Seventy-six percent of marketers think that marketing has changed more in the past two years than in the past 50 years!*

Mobile is a significant contributing factor to this rapid pace of change. For example, between 2011 and 2013, Google’s YouTube share of mobile traffic has increased from 6% to 40%! Facebook’s mobile monthly active users have more than doubled from 432 to 945 million!

My colleague Craig Le Clair recently explained why business agility is a key competitive advantage. I just revisited his framework analysis to explain how marketers must adopt the principles of business agility to survive in the mobile era.

For mobile marketing to succeed, you must deliver your brand as a service, implementing more-personalized and more-contextualized brand experiences on mobile phones — but you can’t do it alone. These differentiated experiences require revamped back-end systems, which requires marketers to take an interest in the software, architecture, and processes handled by business technology (BT) teams. You must work closely with your BT counterparts to innovate new capabilities and deploy them with modern process methodologies and tools. Marketers have a lot to learn from the values underlying the notion of agile IT development.

As mobile matures as a marketing outlet, and as consumers around the world continue to embrace it as their primary Internet touchpoint, mobile’s volatility and velocity of change will instill the need to constantly iterate your entire marketing approach. It will become increasingly imperative for marketing leaders to embrace agile marketing.

Moving forward, agile marketers will:

  • Make data-driven decisions across all channels — not just digital ones.
  • Select post-digital agencies to define new experiences.
  • Be highly involved in orchestrating the business technology agenda.

Clients willing to know more about this can read my new report: “Become Agile To Improve Your Mobile Approach”

*Source: “Digital Distress: What Keeps Marketers Up at Night?” Adobe, 2013