Upon validation, the play can be completed and scaled. In case of invalidation, the play can be tweaked/changed in a “Pivot” to continue to look for a winning play.

This is called “Fire bullets (and only) then fire cannonballs” in Jim Collins’s Great By Choice.

When there’s less risk, it still makes sense to deliver incrementally – you want to minimize the cost of delays between the time you decide to execute a marketing play/campaign and the time you’re able to go to the market. If you can deliver some minimal play/campaign that can already start to impact your customer journey/brand, you want to do that.

Agile Marketing Isn’t Easy To Digest.

This seemingly goes against marketing conventions like “nailing the perfect campaign and only then launching it with a big bang” and “protecting our brand by only releasing high-quality marketing content.”

Why seemingly? because, in spirit, the agile marketing approach is actually more aligned with the rationale behind these conventions.
Using adaptive iterative campaigns, leverage small experiments to make sure “we nailed it” and only then “launching with a big bang” still looks like a “big bang” to most of the market.

Also, you get the advantage of having a higher chance of success since it was validated in the real world, thereby protecting the brand by reducing the chance of spectacular failure upon the big bang launch. (e.g., Pepsi’s controversial ad or New Coke – both smartly pulled from the market pretty quickly after considerable sunk costs).

We HAVE to be able to adapt.

It might feel uncomfortable, but we must find a way to do it. The key to doing it well is to slice experiences in a way that you’re still delivering a great experience but only for a small slice of the market or some part of their needs but in a way that is representative of the wider audience/experience so that you can learn and improve your plans/designs based on it. (e.g., just in one city, just for one type of user of your product, just as an experiment in one airport, whatever).

Being able to craft meaningful, high-quality experiences that are still smaller than the “full thing” is one of the agile marketer’s non-trivial yet important skills.

There’s a lot of applicable learning in this domain from what startups and enterprises see trying to adopt “Lean Startup” and “Minimum Viable Product” thinking. Still, it comes down to innovative, creative thinking by marketers to develop the right tactics that can help them test their strategies without risking the brand or diminishing the overall impact of the overall marketing campaign.

Customer Focused Collaboration

Agile Marketing brings together marketers and other players to collaborate on improving customer experiences. If you were ever a sole marketer for a company or part of a small startup/company marketing team, you know what this looks like. You can move much faster when you need to deliver the overall marketing impact on your team (or in your head). Most marketing organizations lose this advantage when they grow beyond the single team and specialize.

Agile Marketing requires Lean/Agile Leadership.

Agile Marketing tries to bring back this effectiveness, speed, fun, and focus of the small startup regardless of your organization’s size. We create autonomous agile marketing teams empowered to make local decisions aligned with achieving their goals while doing what’s right for the overall brand. This only works if we:

• build the right competence by hiring the right people and encouraging them to master their domain, and giving them the space to learn and improve
• create high clarity by sharing the business context, our vision, and constraints.

This autonomy and new structure don’t mean there’s no need for marketing managers/directors, of course. It does mean changes in their focus, e.g., on hiring and nurturing great marketers and providing a clear and meaningful mission/purpose.

Customer-focus teams can take many shapes.

Those customer-focused teams own aspects such as:

• the whole customer journey for a certain brand/product/market (e.g., SMB)
• Content Creation, Publication, Measurement
• A key marketing challenge/opportunity is a stuck Middle of the Funnel (MOFU), ineffective Sales Enablement.
• Account-Based Everything (ABX)
• Planning and delivering the company’s Customer event or presence at a key industry event
• Exploration of a new marketing approach such as “Social Selling,” and “Video.”
• A key marketing KPI that is not performing well or is identified as a key objective for growth.

While we call it Agile Marketing, in many cases, these teams include and involve participants from other adjacent functions such as Inside Sales, Product Management, Customer Success.

From tasks to Customer-focused stories

Once the marketing organization work structure is oriented towards a customer-focus – Agile Marketers start managing their work in a customer-focused way. They use work items that reflect marketing value, such as “User Stories” or “Job Stories” rather than “to-do lists” or “tasks.” Thinking of work in this way and including the goal/impact expected of each work item as part of the “Story” helps marketers maintain a laser-focus on the customer impact they’re aiming for – day in and day out. This also makes it easier to communicate with business stakeholders about what marketing is focusing on and get their early feedback and guidance – which helps avoid the common situation where marketers talk in language that business/sales don’t care about and after delivering something there are still major gaps between what the business/sales expected and the marketing that was delivered.

Agile Marketers also use more disciplined and more customer-focused prioritization mechanisms that take into account considerations such as Cost of Delay, Time Criticality, Opportunities, and Risks addressed to consider what to focus on next and whether to interrupt ongoing work for an emerging opportunity.

Continuous Planning

While some marketers understand agile marketing to mean “no planning,” this is not the intent. The Agile Marketing Manifesto talks about “Responding To Change” over “Following The Plan.” Another way to look at it is “Flexible” or “Continuous” Planning vs. “Rigid Static Planning.”

Agile Marketers plan at multiple levels oriented both around timeboxes (day, week, quarter) or content (campaign, launch, play). Planning might happen on a cadence or just-in-time. But as a general rule, Agile Marketers plan just enough just in time.