What is agile marketing

One of the authors has since refined this to set out six values and four benefits for adopting agile principles within marketing teams below. As interest in agile marketing has grown, consultancies have tried to apply these values to the work they do with clients, and even their internal marketing teams. McKinsey have set out an agile marketing approach that focused on cross-functional collaboration and iterative experimentation. And Deloitte has transformed its internal marketing team to work in a more agile way.

With many alternative definitions, and conflicting perspectives, it feels like the exact definition of agile marketing is still very difficult to pin down, so here is my take on the five pillars that are that are key to actually doing agile marketing. Agile marketers put the customer front and centre of everything they do. This may sound obvious - after all, what kind of marketing ignores customers? The question agile marketers should aspire to answer, is how best to engage customers at every stage of their journey.

Exactly what collaboration looks like will vary depending on the circumstances. For marketing teams attempting to integrate agile into their daily operations, collaboration may be as simple as inviting a non-departmental colleagues to meetings, or re-arranging where teams sit. For a marketing executive attempting to instigate a bigger change, collaboration may mean reaching out to form a trailblazing multidisciplinary project team - with a remit to tackle a tricky problem that would otherwise fall between organisational cracks.

The collaborative nature of agile teams is reinforced by setting objectives and goals at the level of the team rather than the individual. This type of goal-setting is supported by the notion of servant leadership, in which the leader of an agile marketing team won't prescribe what to do, but rather focuses on making sure the direction is clear and removing impediments to progress. This leads to a very flat hierarchy, with little micromanagement and empowered team members who are all working together to achieve the same things.

It is of course an important prerequisite to make sure that goals are actually measurable. This means deciding in advance on the exact metrics that will be used, the benchmarks for success, and technically how data will be captured and managed. Once goals have been set, the overall strategic direction should be clear. Now the tactics used to get there are up to the agile marketing team. Based on the agreed goals, the team is responsible for managing their own priorities and workload.

Instead, it is fluid and is constantly being updated by the team. New items can be added, half-baked ideas can be fleshed out, and things that are no longer relevant can be removed. For some teams this will be a physical space, for example a Kanban board on a wall, but most will maintain a digital version using established agile software like Jira or Trello.

The backlog needs to be prioritised, and this is something the agile marketing team will devote time to regularly. There are no hard and fast rules for how to do this, and teams will adopt their own frameworks for prioritisation. At first, figuring out what to prioritise in the backlog will involve some guesswork. This is because there may be initiatives in there that nobody is sure how to tackle, or experiments with totally unpredictable results.

Instead, they will work iteratively. In practice, this means regularly pulling the top priority items from the backlog, working together to plan in detail the specific tasks to be done, estimating how long they will take, and deciding who will do them. This is a team-led process and requires constant communication, which is enabled by regular planning sessions, and daily stand-ups. Probably the most heavily adopted and abused piece of agile lingo, a sprint is just a timebox in which the team agree that an amount of work will be delivered.

At the end of the sprint the team should have something to show for it and be able to demonstrate that progress. There are two big reasons that working in sprints is effective. Setting a clear deadline, as with a two week sprint, focuses minds on the priorities at hand. So long as the team is free to manage its own workload, this can lead to rapid, but consistent progress without the risk of burnout. The second, and probably the most important reason, is that working iteratively leads to a shorter feedback cycle.

Your Agile marketing team needs to utilize reliable communication channels and tools to share information and start discussions quickly.

By staying on the same page, the people on your agile team will become more productive and able to successfully accomplish their common goals and objectives. Scrum or stand-up meetings are important for an agile team and need to be organized on a daily or weekly basis.

These meetings demand the presence of all the members of your agile team. The main agenda of a scrum or stand-up meeting is to discuss the tasks at hand, issues or problems encountered by the team members, and innovative ideas to speed up the project development. These meetings have short durations, typically minutes. Through scrum meetings, your team will be able to stay updated about the project progress and also they get the chance to interact with each other and develop their communication skills.

For the successful implementation and utilization of Agile marketing, you need to understand its basic principles. They will make it easier for you to embrace the agile approach for managing marketing projects.

Agile methodology is about accommodating the changes in the requirements or scope of projects. To become agile, you need to acknowledge the changes and start looking for new opportunities.

Accepting unexpected changes is painful, especially when you have made plans that are rigid and inflexible. To become good at Agile marketing, you and your team should welcome changes instead of resisting them. When it comes to marketing, you need to experiment several times to find what strategy works best for your campaigns. Moreover, the agile methodology also focuses on experimentation during project development to figure out optimal solutions.

And when both these combine to form Agile marketing, the need to conduct experiments become even more frequent. Through these experiments, what you do is test different ideas and strategies to discover the ones that are most effective. The experiments and testing in Agile marketing occur in the form of iterations.

Generally, within an iteration, you need to implement a marketing strategy and see how it performs. On the basis of the response and results that the strategy yields, you have to modify and re-run it until the desired objectives are achieved successfully.

Iterations take place during the sprint phase of agile methodology and have short durations. At the end of an iteration, you need to evaluate it and plan the next iterations accordingly. The interaction between the members of an agile team is important because it promotes a better flow of information and also paves the way for constructive feedback.

Agile marketing becomes effective when you get regular feedback from your teammates as well as customers targeted through a campaign. Feedback makes it easier to know how an Agile marketing strategy is performing. Moreover, the feedback that you receive from your teammates makes it possible to identify the shortcomings of a marketing initiative.

During the feedback, team members can also share their ideas to overcome the challenges. Learning is another essential part of the Agile marketing approach. Moreover, you also need to research and enhance your knowledge to prepare more effective marketing strategies.

In Agile marketing, the most important thing that you need to do is to plan and organize sprints. The success of your team and projects largely depends on how you manage project workflows and monitor work progress. Kanban boards are highly effective for managing marketing projects using the agile methodology. Also, it becomes easier for marketing teams to switch to Agile marketing by leveraging the power of Kanban boards.

ProofHub is an all-in-one project management and team collaboration software ideal for managing marketing projects agile methodology.

It comes integrated with interactive Kanban boards that are suitable for putting rapid iteration into practice. Additionally, its interface is quite simple and easy to understand with little to no learning curve. The biggest advantage of using ProofHub for Agile marketing is that you will be able to manage all your projects, teams, and clients from one single space.

The software combines all the essential tools that you need to ensure the timely delivery of projects. It also offers advanced Gantt charts that provide you a timeline view of your projects and make it easier to execute work according to the defined project schedules. Want to try ProofHub to streamline the Agile marketing process for your team? Sign up for a free trial now!

Brainstorming sessions and discussing ideas is quite common in Agile marketing. Moving quickly, iterating often, and continually looking for ways to improve will help you deliver clear messages that resonate with your audience and drive the growth of the business. Marketing Marketing methods What is agile marketing? What is agile marketing? Where does agile marketing come from?

The Agile Manifesto, published by a group of software developers in , lays out four core values: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan If you are new to agile, you might find it helpful to read our agile development guide to learn more about the history and principles.

The main methodologies that marketing teams use to follow agile values and principles are: Scrum Scrum is the most popular agile methodology for software teams. What are the benefits of agile marketing? Additional benefits to adopting an agile marketing approach include: Integrated programs and campaigns Teammates in digital, content, and product marketing are aligned on the marketing plans and can deliver a consistent and seamless experience to prospects and customers. Agile vs. Here is an overview of the differences between agile and traditional marketing: Agile marketing Traditional marketing Define goals Set customer-centric goals that focus on customer engagement and growth.

Set business-centric goals that focus on KPIs such as scope, schedule, and budget. Set strategic themes Themes guide the activities needed to accomplish the marketing goals and reach the target audience. Instead of thinking in terms of broad themes, tie marketing initiatives to specific projects. Understand customer needs Continually explore to understand which channels and messages resonate with target customers. Capture marketing requirements upfront. Build the marketing roadmap Plan programs, campaigns, and activities in quarterly, monthly, or bi-weekly cycles with the flexibility to adjust the roadmap.

Prioritize work Regularly reprioritize to respond to changing customer and market needs. Decide which projects to prioritize upfront and adhere to a fixed schedule. Measure impact Measure campaign progress as you go and adapt your plans to see if you can improve the results. Marketing overview. Introduction to marketing What is the role of a marketing manager?

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