Agile Marketing: Moving At The Speed Of The Customer

Much has been said about the consumer’s control—control over what they choose to listen to, where they choose to shop, and how they choose to get information. They tune in only when companies earn their fragmented attention.

Marketing must keep up—to gather data fast, learn fast, and act fast with targeted messages. To deliver, leading marketers are employing agile techniques to get a jump on competition.

This is the first article in a six-part series that examines—via Q&As with a roundtable of agile marketing experts—what it takes to adopt an agile marketing approach, and how to turn the management of marketing data into a strategic advantage.

Kimberly Whitler: In today’s marketing environment, what are the risks of not moving at the speed of the customer? Why are the most sophisticated marketers basing their marketing approach on speed, iteration and insights?

Jim Ewel: Companies that don’t move at the speed of the customer risk losing out to competitive solutions in the short run, and becoming irrelevant over the long term. One of the clear benefits of agile is that it imposes a discipline on teams. The discipline to clearly adopt the point of view of the customer (through user stories) and to reevaluate priorities every two to four weeks. Agile also builds in a feedback loop, so that you know immediately whether your solution is meeting the customer’s needs. The feedback loop also allows you to iterate, so that even if you don’t hit the bull’s-eye on the first try, you can make changes until you succeed.

Whitler: What are some of the real-world challenges marketing teams encounter as they move from an annual-planning, big-campaign approach to a fast-moving, iterative, test-driven approach?

Mark Verone: Annual planning is important for setting budgets and developing strategy. However, marketing needs to be more flexible than they have been in the past. Strategy and tactics need to be able to change and marketers need to be more responsive than before. Part of this is due to a shift in consumer behavior, which no longer fits into a predetermined formula that enables you to plan 12 to 24 months in advance. It is important to have a strategy, but you have to have Plan B or Plan C in the event something changes or opportunity knocks. Consumers are more connected to brands than ever before, and social media can either be a valuable tool to maintaining a relationship or alienate people with one bad tweet. Data is another factor—it’s allowing for better targeting and personalization, but also better insights into consumer behavior.

Scott Brinker: Probably the thorniest real-world issue with adopting agile marketing is that it's easy to underestimate the magnitude of the behavioral and cultural changes required to make that transformation. The spirit of agile, more so than specific practices, takes time to be absorbed into an organization's bloodstream. Management must be committed to the change and be prepared to nurture it for years.

Roland Smart: The biggest challenge that I’ve observed is related to alignment between leadership and agile implementation teams. There are two primary aspects to this:

• Leadership buy-in and understanding. In many cases, there are entrepreneurial marketers in the enterprise (mid-management or lower) who have embraced agile and who have experienced firsthand the value of the approach. Ultimately, though, they must share their results up their management chain to facilitate more general adoption and scale. Unfortunately, doing so requires a significant shift in mindset for executive management and it’s a common failure point. Executive management tends to struggle with the degree of autonomy that agile teams require to thrive. Getting management to commit to a pilot can be a great first step to addressing such concerns; failure to get such commitments leads to stagnation which in turn leads teams to fall back on traditional approaches.

• Strategic alignment. Even with buy-in from executive management—to scale—there is a need for frameworks that align the agile team’s work (or backlog) with strategic inputs coming from the top down. Such frameworks exist outside of agile methods and often require the integration of more traditional practices with agile practices. This is where alignment frameworks like Objectives & Key Results (OKR) (that Google uses) can make a huge impact.

Whitler: What results can marketing experience if they embrace agility and rapid testing, measuring and optimization?

Jennifer Zeszut: Quite simply, the companies that build, internally, a core capability for alignment, autonomy, speed, agility and rapid iteration have a huge competitive advantage. The agile marketing organization is one that tests, learns and optimizes very quickly—which ultimately enables them to drive more business value per marketing dollar than companies that rely on “big bang” marketing, where they plunk down all the dollars and pray that it works.

Very much like the exponential power of compound interest, agility means that every learning and optimization is a payoff that results in growth, and each successive payoff also grows all the ones that came before. Seen in this light, the key to maximizing marketing’s impact lies in increasing the frequency of good decision-making. The best returns come not from a single decision around marketing mix made once per year, or even once per quarter, but from thousands of small optimization decisions made all year long by our extended teams.

Real-world studies bear this out. We commissioned Forrester as a neutral third party to quantify the benefits of using Beckon to be more agile. In every case, marketing teams saw a lift in marketing ROI, ranging from 6% to 20%, with an average of 12.7%.

Join the Discussion: @KimWhitler