The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing

Chapter 16From Campaigns to Continuous Improvement

There is always room for improvement in our game.

—Virgil van Dijk, Dutch professional footballer

Most marketers think in terms of campaigns. The language is embedded in many of the tools used most commonly by marketers. Facebook Ad Manager and AdWords are organized around campaigns. And this works, if some of the campaigns are seen as experiments, some are continually tuned and improved, and others grow out of this experimentation and tuning. Too often, though, campaigns are run as “advertising” and declared as successful based on vanity metrics.

Marketers are like anyone else; we hate to report failure. And, typically, we are trained to weave stories. So rather than report that a campaign failed to achieve the desired business outcomes, we tell a story using vanity metrics to demonstrate that the campaign was successful. Which of us has ever run a multimillion-dollar campaign and reported that it didn't deliver great results?

That is why, in Agile marketing, we recommend continuous improvement over big-bang campaigns. Before spending lots of money, Agile marketers test: They create and record a hypothesis about what might work, and then seek to prove or disprove that hypothesis. If the hypothesis is true, and the promotion or interaction delivers desirable business outcomes, the Agile marketer then tunes the promotion or interaction to produce the best business outcomes. Only when we have evidence of the efficacy of an ...