Agile growth marketing is a marketing approach that takes inspiration from Agile development and focuses mostly on responding fast to the new opportunities, rapid iteration, testing, testing, testing (we call it "experimentation") and analyzing data and, above all, learning. 

In Hypertry we are all agile growth marketing evangelist, so of course, we strongly recommend to implement the methodology in all cases when you think you need transparency in terms of how your overall marketing campaigns, both on and offline, impact your results and what is that your team actually learns from failed experiments. 

If your company needs a rapid response to new developments and product updates, response based on client and potential client feedback, lacks transparency or you feel like many campaigns are not actually bringing solid results and rely solely on vanity metrics, than AGM is a must.

Now, that you know what Agile Growth marketing is let’s learn how to implement it.

First of all, the manager of the team sets the goals that are need to be accomplished in a specific time, and decides on the metrics. Each goal should reflect on the metric directly related to business growth. If you are a freelance designer, your key metrics will be revenue, number of new clients and maybe leads - potential future clients that really look like they could be interested in your services in the future. You goals in this case may be to get 10 new leads a week and 5 new clients a month, or reach a monthly revenue of $8000, for example. 

If you are an e-commerce company, your goals are going to be 100% sales-oriented, so you will be looking at number of purchases per channel, while average order may be your secondary metrics. You may, of course, have dozens of other metrics in this case that you want to work with, like average acquisition cost, average order value, cart abandonment rate, average profit margin, and others.

Once you have the goals and metrics in mind, it's time to add growth drivers. Drivers are the "How" of your business: different ways in which you may want to achieve your growth. You may think: who doesn’t have an account on any social media these days? I will add Social Media as my growth driver. Good! You may want to select specific channels though or even a segment of the value proposition to focus on, like: Facebook Events, Instagram Influencers, Twitter Lists or Linkedin Groups.

3. Set up experiments to validate or reject drivers 

Once you have growth drivers in mind, it is time to set up experiments to validate or reject them. Lets say you are freelance designer looking for new clients and you set up social media growth drivers. You may then set up a couple of specific events via Facebook, contact micro-influencers on Instagram offering revenue share based collaboration, set up different Twitter list to monitor queries that may be related to your business groups or participate in conversations in different Linkedin Groups. The amount of leads, clients and revenue each of these sources is going to bring you during the experiment is going to be the key metrics on whether this driver works. You can then validate or reject it based on that!

Learnings are going to prevent you from making the same, or similar, mistakes in the future, there are, therefore, absolutely essential to track in a consistent way. Every single experiment should teach you something. Are there Linkedin Groups that are pure spam while others have meaningful conversations in which you can participate as expert and improve your personal branding as a freelance designer? Great, you should definitely add these learnings. 

This process is never ending. You set drivers, validate them, scale up processes of drivers that actually worked (therefore, have been validated), reject the drivers that didn't, set up new experiments for new drivers, learn from your mistakes, apply learnings to new experiments, execute, execute and execute. 

You need to remember that 98% of experiments will fail. That's OK. Not all experiments need to be a success, and they will never be. In fact, it's much better to have experiments that don't work, because that means you're trying many different things and learning through the journey. If you only set up experiments that you know will surely work you're playing it safe, but there might be opportunities that you're missing out on. Do not give up, and experiment a lot!