Agile marketing is an adaptive marketing strategy that adjusts based on consumer trends and customer needs. The agile methodology prizes team members who question structures instead of adhering to standard ones. Traditional marketing may build off of existing templates and trusted marketing efforts. In contrast, an agile marketing approach has frequent check-ins to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) while making real-time changes to a plan to improve team structure and initiatives.

The agile marketing manifesto has seven core values:

1. Customer-focused collaboration: The end goal for all agile frameworks is to prioritize the customer journey and customer needs. Marketing teams will place themselves in the customers’ shoes, optimizing ads, content marketing, and more to best suit the customer. Marketers use teamwork in agile marketing—there are no silos or hierarchical systems.
2. Customer discovery: Agile practices also constantly learn more about a target audience or customer demographic. Instead of static prediction, agile principles rely on standup meetings to reanalyze what teams thought they knew about the consumer, employing new findings to refine campaigns.
3. Validated learning: The agile approach is more concerned with data-driven digital marketing than marketing plans built on conventions or assumptions. Agile marketing works best when research informs project management, even if new findings in the data change mid-project.
4. Small experiments: Marketers will deploy multiple small campaigns throughout the process. These small experiments are often less expensive and more effective than pursuing one massive campaign that can sink a team’s time and budget.
5. Iterative campaigns: Marketing departments find agile ways to deploy multiple campaigns, testing out which ones work best instead of executing big-bang campaigns that take ample time and resources.
6. Flexible planning: In agile marketing, marketers avoid rigid planning. Instead, teams encourage new ideas and disruptive patterns for experimentation. Teams will try out new marketing strategies while ensuring workflow stays consistent for the well-being of everyone, from the CMO to a representative.
7. Response to change: Agile marketing favors questioning tactics, exploring new options, and inviting search engine optimization (SEO) or customer data to inform future practices.

There are a few agile marketing frameworks, including the following approaches to project management:

1. Scrum: Scrum originated as a software development tool but marketers also use it for agile marketing campaigns. Scrum is a methodology that promotes adaptability, and the basic system involves selecting a data set or campaign idea to explore from a company’s backlog of content, sprint planning (where sprints are the testing of a strategy based on the content at hand), iterations where the sprint is public as a campaign, daily stand-up meetings to assess the viability of the campaign, and then forward action based on what these retrospectives illuminate.
2. Kanban: There are several moving pieces in agile marketing, so some teams will choose to employ a kanban board. While scrum focuses on adaptability, kanban leads with transparency. Its table shows what actions are at what phase in their lifecycle (whose parts may be labeled as “ideation” or “drafted” or “live”). Kanban offers a clear system and progression of tasks to help teams stay on track and prioritizes a balanced workflow as new marketing plans arise.
3. Scrumban: Scrumban is a portmanteau of scrum and kanban, combining pieces of each framework type. Scrumban uses the consistency of scrum’s sprints output while organizing it in kanban’s tabular system to keep track of individual tasks and processes. Scrumban utilizes daily stand-up meetings, a visualized workflow, and consistent retrospectives.

Stakeholders and product owners will find agile marketing to be a beneficial strategy because the strategy achieves the following:

1. Embraces the new. Agile marketing constantly adapts, meaning it can be the first strategy to try out cutting-edge technologies and practices.
2. Uses more precise data. Agile marketers will hold daily stand-up meetings to look into consumer trends and market research. Marketers use the up-to-date data to adapt the campaign for the brand’s benefit.
3. Builds stronger customer relationships. Customer satisfaction is the end goal of agile marketing, so brands focus on image and customer service to prioritize consumers. This improves brand loyalty and trust.
4. Leads to more sales. Brands that innovate and try new ways to attract customers will find their efforts pay off. Employing diverse channels and systems can reach new buyers.

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Businesses are more than just a clever idea—good business owners spend a lot of time developing every aspect of their business model to ensure they have all the information they need in order to take their idea to the next level. There are four key elements that you’ll need to research in detail to figure out if your small business idea is a good one:

1. Need. Every good start-up business is filling a need; if not, there would be no reason for them to exist. You need to think thoroughly about what needs your business is filling, and if there are enough people who have that need. The value of a business can be directly correlated to demand; many businesses fail in their first year because they don’t verify that their idea has market value.
2. Differentiation. A quick Google search will often reveal that there are other businesses doing what you want to do. There isn’t an unlimited amount of space in a market for businesses doing the exact same thing, so it’s crucial that you think about what makes your business different than the competition. This is called your “unique selling proposition” (or USP), and it’s the pitch that you can give to your potential customers to convince them that your product or service is uniquely suited to meet their needs, as opposed to the other businesses selling similar products or services.
3. Target market. It’s vital that you determine who your ideal customer is: who will be buying your product or service? The more specific you can get, the more likely you will understand how to design the marketing strategy of your company—think about their gender, age, weight, interests, education level, lifestyle, occupation, income, and location. If you’re stuck, focus groups and surveys can help you better understand the pain points of your demographic. Once you’ve narrowed your target customers as much as you can, you’ll want to conduct a market analysis (also called market research) to determine how big (and how saturated) the market is for your product or service.
4. Cost. You’ll need to ask yourself how much your business structure will require to get started, and how much money you’ll need to spend to create each new product or offer each new service. This information is essential to know in order to calculate your overhead and so you know how big your business needs to be in order to create good cash flow. You can also ask other cost-related questions: Would your business be a good candidate for crowdfunding? Would it require a business credit card?