Why Agile Marketing is the Only Way to Inbound

The more esoteric post, James Cameron is the Godfather of Inbound Marketing, focuses on the need for professional marketers to understand that their art must be the master of, and not a slave to,  the tools they choose to use.  This underscores what seems to be driving the next wave of inbound marketing (Inbound Marketing 2.0 if you will).  This second wave, which has already hit the shore, is focused squarely on storytelling.   A brand personal, integrated, selfless and artistic narrative that is informed and does not pander is what must guide all inbound marketing efforts.  It must be a narrative that engages the intended audience.

There is both good and bad news in this new reality of inbound marketing strategy.  The good; companies, no matter the size, who make a commitment and an investment to own their narrative and nurture it’s evolution and maturity, will undoubtedly have a significant advantage in their market.  The bad; it ain’t easy to do and the effort is ridiculously larger than anyone wants to admit.  So what do we do as professionals in this new realm of storytelling to educate, inform, help and eventually sell to our audience?  We get Agile.

Introduction to Agile as a Framework

Agile is a framework, fluid and malleable, that offers an approach to product development and places the very real, tangible and discernible needs of the targeted user centric (you can learn more about the history of agile and its origin here).  With this focus in place, the effort to deliver product takes on a continuously collaborative and developing effort to better understand user needs and then rapidly respond to these revelations in order to adjust our development efforts and thereby absolutely nail the identified requirements.   Consider the tenants of Agile from the Agile Manifesto for Software Development:

Individuals and Interactions OVER Process and Tools

Working Software OVER Comprehensive Documentation

Customer Collaboration OVER Contract Negotiation

Responding to Change OVER Following a Plan

Applying an Agile framework to marketing, agile marketing,  first allows us to quickly determine what our audience finds interesting and eventually ensures that our audience will find the narrative that we are creating interesting.  Agile marketing helps marketing teams to accelerate the speed with which they are telling their story while at the same time improving content quality.   It also gives us a method to leverage our selected communication platforms (social networks, mobile, etc.) correctly and effectively.  The agile marketing manifesto might have one slight change.  Instead of ‘working software OVER comprehensive documentation’ it would read as follows:

Compelling Narrative OVER Static Communications 

The Agile process varies depending upon the flavor of the framework that is applied but ultimately is broken down into 4 general phases.  (NOTE: The following is a very general overview of the process.  Here are some great resources that help expand some of the concepts Agile Marketing video from MOZ.com, 8 minute video from axosoft on scrum a version of agile, quick read on seven step approach to agile marketing, from Hubspot includes a good presentation with good to know details.)

Story Development:  This is an exercise in gathering the smallest detail about what the audience cares about.  We must identify all aspects of this care and how to communicate it.  We have to understand what the audience believes they know, what they do not know, and even that which the audience literally does not yet know they don’t know.  From an inbound marketing strategy perspective this creates chapters of our narrative and drives our content development.  These chapters create an entire story arc of engagement with our audience, and the story provides value to them for no other reason than that was the intent and purpose of each chapter.

Prioritization:  Once elements of the story are identified the ‘scenes’ in each chapter are then prioritized.  We literally force rank which elements of the story are most important to tell.   The forced rank priority is really one of the few binding contracts in an agile marketing approach. Priority order cannot be violated without a good cause.  Fortunately the process provides a mechanism for identifying and defining such instances (see iteration planning below).

Sprint:  With the story identified and prioritized the work of content development begins.  The execution is usually a short duration (30 days in many cases), and only works on a cumulative set of prioritizes that can be fully delivered within that time period. The end result is a complete bundle of content deliverables that can be placed into the marketplace.

Along the way:  Throughout the process, usually weekly, there is an ongoing planning effort called iteration planning.  The purpose is to continue to define and prioritize story details.  These details will be placed into the next sprint in their priority order.   This planning cycle also allows for the identification of any changes that might need to be made to make sure the story is resonating with the audience.  It is at this point that new elements to the story are added and prioritized in the context of the existing priorities.

The process is incredibly liberating.  It allows a marketing team to focus on mastering the engaging elements of the narrative that matter most to the audience, and then begin to edit their content in that direction.  More importantly the process provides almost immediate feedback without a large investment of time.  If a content bundle ends up not performing as well as anticipated the feedback on why this was the case will far outweigh the reality that the content didn’t live up to its expectation.

Plenty more to come on this topic, in the meantime I’d love to hear any feedback you might have on agile marketing or if you have had any experience with it good or bad.

image credit: VSF Digital Design