The following is my most recent blog post for Mudbug Media entitled “What is Agile Marketing and Why is it Important?”.

Agile Marketing…Is it just a buzzword or a new way of marketing that could have a big impact on productivity and creativity?

Agile originally began as an approach to software development, but the ideas and practices have been adopted by those with a variety of skill sets, including design and marketing. By using an Agile approach, marketing becomes about being adaptive and responsive. The following are a few of the key components of the Agile approach to marketing:

• Responding to change
• Adaptive approach to marketing
• Focusing on data and measurable results
• Short term goals
• Engagement and transparency, creating open communication with your customers
• Working with others, in a more cohesive work environment

Where Agile Can Be Beneficial

Agile marketing has come into play more frequently in the marketing world of new media: content strategy, analytics, inbound marketing, and social media. Agile marketing encourages collaboration between teams, which is critical with the rise of integrated marketing strategies. Instead of keeping departments and roles separate, design, SEO, social media, analytics, traditional media, etc., become integrated when using the Agile approach.

The ability to easily respond to change, engage with consumers, and quickly adapt to changes can be very beneficial to SEO, PPC, and social media plans due to their constantly changing nature (i.e. algorithm changes or popularity of a new social media platform). In addition, the focus on short-term goals and adaptability of Agile can be beneficial to marketers working on multiple campaigns and/or media channels.

The Agile Marketing Manifesto

This summer, the Agile Marketing Manifesto was created out of SprintZero, a meet-up of a group of Agile marketing practitioners at Mindjet in San Francisco. The manifesto was formed around the ideas presented in several independent Agile Marketing manifestos published over the past few years. Using those documents as a starting point, the community gathered and voted on what they believed to be the seven core values of Agile Marketing:

1. Validated learning over opinions and conventions
2. Customer focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy
3. Adaptive and iterative campaigns over big-bang campaigns
4. The process of customer discovery over static prediction
5. Flexible vs. Rigid Planning
6. Responding to change over following a plan
7. Many small experiments over a few large bets

Learn more about design trends, application development, and marketing strategy on Mudbug Media’s Blog au Roux.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net
By Brianna Smith