Hacking Marketing

12Iteration = Continuous Testing and Experimentation

The twin engines of agility in sprints are increments and iterations.

Increments let us take a large project and build it out in stages. Each stage, or increment, provides us an opportunity for feedback and course correction. And it gives us the option to release it out into the world at earlier points along the way. In software, developers often refer to the outcome of any given sprint as a potentially shippable increment. As we saw with examples in the last chapter, marketing can apply this approach to many of its initiatives too.

Iterations are similar, in the sense that they usually start small. “What is a concrete marketing deliverable that we can produce and deploy within a single sprint?” But unlike increments, iterations are not necessarily conceived of as parts or stages of a larger production. They're either small, stand-alone deliverables or small changes made to an existing program or asset. They aren't necessarily expected to grow in size. Instead, the motivation for doing multiple iterations is less about increasing the scale of what is produced and more about improving its performance, as shown in Figure 12.1.

Figure 12.1 Iterative Marketing Aims to Achieve Cumulative Growth in Performance

A typical example of iteration in marketing is the life cycle of a landing page. A landing page is a Web page that is dedicated ...