Agile Marketing

Agile marketing is an organizational effectiveness strategy that uses self-organizing, cross-functional teams doing work in frequent iterations. It aims to drive growth by focusing team efforts on those that deliver value to the end-customer. This emerging practice in marketing applies selected principles of agile software development. Proponents argue this increases speed, quality, flexibility, and effectiveness of a marketing department - allowing them to deliver more responsive, customer-centric business outcomes.

At a high-level, agile marketing may be described as a group of teams organizing around the question “How can we best deliver value to our customer?” Teams collaborate across an organization executing a set of high priority tasks over a recurring short (1-4 week) period - adapting direction, objectives, and processes as needed.

Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service, and involves all the actions a company undertakes to draw in customers and maintain relationships with them. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses. Networking with potential or past clients is part of the work too, and may include writing thank you emails, playing golf with prospective clients, returning calls and emails quickly, and meeting with clients for coffee or a meal.

At its most basic level, marketing seeks to match a company's products and services to customers who want access to those products. Matching products to customers ultimately ensures profitability.

Product, price, place, and promotion are the Four Ps of marketing. The Four Ps collectively make up the essential mix a company needs to market a product or service. Neil Borden popularized the idea of the marketing mix and the concept of the Four Ps in the 1950s.

• Product: Refers to an item or items the business plans to offer to customers. The product should seek to fulfill an absence in the market, or fulfill consumer demand for a greater amount of a product already available. Before they can prepare an appropriate campaign, marketers need to understand what product is being sold, how it stands out from its competitors, whether the product can also be paired with a secondary product or product line, and whether there are substitute products in the market.
• Price: Refers to how much the company will sell the product for. When establishing a price, companies must consider the unit cost price, marketing costs, and distribution expenses. Companies must also consider the price of competing products in the marketplace and whether their proposed price point is sufficient to represent a reasonable alternative for consumers.
• Place: Refers to the distribution of the product. Key considerations include whether the company will sell the product through a physical storefront, online, or through both distribution channels. When it's sold in a storefront, what kind of physical product placement does it get? When it's sold online, what kind of digital product placement does it get?
• Promotion: Refers to the integrated marketing communications campaign. Promotion includes a variety of activities such as advertising, selling, sales promotions, public relations, direct marketing, sponsorship, and guerrilla marketing.