I attended for the past few days the Meetup organized by Interlogica entitled “You, me and #Agile” and I brought my experience regarding the concrete application of Agile Marketing in a company.
Here I try to give 5 interpretations that the Marketing Manager, Digital Strategist and CEO should take into account when approaching Agile Marketing.
The principles and values on which Agile Marketing is based, as described in the Manifesto, indicate people and relationships as essential elements. For this reason, the first step, even before thinking of strategies and tools, is “devote time to people”.
1 – DEDICATE THE RIGHT ATTENTION TO PEOPLE
Allow them to train, guide and support team members within the project to participate actively in value creation. Spend time on open and interactive interpersonal comparisons, reducing the use of traditional channels such as emails and telephone and promote the use of visual tools such as post-it, flip charts, and whiteboards to be hung on the walls.
2 – STAY FOCUSED ON THE VALUE YOU GIVE TO THE MARKET
Choose tasks and priorities in order to tangibly bring value to the market at every release through the reduction of waste, and reasonably apply a kanban board that clearly shows the WIP Limit (Work in Progress Limit). It will help you understand how much you are putting aside (think about the activities that you have on your desk that you have started but not finished… how many are they? Maybe too many) and how much you are actually bringing to the market.
Stop starting, Start Finishing.
3 – INVOLVE YOUR CLIENTS
Customers and marketers must be present during the entirety of the project, starting from the initial phase. It is true that marketing is a hypothesis, but it must never lack the costumer’s vision.
Even in the final stages, during which you verify things together, perhaps with the use in “demo” environment that simulates the marketing campaign.
Lifeʼs Too Short to Build Something Nobody Wants. (Ash Maurya)
4 – MEASURE WHAT YOU DO
McGlaughlin’s formula allows you to value the probability of your client buying from you:
Reasoning on these variables is essential for the whole team, who will find the right key to determine strategy and effective tactics with respect to the product/service (from Lean-Agile Marketing: How to Become Agile and Deliver Marketing Success, Olajiga Femi).
5 – AGILE MARKETING IS NOT GROWTH HACKING AND VICE VERSA
This is a question that at the Meetup shook the hearts and made us think a lot.
Agile Marketing is an approach based on principles and values that allow people to grow and make the most of collective intelligence to achieve the best possible result. Companies that decide to adopt Agile are applying a deep transformation at an organizational level, and often need a coach to help them do it.
Agile is achieved by combining tools and frameworks that allow to:
- work in a Visual way;
- facilitate the Sharing of information with internal and external customers;
- improve the personal growth of team members working on both hard and soft skills;
- apply Learning by doing is very productive and makes teamwork a source of influence.
Growth Hacking is a mindset that bases its principles on data analysis.
The team applying Growth Hacking is asked to constantly experiment, analyze data and find the best (technical) way to grow the business in terms of active users and/or turnover and/or brand visibility… Growth Hacking is a mindset and requires a lot of work.
A Growth Hacking team can work without experiencing Agile Marketing and vice versa.
So, you are probably wondering: why did you put them together in the various consulting experiences in the company?
Because I believe in people’s ability to build value when working together.
Exchanging skills with continuous attention to the market and its evolutions makes organizations more flexible and they react to changes in the market by loosening frictions.
I do not think it’s possible to embrace the fast operation of continuous growth and experimentation (Growth Hacking) without this being supported by people who are able to understand it and transform it into opportunities for themselves and for the business.
In my opinion, the Growth Hacking without Agile risks creating strong splits in the Team used to silos work instead of a horizontal work.
Deborah Ghisolfi is an Agile Marketing Consultant, Growth Hacker and Business Coach. Founder of BeRelevant she coaches the companies in a consulting and training path to create an effective digital strategy, helping to validate the business model with experiments and surveys.
