• by Andrew Fegley , Op-Ed Contributor, August 11, 2017

If you’ve worked within the digital landscape for any length of time, you likely know the term “Agile.” In case you aren’t familiar, Agile is a time-boxed, iterative approach to software delivery that builds software incrementally. Beyond just an approach, Agile is a mindset that embraces a “fail fast” methodology, allowing teams to test and experiment quickly and often, learning and getting smarter all the time. 

Sounds like the type of environment that would make sense for marketing, right?

As a marketer, you’re tasked with applying budget across myriad programs, with different goals along the marketing funnel. Some of that budget is locked and loaded based on existing priorities, with spend keeping you in a steady state. But some dollars you have at your disposal can and should be deployed against testing and experimenting — new programs, campaigns, products. 

The retail industry is embracing this mindset. A recent survey of 136 leading retail executives by eTail and Optimizely revealed that 6% of them attribute 20% or more of their commerce growth to experimentation programs. And they’re experimenting along critical phases of the customer journey – 71% of successful tests are being executed between the prospecting, acquisition, and purchase phases of the customer journey, where the top strategic initiative is an increase in customer acquisition. 

Let’s back up and define some of those Agile terms and how they might help you and your organization experience the success that those retailers are seeing. A Kanban system in its simplest terms is a big board on a wall with physical cards, placed in columns, that represent phases in a process. Those phases could be the customer funnel — from awareness to loyalty — and an individual card could be something like “find new customer acquisition sources.”  

Kanban is powerful because it enables you and your team to clearly see all of the different tests and experiments you have running at any given point in time, all broken down into steps. It also provides insight into where the bottlenecks or issues are in that process. A few days of downtime on delivering assets, for example, can make or break revenue goals for a given campaign. The notion of experimenting can become slightly less stressful when you and your team have a constant, constantly updated visual representation of what’s happening, and how it’s working. 

A Scrum Master is the person who facilitates the Agile process — if you’re a CMO or other leader in your marketing organization, that would likely be you. Every day, you would communicate with your core team of experimenters around three key questions: What they did yesterday, what they’re doing today, and what — if anything — is impeding their ability to make progress. As you are beginning to see, Agile is grounded in the notion that transparent communication and a high degree of collaboration lead to success. When launching an experimentation program with your team, this philosophy gives everyone skin in the game, and lets your team know how committed you are to keeping everyone involved, accountable, and aware. 

Last, the Agile Manifesto is 12 guiding principles for teams to follow as part of the process. These principles are organized around a few central ideas: cross-discipline collaboration, revealing results frequently, and learning and quickly pivoting based on those results. While traditional Agile is focused heavily on bringing business and technology teams together, for you, those teams could be marketing and sales, or some other permutation that makes sense in your organization. Imagine your team, plus the key players from your extended team, feeling free to try new things, fail, and succeed — and getting smarter and faster at success with each new experiment, all while continuously delivering results. 

As you plan your spend for 2018, think about allocating budget to an “Agile Marketing Lab” that functions as I’ve described. In fact, eTail’s survey found that despite competition for digital budget, 44% of respondents put 5% of their resources towards testing, and out of that group, 9% allocated more than 20% of their budgets towards it. That’s a huge signal of their confidence in the ability of experimenting to contribute to bottom-line growth. This is a great talking point for you to reference as you announce your budget plans to your boss and team.