What is Agile Marketing?

The Rundown

Marketing organizations are finding success with new organizational effectiveness strategies adapted from software development. Both marketers and software developers experience constant change, a situation exacerbated by digital. Traditional management methods increasingly underperform under today’s conditions. Agile teams, using methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban, apply design, communication, project management, and decision techniques that are better suited for turbulent environments. Benefits include increased productivity, the ability to manage shifting priorities, greater innovation, faster delivery, and staff satisfaction.

Why Agile?

Ask a marketing leader if they want more agility. The answer you are likely to get is “duh!” Agile means quick and well-coordinated, according to the dictionary. The opposite? Awkward or sluggish. Who aspires to be a slug? 

Marketing is a complex system with many interacting agents – customers, competitors, influencers, social networks, partners, sales teams, CFO’s – each of whom has their own (often conflicting) agenda. Situations change rapidly. Numerous feedback loops. Many unknowns.  Demands exceed resources. Widely varying and difficult to measure returns on investment. 

The digital transformation accelerated marketing’s complexity. Older management methods including “waterfall” planning and execution, hierarchical organizational structure, silos of experts, and centralized control just don’t work as well as they used to. 

To better respond to today’s challenges, marketing organizations are adopting Agile marketing methodologies. Agile not only accepts change, change is welcomed! These methods, similar to those now commonly used for software development, are modified for marketing. As Scott Brinker says in his must-read book, Hacking Marketing, “The challenges of creating great software and the challenges of creating great marketing share increasing similarities in a digital world. They’re both juggling an explosion of digitally powered interactions in a tornado of constant change and innovation.”

Some people use the term ‘agile’ as a loose synonym for a do-it-yourself attempt to be faster and more responsive. However, unless you are a tiny team with a simple marketing task, this DIY approach will land you substantially short of your potential. After many false starts, you may stumble on practices that leaders in turbulent environments have discovered during the last 20 years. Better to start efforts with the practices known to work.

Because Agile is designed for complex situations, Agile methods resolve conundrums that marketing has struggled with for decades. According to the State of Agile Marketing 2020 survey, conducted by Agile Sherpas and sponsored by Aprimo, benefits include improved productivity, ability to manage changing priorities, increased innovation, accelerated campaign delivery and staff satisfaction. Yet, 71% of survey respondents say they are still at the earliest stages of adoption (18% deploying in pockets and 53% still maturing). It’s reasonable to expect that as these organizations mature in agile capability, even greater benefits will accrue. 

What are the main types of Agile methodologies?

While the various flavors of Agile are different, they incorporate similar practices. Some of the most important practices are iterative work cycles, managing boundaries on work scope and/or work time, customer-centered design, semi-autonomous teams, and deploying lots of collaboration, communication, and transparency.

No single Agile method meets all marketing requirements. Marketing involves many different kinds of programs, ranging from nearly instant social discussions, through continuous “streaming” digital campaigns, to massive, multi-threaded, time-specific events. As organizations get more proficient at Agile, they find that combining practices from various methods often work best.

Here is a quick summary of the most popular Agile methods:

Scrum: The original (late 1990’s) and most commonly known. Scrum practices include sprints, daily stand-ups, reviews, and retrospectives.

Kanban: Newer (~2013) and more freestyle. Kanban’s main innovation is the use of visual signaling for prioritization and other work management practices adapted from Japanese Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing.

Scrumban: The newest technique (~2016) combines the use of Kanban visual systems within some of the Scrum structures. It’s becoming quite popular with marketers as it accommodates a broader range of marketing project types.

Lean: Lean also borrows from Japanese manufacturing and is more of a philosophy than a work management framework like Scrum. There’s much to learn from Lean, but used alone it isn’t enough for agile marketing

Do you need formal training?

Agile is a set of practices. It’s also a mind-set. For the practices, getting help from a coach or sending a team member to a few days of formal training is tremendously valuable, say Agile-experienced marketers. Agile methodologies are a little like recipes. They capture the hard-won experiences of those who came before so you can get their benefits without as much risk. Formal training is a short-cut to gaining competency. 

However, no matter how much training you have, the Agile mind-set has to be experienced. When marketing starts to become more agile, it can be a big shift for the entire company.  Expect the effort to take time, to experience some big a-ha’s, make mistakes, and like any art, to keep climbing the ladder of improvement forever. 

Not all companies are ideal candidates for Agile marketing. Companies with a “measure twice, cut once” mentality or that require very proscribed outcomes may struggle with Agile. Companies that insist on top-down decision-making and want to maintain siloed departments where marketing is considered a low-level function may also be challenged. While agile can sometimes be a lever to change a company’s orientation, potential practitioners just need to be aware of the uphill battle.

All other companies should explore the Agile marketing direction. Agile is a commitment and can’t be treated as a side-job. Doing it half-way is worse than not doing it at all. However, this is where marketing management is going.