Agile marketing is based on a growth mind-set across the marketing team – one that allows for open communication across the team without fear of making mistakes. For a marketing team to truly become agile and growth-oriented, it needs to adopt the same agile ground rules from IT software development.

1. Having been successful in IT software development over the past
couple of decades, Agile (Scrum) principles are slowly entering the
marketing domain. Because agile marketing is still in its infancy, it is
important to understand the underlying principles that made agile
(scrum) so successful in IT and how marketing teams can adapt some
of these principles for their own purposes, although it is also worth
mentioning that not all agile principles will be applicable to marketing
due the difference in mind-set, goals and team size(s).
Marketing teams have traditionally been structured to mirror the
waterfall project management approach because, for a long time,
marketing represented a one-way communication from brands to
customers. However, the fairly recent explosion of the internet
changed the predictable nature of marketing, as it gave more power to
the consumers to voice their opinions and, thus, influence the
perceptions of the brand by other consumers. The key problem
marketers face today is that customer behavior is anything but
predictable because of the increased number of marketing channels

2. and the influence exerted via social media on how customers make
their buying decisions.
While the traditional process of creating marketing plans at the start
of a fiscal year gives the impression of an orderly, accountable and
measurable approach to strategic marketing, this approach creates a
very rigid mind-set for marketing teams, as it does not allow them the
flexibility to respond to changing and uncertain customer expectations
and their subsequent buying decisions. Adopting agile
marketing based on some of the principles that have been so
successful for software development teams will allow marketing
teams to adapt their marketing tactics to meet these changes in
customer behaviours based on good quality insights from web
analytics, CX and UX data.
For many marketing teams, creating rigid marketing plans makes
sense in terms of allocating budget funds to online and offline
marketing channels and then waiting for the next financial year before
a new plan is created. The non-agile (waterfall) mind-set will believe
that marketing plans must be followed without any change and if the
marketing plan does not work, the assumption is that the marketing
plan did not work as opposed to questioning the execution of a plan
that does not allow for response to change in customer behaviour.
Furthermore, budgets are usually signed off by senior management,
even though the required insights needed to adapt the marketing plan
to the changing market conditions are mostly generated by lower level
marketing and customer-facing employees.
Agile marketing is based on a growth mind-set across the marketing
team – one that allows for open communication across the team

3. without fear of making mistakes. For a marketing team to truly
become agile and growth-oriented, it needs to adopt the same agile
ground rules from IT software development. The proposed agile
marketing principles can be found online on
www.agilemarketingmanifesto.org/principles and they align
completely with the same principles adopted by software
development teams. Although developed a few years ago, the
principles listed in the agile marketing manifesto still remain at
“proposed” stage at the time of this writing. Therefore, in this article
we will discuss agile marketing through the prism of insights offered
by some of the original software development literature: the original
“Agile Manifesto”, “Lean Product Development”, “The Scrum
Guide” and Kanban. Marketers can leverage marketing optimisation
through employing three key principles of transparency, inspection
and adaptation. We discuss each of these in greater detail below.
Transparency (Visibility)

4. Agile marketing encourages transparency of all customer information
that are important towards meeting the overall objectives set out in
the integrated marketing plan. The social media, offline marketing
and web analytics teams must make all information at their disposal
available to all the people involved in marketing, whatever their role.
Agile project management teams use collaboration tools like JIRA as
a central repository for all project information which makes
transparency easier because every member has unrestricted access to
all the information available all of the time. Marketing teams can
adopt the same approach by using tools like JIRA to store both
strategic-level and tactical-level marketing plans.
Openly sharing the integrated marketing plan with all members of the
team is crucial, although, arguably, some organisations do this better
than others. Creating an environment of information transparency will
promote an easy flow of information throughout the marketing team
which will also help create an open and collaborative work culture
among the existing marketing team silos. One could also argue that
making information easily accessible will reduce meaningless
meetings and interruptions between team members and generally
improve team members’ individual productivity and efficiency.
Agile teams within the IT industry also conduct daily meetings called
“stand ups” where teams members share information about what they
were doing the previous day, what they plan to do on the day and
whether there are any issues and problems that are affecting their
work. These meetings allow team members to be aware of what the
rest of the team is doing and to pitch in with suggestions and help
each other troubleshoot any issues. This, again, helps in boosting

5. team morale and individual team members’ positive attitude towards
their work and one another. Having unrestricted access to the team’s
strategic and tactical KPIs, as well as being aware of their team
members’ individual KPIs encourages teams to have a collaborative
mind-set. Marketing teams everywhere could benefit greatly from the
adoption of the agile approach in their day to day activities. It is not
about creating a finger pointing atmosphere, but about understanding
that the team is only as strong as its weakest link: if any one person
on the team fails in completing their tasks the whole team will be
negatively affected. The collaborative and supportive atmosphere
agile helps to promote ultimately supports increased productivity and
effectiveness of each individual team member.
Inspection
Supporting transparency (discussed above), inspection is very much
about the daily meetings and sprint reviews, which are critical
activities that help the team identify hindrances and problems that
could be slowing down the team’s efforts towards completing the
project output.
Agile marketing teams can adopt the same mind-set by scheduling
daily meetings that should not last more than 15 minutes. In these
meetings every member of the team is able to highlight issues they
need help with, while the most senior member of the team or anyone
else can help resolve the issue with their suggestion. For example,
what issues is the SEO team having and how does that impact paid
search advertising? Is there anyone in social media that can help offer

6. a solution? This is the type of scene where a daily meeting and input
from other members of the team can help individuals resolve issues
and prevent minor niggles turning into insurmountable, complex
problems.
Adaptation
Agile project management teams have four events that help these
teams inspect and adapt their activities to ensure that team members
do not deviate from the expected output of the project. These include
events such as daily meetings, sprint planning, sprint reviews and
retrospectives.
Developing a marketing strategy that guarantees customer acquisition,
conversion and retention is very difficult with changing customer
perceptions and the multitude of purchase touchpoints customers have
at their disposal. An important aspect of a successful marketing
strategy is reducing all forms of customer journey drop off points,
however, identifying these becomes increasingly complicated with the
over reliance on quantitative data. This begs the question, then: how
do we as marketers develop a feedback loop which will inform digital
strategy about customer experience and expectations?
Shop Direct UK is a perfect example of how to reduce customer pain-
point uncertainty on the website, mobile apps and other marketing
channels. Shop Direct UK has a department within its head office
called the ‘UX lab’, the main purpose of which is to identify the key
positive and negative aspects of its digital properties and how these
can be exploited or minimized (respectively) in order to make their

7. products more easily accessible. This user-centred design process
enables Shop Direct’s team members to collaborate and innovate in
order to improve their business results through meeting their
customers’ needs in a better way (https://www.shopdirect.com/shop-
direct-accelerates-testing-programme-in-house-ux-lab/). Like Shop
Direct, agile marketing teams in all industries can address multiple
types of customer pain point uncertainty in an iterative and
incremental ‘test and learn’ environment. Ongoing customer
experience research through frontline customer-facing touchpoints
and improvements will also help reduce customer pain-point
uncertainty.
Keep the Integrated Digital Marketing Plans Open
Digital marketing budgets are allocated per marketing channel and
tactics which is further broken down into quarters, lines of business
and regions (in multinational marketing teams). Important decisions
and a review of the marketing channel performance must be made

8. before the transition to the next quarter or financial year, even if
current analytics, UX and CX insights demand an immediate review
of the marketing strategy.
Agile marketing favours an option that keeps the marketing plan open
to changes in response to insights gathered from CX, web analytics
and UX feedback from customer segments on an ongoing basis.
Accept That You Can’t Get It Right Up Front with Regards to
Marketing Plans
It is normal to assume that we can “get it right” up front with initial
digital marketing budget and resource allocation across channels and
tactics. The reality, however, is that we are oftentimes guilty of
creating marketing plans based on assumptions about what our target
customers want and ignoring important qualitative analytics data.
Agile marketing acknowledges that’s we cannot get all the required
customer insights or plan the perfect acquisition, retention and
conversion strategies upfront. With Agile marketing, we create
marketing plans with the assumption that we will update the tactics,
budgets and channels as we learn more about the performance of each
tactic from a revenue driven conversion optimization perspective.I’d
love to hear what you think about this topic
About The Author
Femi Olajiga is an independent consultant: Agile Digital Marketing
Consultant (Web Analytics, Customer Experience and User

9. Experience). You can connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter or visit
my website CXconversion.com
Share and find out more about Agile Marketing in my next post
- Agile Marketing Mindset: Explained

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Reference: Rubin, Kenneth S. (2013) Essential Scrum: A Practical
Guide to The Most Popular Agile Process, Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Addison-Wesley.
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