By Maria Matarelli   |   Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) – Formula Ink

Real Agile transformation includes more than just your IT department. Yet Agile continues to be strongly associated with software development.

What if your organization not only developed products faster, but reached more customers in less time? Imagine if you could truly connect with your ideal customers and develop a relationship so strong that it brought exponential increase in the number of people buying your product. What if speed to market didn’t just stop at the launch point, but flowed seamlessly throughout your organization through the end sale?

When applying Agile to departments outside of IT, dramatic results have brought new attention to what previously existed as theoretical concepts. But what exactly about this new approach to marketing makes it so Agile? Our approach to Agile Marketing extends beyond the world of theory and into real-time, practical, marketable application.

The Agile Marketing initiative began many years ago, but while we’ve seen IT teams effectively increase their speed to market, other departments have yet to catch up to this level of performance until now.

So what exactly is Agile Marketing?

Agile Marketing is:

• An iterative process for fast results and sustainable growth
• Focusing on customer relationships that carry the most value
• Organizing your marketing into channels
• Creating the systems and messaging to reach your ideal customers

All of these points direct our focus back to the main idea which is that good business is about putting people first. Whether it is the employees, the customers, or any individual involved along the way, the primary focus has to be the person, not the product. And more importantly, the customer needs should be at the forefront.

Agile Marketing provides a very unique outlook on the process of sales and marketing. It’s a fundamental shift in mindset. Instead of focusing on who you can sell to, the focus is shifted to who needs you most while leveraging rapid iterations for maximum output.

As we began applying Agile to marketing with clients, we began to see an incredible increase in revenue. By uncovering the true message to market match combined with short iterative testing cycles, we were able to identify the right customer with the right messaging and discover how the product or service could truly meet their needs, which led to incredible growth.

With clients getting more than 300% increase in revenue in just 6 months and more than 780% increase in revenue in a year, we launched a case study program to solidify the Agile best practices as applied to marketing. While pulling specific techniques from Lean, Kanban, Scrum, and Extreme Programming (XP), the benefits were clear: Agile Marketing gets results.

As many companies reach toward true organizational agility, it is important to look across departments and outside of IT. Leveraging Agile in marketing creates a common language across departments which puts the emphasis on results that are tied to revenue.

More insights await at the virtual Agile and Scrum conference, going live on May 4th. 5 keynotes and 20 sessions to choose from, plus networking and PDUs/SEU^®s.

About the Author

Maria Matarelli is a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) who travels the world on one-way tickets consulting and training companies on reaching true agility. In addition to applications of Agile in IT, Maria and her team have been applying Agile to the Marketing realm with incredible results. To learn more about Agile Marketing, join our community at: http://Community.AgileMarketingAcademy.com