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April 22, 2021 · 2 min read timeWhat does agile marketing bring into your mind? For some, it brings to mind a seller of snake oil, who eagerly promotes his product, but runs off as soon as the customer has made the purchase. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Marketing teams benefit from the implementation of agile team practices, teamwork and transparency to all ongoing work. But agile marketing is more than that: it’s a way of thinking about marketing as a series of experiments to learn how to advertise or sell a product and to find out the best pricing methods.
According to the third annual “State of Agile Marketing 2020” report, agile marketing is 58 percent more productive and 49 percent more innovative than traditional marketing. Productivity growth is the second most important reason to move to agile marketing. The most important driver is the better quality of work and the third most important is the alignment of priorities with the rest of the organisation.
Did you know that there is also an Agile Marketing Manifesto? According to the manifesto, we value the following things in marketing:
Validated learning over opinions and conventions
Customer-focused collaboration over organizational silos and hierarchy
Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns
The process of customer discovery over static prediction
Flexible rather than rigid planning
Responding to change over following a plan
Many small experiments over a few large bets
You can always copy a product or a service — but the customers inevitably return to where they feel they have received good service easily. That is exactly why the major players, aka FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google), collect our preferences.
Agile marketing means that in a larger company, marketing, together with service design and product development, is involved at an early stage in defining how a product or service is tailored for different customers, and in determining the direction in each increment. Instead of marketing taking place only at the end of the project, marketing as a function is involved already at the beginning, in the middle as well as when the product is launched, and while it is on the market.
If you are interested to hear what agile marketing is, you are invited to attend a free webinar provided by Nitor and Scaled Agile Marketing SVP Melissa Reeve on 12 May from 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm. You are warmly welcome to join us!
Feel free to ask us about the agile training of marketing teams as well!
Written by
Maarit Laanti, a SAFe Fellow, is one of the contributors to SAFe methodology and is the first certified SAFe program consultant trainer in Finland. Maarit has done her dissertation on large-scale agile transformation.
