The concept of Agile marketing is borrowed from the methodology of the Agile software movement that started about 10 years ago.
Agile Marketing is a philosophy of getting things done that proposes to shorten the length of marketing campaigns, to get actionable information from those campaigns as soon as possible, and to test these ideas to keep the good ones and spend less time on campaigns that don’t produce results. The goal of this process is to make the marketing process more adaptable to changes in your business.
The main goal is to try to get your businesses to focus more on how you can take your business objectives and then build an online community that will help you reach these objectives. Sometimes in order to do this you need to be more flexible, or agile.
Traditional marketing is like baking a cake. You put in all of your ingredients, then bake it. If you forget your sugar the cake is no good, you need to throw it out and start over. With a traditional marketing plan you can do everything that you planned to do, and if you left something out or something needs to be changed because it doesn’t work, you’re done and have to start over.
Agile Marketing is like making a soup. You add your basics then you continue to taste it over time and add more ingredients as they are needed. You can change it and add to it throughout the entire process.
Agile Marketing Is
+Responding to change over following a plan
+Testing and data over opinions and conventions
+Numerous small experiments over a few large bets
+Engagement and transparency over official posturing
+Collaboration over silos and hierarchy
When putting together campaigns you should ask yourself the following:
As a <role>
I want <goal/desire>
so that <benefit>
This gives you the ability to be Real, Relevant & Responsive
Be Real:
When you are REAL, you are opening yourself up to your customers, you are letting them tell you about your product.
You need to ask yourself:
+What problems does your company solve?
+What solutions do they offer to customers problems?
Be Relevant:
Traditional offline market involves interruption, online marketing asks permission. If you want people to share your concept you need to be relevant, you should not interrupt them but engage them.
Be Responsive:
Remember this is not a monolog campaign where you dictate what is being said and perceived. This is growing campaign that can either gain momentum or be shot down. You need to be able to respond in a quick fashion to what is working and what is not.
Another way of looking at it is to BUILD MEASURE & LEARN
BUILD
Build campaigns that answer:
+What problems does your product or company solve?
+What solutions do they offer to customers problems?
MEASURE
Watch social markets and ask:
+Who are we engaging with?
+What do customers respond too?
Use quantcast, alexa, webmaster tools, site stats and set goals with analytics. It is not enough to just count the data, you need analyze the metrics to make decisions. Look at the conversions. Did they fill out a contact form? did they call?
LEARN
+What is a hot topic
+What content designates with people?
+How do they share it?