Is Agile Marketing incompatible with a longer-term, more strategic approach to marketing?
I get asked this question often. Most times, it’s a genuine question. Sometimes, it’s a critique of agile marketing dressed up as a question, the questioner’s tone implying that the short iterations of agile marketing must lead to a tactical, non-strategic approach to marketing.
Last night, at the Seattle Agile Marketing Meetup, Scott Brinker of Chief Marketing Technologist joined us. Scott walked us through his diagram of Agile Marketing (shown at left and described in his blog) – in particular, his explanation of the centrality of creating great customer experiences resonated with me and deepened my understanding of our tasks as Agile Marketers.
As best I can remember, Scott said something like the following:
In Part One of The Buyer’s Journey, I talked about the importance of aligning your content not with the sales cycle, but with your unique buyers and their buyer’s journey. Here, in part two, I’ll cover the later stages of the B2B buyer’s journey, including Trial, Social Vetting, Building Internal Support for your specific solution, Negotiation & Commitment, Onboarding and Implementation, Community and Referral/Upsell.
Agile Marketing takes its inspiration from Agile Development. But why would a set of values, principles and processes developed by software developers for faster, more predictable delivery of computer code help marketers? Aren’t developers and marketers as different as oil and water? Don’t they approach problems with a different mentality, respond to different incentives and perform very different jobs?
I recently appeared on the Pulse Network’s Market Science Video segment talking about Agile Marketing, and Allan Bonde, their CMO and the host of the Inbound Marketing Summit, asked me to articulate the elevator pitch for Agile Marketing. It didn’t quite clock in at 60 seconds, but it’s still a pretty concise explanation of Agile Marketing.
Join the free, global community at the Agile Marketing Alliance.
Membership is free.