Agile Marketing: A New Approach for mHealth Brands

Agile Marketing: A New Approach for mHealth Brands.
Today, marketers are being asked to do more with less. They have tighter budgets and greater ROI expectations. Almost every facet of the marketing function has a sophisticated software component generating more and more data. In this ever-changing environment, how are mHealth company marketing departments going to deal with this?

Think Agile Marketing
Agile marketing is both a set of principles and processes. It takes its inspiration from Agile software development methodology. The goals of Agile Marketing are to increase the speed, predictability, transparency, effectiveness and adaptability to change of the marketing function.

Here’s a little background in case you’ve never heard of it:

In 2001, a group of software developers came together at the Snowbird Ski Resort in Utah to create the Agile Manifesto. Frustrated with the slow time to market and documentation driven heavyweight software development processes, they agreed on four core values:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Marketers working in technology companies using Agile began to see the results of this process in the software products being developed. Taking a page from their developer brethren, a group of marketers recently met at an event called SprintZero to develop the Agile Marketing Manifesto.

I recently spoke with John Cass, a passionate evangelist for Agile Marketing who was one of the organizers of SprintZero. He shared these points about Agile Marketing with me:

Sprints – Do 2-4 week sprints and leave a week in between for review and planning. Otherwise it will fee like you are on a treadmill.
Scrums – – Do scrum meetings daily. Meetings last 10-20 minutes and center on what you are working on, what you’ve accomplished and what barriers exist to accomplish your tasks.
Agile is not about speed, it’s about focus. You do things faster because you are more focused.
Start slowly. Don’t turn every single project into Agile. Confine your efforts to a project and grow from there.
Start small. Do 2-4 week Sprints, think about what you have learned, and then regroup. Build and add elements as needed.
Agile Marketing is a work in progress. Take what you want from the variety of methods and toss the rest. Integrate more as needed.

Agile is a different way of operating and will require a shift in the way you think. The main takeaway here is Agile Marketing can help mHealth companies become more effective by incorporating Agile principles into their marketing DNA. Isn’t that worth contemplating?