Agile vs. Traditional Marketing

How are agile marketing and traditional marketing different? Let's dive into some key differences using our best source for clearly articulating the differences—The Agile Marketing Manifesto, written by a group of marketers from across the globe who wanted to see better ways of working for the industry. 

By exploring the 5 Values of Agile Marketing from the manifesto, you'll quickly recognize that there are two vastly different approaches to working as a marketing organization.

Value #1: Focusing on customer value and business outcomes over activity and outputs

If you're in marketing, there's always a lot of activity! However, a lot of this activity comes from stakeholders, often in business development or leadership, who are constantly requesting work from the team. There may be a false sense that a lot of activity will drive business. Most marketing teams are so bogged down with activity and reactively servicing stakeholders that they lose sight of the business outcomes they're trying to achieve.

Agile marketing shifts the thinking about how marketers approach work to focus on customer value and business outcomes rather than a lot of activity. It's easy to show how many blogs you wrote, how many emails you sent, or how many trade shows you attended, but volume doesn't equate to results. 

When practicing agile marketing, the company takes on a "less is more mindset" as long as the right outcomes are happening. This also requires marketers to carefully evaluate every tactic and to think about what outcomes are needed.

Value #2: Delivering value early and often over waiting for perfection

As marketers, we value our craft and take a lot of pride in the creation of our work. This is a good practice as an individual, but as a business trying to make money, perfectionism may delay what we're trying to accomplish. 

Fear of making a mistake is even greater if you work for a large company or a regulated industry where extensive approval processes ensure that no mistakes are made.

With agile marketing, it's finding the right balance between quality and delivering value early, with a strong leaning preference towards the latter. This means rethinking company practices for approvals and accepting that some imperfection is less risky than taking too long to deliver work.

Value #3: Learning through experiments and data over opinions and conventions

The third value was created to help marketers get away from mindlessly doing things because someone has an opinion that it's a good idea or because the company has done it this way for years, and no one questions why.

A good example of this is attending a tradeshow. A lot of companies attend the same tradeshows year after year because they believe it's business critical to be there without ever asking questions such as:

• Did we get any qualified leads? 

• Did we generate any new business? 

• Did we have conversations with the right people? 

• Where else could we invest the same amount of money, and would the results be better?

With agile marketing, you look at data to evaluate the investment before making a commitment. Additionally, you experiment with new ideas, building on what works and pivoting away from experiments that don't deliver desired results.

Value #4: Cross-functional collaboration over silos and hierarchies

In traditional marketing organizations, people are siloed by the functional department. A graphic designer works with a team of like-minded individuals; writers work with other writers, and so on. Many marketers find that this organizational structure is really good at perfecting a craft, but it's an incredibly slow way to deliver results.

With silos, it becomes a game of passing the baton from one team to the next, increasing the duration of when the work gets released to a prospective customer.

The agile marketing approach brings everyone needed to deliver work together to collaborate as a team. When the team understands the goals of the work upfront and together, it's delivered in a substantially shorter time period, often with improved quality because everyone's aligned on the project's goals.

Value #5: Responding to change over following a static plan

In traditional marketing, planning is done infrequently and with a lot of detail, and veering from the plan is discouraged. A decade or more ago, when marketing moved a lot slower, this was an effective strategy. However, in today's fast-paced world, a company can rarely plan with any level of detail into the future.

With agile marketing, planning doesn't go away, but it's looked at more frequently, adjustments are expected, and more detailed planning is done later than before to avoid re-work.

Grow your agile marketing skills

If you're experiencing any of the common problems with traditional marketing, such as an over-emphasis on tactics, lengthy approval processes to complete work, working on deliverables that come from random requests, siloed work that takes too long to complete, and not adapting quickly enough to change, you may want to try agile marketing. 

With agile marketing, you work as a team that's empowered to test and learn from experimentation, pivoting quickly as market conditions or company goals change. This new way of organizing a marketing organization is necessary in a world where we must be adaptable and responsive, allowing data and real-time scenarios to drive decision-making.

Learn agile marketing basics and get started with ready-to-use tactics today with the Agile for Marketing microcredential course from Scrum Alliance! You'll earn a lifetime microcredential to showcase your skills.

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