“Fail fast. Fail often…The most talented people in the world have bad ideas. That’s a good thing to learn.”
– Rashida Jones
What are the Core Values you chose to define your business?
Some of the most common ones include Excellence, Innovation, Trust, Integrity, and Leadership.
Now, consider your Marketing plan and think about your current efforts to support your business.
Speed and Flexibility probably aren’t core values for your business, but they can serve as big benefits for your Marketing.
What is Agile Marketing?
Agile Marketing is a method of Marketing that draws inspiration from Agile Development methods popularized in the 90s to write software.
From the Agile Marketing Manifesto, here are 5 core values behind the philosophy:
- Customer Value and Business Outcomes > Activity, Outputs
- Deliver Value Early and Often > Waiting for Perfection
- Learning from Experiments and Data > Opinions
- Collaboration > Silos, Hierarchy
- Responding to Change > Following a Static Plan
All of these are important — for one-person businesses, I believe the first and last points are particularly critical.
- Outcomes beat Outputs every time. A common marketing trap for business owners is forgetting at times that marketing is an investment and not an expense. Devoting time to publish materials and assets to promote your business requires a payback.
- Responding to Change vs. following a plan. Agile Marketing incorporates unpredictable results such as failed executions, changes in market demand, and new economic developments. Committing capital and time to marketing programs that are too far into the future can potentially hurt your business.
2 Takeaways:
- “Focus on Experience and Feedback vs. Failure.” Think of it as the bright side of starting something that eventually went belly up. With all of the many Marketing tactics out there today, I’d bet you’d experience more failures than successes as a business owner. Experience and feedback are a gift. Remember the third point from the Manifesto above (experience, data > opinions). A failed Marketing program that you tried becomes a fact, (not an opinion), and it comes with learnings.
- “Install a “Retrospectives Cycle” for Your Marketing Efforts.” Speed and flexibility are born from hard decisions that force business owners to adjust and experiment. Without a forcing function (you), your programs can limp along, auto-renew, and run again and again while producing less-than-favorable results. Frequent performance reviews and decisions are the catalysts for speed and flexibility.
1 Action:
Next week, start adding a Retrospective phase for your current Marketing programs to make “go or no go” decisions. Agile methods typically follow 2-week sprints that end with a Retrospective. Choose a proper time frame that works for you and ask yourself these questions:
- What Marketing tactics worked well for you (defined by specific metrics)?
- What Marketing tactics did NOT perform well for you (defined by specific metrics)?
- What actions will you take to double down on performers and reduce non-performers for the next sprint?
Agile Marketing doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does require accountability.
Hubert