Agile marketing is all the rage, and for good reason. The agile marketing manifesto highlights Agile’s focus on doing it now, doing it often, and learning from what you do.
The challenge for the agile marketer who is looking to automate marketing is that there are few tools available for that purpose. The standard approach of centralize, analyze, segment, blast and pray does not work anymore. It is too costly, too lengthy and not flexible enough to react quickly to changing conditions. The agile marketer needs a design and implementation tool that speaks to the Agile Manifesto.
I am one of the lucky ones. I get to work with a Customer State Marketing platform that allows me to design various marketing scenarios and automate them in a matter of minutes. This is possible because the tool makes it easy to define a process, and makes it easy to change the process. It is also easy to connect the scenarios to outside applications (e.g. email, mobile, web, database…) and then put the scenarios into action on the cloud so no special IT infrastructure setup is required. As a result the design and implementation phases are compressed.
Thanks to this Customer State Marketing tool, what used to take weeks now takes only a few days. The agile marketer can now generate multiple iterations of a design and continually enhance it based on the result of the previous iteration. Before this, it was only possible to generate and put one or two versions into production. Now the agile marketer can quickly and easily develop new scenarios in order to continually test, test, test!
A short implementation cycle means lower implementation costs and faster time to market. That translates into having more of the marketing budget available to run more experiments, more time to adjust to last minute wrinkles and competitive tactics, and lower manpower requirements to operate and enhance the marketing automation process. The result is that the agile marketer can now concentrate on designing and implementing strategies and tactics that yield higher ROMIs.
