People
When our focus is primarily on the product, we let it drive our decisions and lose sight of what is important – our customers, the people. By putting customers at the center of what we do, we can stay grounded in their changing needs. It also allows us to think about products as frequent releases of value to customers, rather than a single product or service that the customer consumes.
- In practice: In light of the “great resignation” landscape, ICAgile considered how to bring value to professionals by making our certifications easier to share as they seek new opportunities. We added a digital badging integration to help professionals tout their ICAgile certifications and achievements. If we focused strictly on the product of ICAgile certifications, our marketing efforts would have looked very different. Instead, we focused on how to serve the current needs of our customers.
Purpose
When we focus on a purpose, it allows us to stay in a curious stance and helps us understand the “why” behind our marketing. It also helps us shift our focus from generating outputs to delivering outcomes – what outcome are we hoping to help our customers achieve?
- In practice: When ICAgile was planning its launch of Learning Programs, we could have focused on outputs: new graphics, email campaigns, FAQ sheets, etc. Instead, we focused on the purpose behind our marketing, which was to enable our Member Organizations to tell a stronger story about how our learning offerings work together to enable business agility for organizations. We engaged our Member Organizations throughout the planning process, which was how we discovered that their desired outcome was the ability to tell a more cohesive story and as a result, sell more ICAgile-accredited courses.
Pilot
Long gone are the days of designing 12-month marketing plans and approaching marketing as a one-way communication effort where we talk to customers. As marketers, we need to be deliberate about piloting short and frequent experiments that allow us to gather feedback from customers quickly. This opens up a space for discovery and allows us to provide ongoing dialogue.
- In practice: When ICAgile was brainstorming how to bring more visibility to our certifications, we experimented with Google ad words that drove people to our website. Looking at our analytics, we saw that these web visitors were not signing up for a class, even when we directed them to our “Find a Class” page. Instead, they were looking for more information and were not ready to take an ICAgile-accredited course. This led to a hypothesis that people wanted to dig into more content before committing to taking a course.
Pivot
Based on the findings from these short and frequent experiments, we need to learn relentlessly and pivot as necessary.
- In practice: From the aforementioned Google ad experiment, we pivoted as a marketing team. Instead of focusing on driving more ad traffic, we shifted our focus to creating more content in response to our web visitors’ needs. Preliminary data confirmed our hypotheses to be true and our pivot to be the right decision.
By adopting these Four Ps of Agile Marketing, we’ll be able to shift our focus to serving our customers, not just selling to customers. This will result in longer-term loyalty and stronger customer relationships that can weather volatile and uncertain times.
