Why Your Agile Marketing Strategy is Doomed to Fail

So What is Agile Marketing?

Agile marketing is all the buzz lately. Marketing teams are scrumming, sprinting, and pivoting with a renewed energy to improve speed, transparency, and adaptability of their strategies. The ability to be responsive, adaptive, and flexible has proven itself in the software industry to be extremely successful in empowering teams to get their ideas out into the market faster. Do you remember Oreo’s fast thinking during the blackout at the Superbowl? It wasn’t in their marketing plan, but they seized the opportunity and profited heavily for it.

Companies around the world are adopting the agile marketing method at a rapid pace and those jumping into the game later than others are actually benefiting quite nicely, picking and choosing from the examples the early adopters have been leaving behind. And while the benefits of agile marketing (higher efficiency, faster response, more creativity) are becoming clearer by the day, there are some hefty dangers.

Why You are Going to Fail at Agile Marketing

Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing puts it best:

We have to be careful that we don’t let all this great activity that we’re getting done because of Agile Marketing lull us into thinking that we’re accomplishing our goals just because we’re moving so much from the Sprint backlog column into the done column.
(source: agilemarketing.net)

The goal of most organizations is growth and as companies grow, agility is not only more important to focus on but simultaneously harder to achieve. And if you are spending all of your agile marketing energy in the wrong sector, you may simply be wasting your time (and money). An essential step in the process of agile marketing is in listening to your customers to learn what problems you can provide a solution to. Should you invest in a new product? A new market? Both?

There is no right answer. It’s not always about which strategy is right for you, it’s about your portfolio across these four different kinds of growth strategies. Use agile marketing to listen to your customers. Solve a problem in the market with the correct growth strategy, even if it means you need to jump into a new market, develop a new product, or stick to your guns and sell your current products to your current market better. Download our free full growth strategy matrix for a deep dive into Ansoff’s Growth Strategy Matrix along with examples of how Apple uses all four strategies for the most agile marketing strategy.

The key to agile marketing is developing the right market growth strategy: providing the solutions your current or potential customers need and communicating them well. Download the free guide for market growth strategy as a resource for your agile marketing strategy.

Content Marketing Specialist at eCornell
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