WOW #022: Agile Marketing Insights for One-Person Businesses

Quote of the Week:
“Fail fast. Fail often...The most talented people in the world have bad ideas. That's a good thing to learn."
- Rashida Jones

What are the Core Values you chose to define your business?

Some of the most common ones include: Excellence, Innovation, Trust, Integrity, and Leadership.

(Now, consider your Marketing Plan and think about your current efforts to support your business).

Speed and Flexibility probably aren't core values for your overall business, but they can serve as big benefits for your Marketing.

What Is Agile Marketing?
Agile Marketing is a method of Marketing that draws inspiration from Agile Development methods popularized in the 90's to write software code.

From the Agile Marketing Manifesto, here are 5 Values behind the philosophy:

1. Business Outcomes > Activity, Outputs
2. Deliver Value Early and Often > Waiting for Perfection
3. Learning from Experiments and Data > Opinions
4. Collaboration > Silos, Hierarchy
5. Responding to Change > Following a Static Plan 

While all of these are important, for One-Person Businesses, I believe the first and last points are particularly critical.

Outcomes beat Outputs every time. A common marketing trap for business owners is forgetting at times that marketing is an investment (not an expense). Devoting time to publish materials and run programs to promote your business requires a payback.

Responding to change vs. sticking with a Marketing Plan written months ago is another pitfall. Agile Marketing acknowledges unpredictable results such as price and cost shifts, changes in market demand, and new economic developments. Committing capital and time to programs that are too far into the future can hurt your business.

2 Takeaways:
1. Focus on Experience and Feedback Instead of Failure. Think of it as the bright side of starting something that eventually went belly up. With all of the many Marketing tactics out there today, I'd bet you experience more failures than successes as a single business owner (especially when starting out). Experience and Feedback is a gift. Remember the third point of the Manifesto above (experience > opinions). A failed Marketing program that you tried becomes a fact, (not an opinion), and it comes with learnings. 

2. Install a "Retrospectives Cycle" for Your Marketing Efforts. Speed and Flexibility are born from hard decisions that force business owners to adjust and experiment. Without a forcing function (you), your programs can limp along, auto-renew, and run again and again while producing less than favorable results. Frequent performance reviews and decisions are the catalysts for speed and flexibility. 

1 Action:
Next week, start adding a Retrospective phase for your current Marketing programs to make "go or no-go" decisions. Agile methods typically follow 2-week sprints that end with a Retrospective. Choose a time frame that works for you and ask yourself these questions in the Retrospective: 

1. What Marketing tactics worked well for you (defined by specific metrics)?

2. What Marketing tactics did NOT perform well for you (defined by specific metrics)?

3. What actions will you take to double-down on performers and eliminate non-performers for the next sprint?

Agile Marketing doesn't have to be complicated, but it does require accountability.

Thanks for reading and see you next week,

Hubert