The Agile Marketer: Turning Customer Experience Into Your Competitive Advantage by Roland Smart
Roland Smart serves as the VP of Social and Community Marketing at Oracle, where he oversees a range of programs designed to enrich the communities associated with Oracle’s products and services.
His previous experience includes foundational roles at a number of start-ups.
He speaks at industry events such as the ad:tech, Modern Marketing Experience, The Social Media Optimization Conference, and SXSW. He has also written for such industry publications as Forbes and iMedia.
He is also the co-host of The Marketing Agility Podcast.
And he has undergraduate degrees in art history and design.
The Host’s Perspective:
Recently a lot of really smart people who write marketing books have explained that we are now in an era of marketing where the experience that your prospects and customers have with your brand is the most important aspect of marketing. It’s more important than your product or service by itself – the customer experience has a greater impact than all the other things you must do to market your organization. It brings to mind the Maya Angelou quote “I‘ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
The Agile Marketer is not the very first book to explore how engineering your customer’s experience will give you an enormous competitive advantage. What’s different about this book is that Roland Smart explains how using an agile approach to managing your marketing can dramatically improve your customer’s experience. In a nutshell, the agile approach is a concept from the software world after software could be delivered over the Internet rather than in a box.
Once that means of delivery was possible, software companies could provide the minimum viable product and then constantly iterate and refine and provide continuous updates and improvements. There is growing evidence that modern marketing should be managed using that same agile approach, instead of planning and producing an entire campaign from soup to nuts and then launching it like many companies still do. So in essence, Roland Smart’s book does two big things: it explains why customer experience has become the holy grail of marketing, and how using the agile approach can help organizations on their quest to that end.
Listen to the Interview:
Show Notes:
“The Agile Marketer: Turning Customer Experience Into Your Competitive Advantage” by Roland Smart
Sean Ellis’ Blog (Startup-Marketing.com)
Peter Drucker (DruckerInstiture.com)
“Digital Body Language” by Steven Woods
“Cluetrain Manifesto” by Rick Levine and Christopher Locke
Roland’s Website (RolandSmart.com)
Roland’s Podcast (AgileMarketingBlog.com)
Roland’s most recent Blog Post
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