive marketing, social media marketing, “Marketing 4.0”, “Growth Hacker Marketing,” content marketing, performance marketing and more. Some are onto something. Social media marketing was a true shift that really started around 2004 with the publishing empowerment of the individual. It gave marketers a way to make sense of changing customer behaviors and the shift in attention that undermined the effectiveness of marketing-as-usual. Some of these new marketing concepts won’t take hold in any big way but may successfully sell a book or two.
Agile marketing will be a significant shift in how marketers run their teams. It is as much about how we develop high-performing marketing as it is a response to changes in customer behavior. Agile marketing offers a way to apply the best of account planning and performance marketing to a discipline that can no longer sustain the stratified, agency teams of the eighties. It is a way to work smarter, cheaper and better. Yes, all three.
Account Planners Gave us Customer Insights
Account planning introduced the notion that deep customer knowledge – from psychology to where and how people spend their time – could add intelligence and effectiveness to the unknowns of marketing. That model saw the rise of the “planners” in marketing agencies, first in London, and soon across the world. These were the guys and gals who ingested customer research and insights to design marketing programs that, hopefully, produced results. Planners came in many shapes and sizes – account planner, communications planner, brand planner, “connections planners.” Born in 1965 in London and Australia, brought to the US by Jay Chiat in 1982, the planners most often were the voice of the customer in marketing. They had ways of mining insights from quantitative and qualitative research which often included anthropological excursions that looked as much like deep undercover assignments as anything. They were thorough.
The future of planners and the bigger agencies they sit within is in question. Not because they aren’t good or relevant. More likely it’s because they have only one piece of the puzzle – moment-in-time customer insight.
Performance Marketing Brings Real-Time Instrumentation
When customers shifted to digital shopping, buying and influence, performance marketing was born. Suddenly we had actual data behind customer behaviors. Direct marketers discovered they could tweak and optimize their marketing to drive up effectiveness and drive down marketing cost (e.g. cost-per-click) based upon what the buyer actually did. This real-time instrumentation was taken to extremes by the ‘bottom-of-funnel” ecommerce marketers who only cared for an efficient cost-per-purchase.
Performance marketing seemed to overcome the age old ‘Wanamaker Problem’ of determining whether marketing was producing a result or not. It favored a ‘last click’ analysis which doesn’t reflect the complexity of the buyer journey – all those soft touches in the weeks of research leading to a purchase. More recent improvements in tracking a buyers experience across devices and even online and offline touchpoints may strengthen the richness of performance marketing. This may give a view of what content and experiences provide an “assist” to a sale. That is if we can weight these touchpoints in a way that reflects how the actual customer weights them.
Performance marketing-thinking drives us to get marketing materials into market faster to see how they will perform. We don’t want to overinvest in those assets as we fully expect to optimize – drop, add, change them – based upon actual behavior.
Software Development Popularized “Agile”
Meanwhile, software development had evolved from the careful, planned approach that mimicked factory work – moving the process along an assembly line – to one that was more nimble, more responsive to feedback and ultimately relied on teams to be more “agile.” The long development process of traditional software tended to veer away from user needs either because the research phase was so removed in time for the release of the software or, more likely, no research in the world did a good enough job of anticipating how customers would actually interact with software applications once relased. Best to get a ‘pretty good’ version of the software done and out quickly by a multidisciplinary team. Agile teams work in sprints with small teams achieving incremental progress towards and on top of a ‘minimum viable product.’ Get that MVP in hands of actual users and see what resonates. (Get more on the history of agile development from Gary Police)
What is Agile Marketing?
Agile Marketing combines lessons from the quick, collaborative approach of agile software development with the reliance on insights from the planners and the use of response data in performance marketing to create a way to plan and execute marketing that is fast, responsive, and measured.
Here’s a definition: Agile marketing assembles small teams that represent makers and planners and equips them with customer insights to work collaboratively in short sprints to develop marketing content, tools, and plans that are tested and optimized for effectiveness and efficiency.
Here are a few more:
“At its core, Agile marketing is a tactical marketing approach in which teams identify and focus their collective efforts on high value projects, complete those projects cooperatively, measure their impact, and then continuously and incrementally improve the results over time” from the Workfront Blog and Andrea Fryrear
“Agile, in the marketing context, means using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly iterating. At scale, a high-functioning agile marketing organization can run hundreds of campaigns simultaneously and multiple new ideas every week.” From McKinsey Insights and David Edelman, Jason Heller, and Steven Spittaels
“A mindset and methodology that transforms culture and operations so you can execute more efficiently, champion the customer, and achieve better performance through a data-driven iterative approach.” From CMG and Russ Lange.
Is Agile a Strategic or Tactical Approach?
These definitions of agile marketing don’t preclude the value of big, pivotal insights about customers that can inform strategy. Still, we cannot build cathedral-like marketing programs that are carefully crafted prior to ever seeing the light of day.
Agile marketing may be a new way of being more customer-centered when behaviors and channels are changing more quickly than the last half of the prior century.
Agile may be a better way to develop marketing strategy and to execute once you have a strategy. The choice to work in a more nimble, responsive way could be its own strategic choice to remain relevant to customers. The concept of agile emerged from an operational mindset – how to make software development better – better result, more efficient. It’s a leap to apply new operating methods for software to contemporary marketing. Still, something has to change. The over-architected marketing strategies of yesterday that required a whole ecosystem of marketing agencies to plan and execute will disappear. Those agencies are fast-evolving as they look to better ways to deliver value to the brands and companies they once worked for.
Internal marketing teams need ways to cut costs of marketing as that marketing is now being evaluated as a revenue-driver and not simply as brand-building. As marketing gets more technical and data driven, we need collaboration methods that bring creative, data-geeks, UX wizards and storytellers together.
Agile marketing methods may just be the way forward.
(image from Twin Cities Obedience training Club)
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