A Complete Guide to Agile Marketing

Organizations need to be flexible, adaptable, and responsive in a world where consumers are bombarded with infinite messages daily and a society that moves faster than the latest TikTok video. Agile marketing practices are no longer a nice-to-have—they are imperative to surviving in today's digital world.

In this Complete Guide to Agile Marketing, we'll give you everything you need to understand the principles and values that guide the practice, common frameworks used, how agile marketing benefits your company, and practical ideas for getting started.

What is agile marketing? 

Agile marketing is a set of principles, values, and practices that allow marketers to keep up with the speed and complexity of their profession today, finding new ways of working that focus on customer value and business outcomes, early delivery, experimentation, team collaboration, and being responsive to change.

Agile marketing breaks down organizational silos that slow down productivity and improves collaboration by working in small, cross-functional teams that can perform everything from strategy to delivery. When working together, marketing campaigns can often shave off weeks or months from strategy to delivery because the team has all the right players.

Organizations that embrace and practice agile marketing are more adaptable, allowing quick pivots when customer preferences change, unpredictable events occur that may impact products and services, or people simply aren't responding to marketing messaging.

Agile marketing improves effectiveness, allowing companies to deliver more work with fewer people involved due to smaller team sizes, improved communication, and the elimination of slow and wasteful business practices.

Agile marketing originates from software's success

While anyone can be "agile" in their marketing—meaning they're flexible and responsive—the official practice of agile marketing goes deeper, and it stems from a set of values and principles that have stood the test of time for more than 20 years in software development.

In 2001, a group of software developers wanted to create more collaborative partnerships between themselves and business stakeholders and remove the obstacles that slowed down product delivery. During a ski trip to Park City, Utah, they informally created the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. It quickly caught on as a movement, revolutionizing the software industry. Today, agile software development is practiced at most companies and is now considered the norm.

In recent years, agility has become a company-wide initiative, and marketing practitioners have been a powerful contributor to its expansion beyond software development. In 2012, the first version of the Agile Marketing Manifesto was created to showcase how marketers can apply similar values and principles. Unlike the static software manifesto, the Agile Marketing Manifesto was revised in 2021.

Today hundreds of companies like General Mills, IBM, Mozilla, ING, Teradata, Thermo Fisher, Spotify, Dell, Microsoft, CarMax, Oracle, REI, MetLife, and more use agile marketing to drive innovative campaigns that move quickly and with agility, allowing them to get in front of the right customers at the right time, and ultimately improving outcomes—not just work outputs.

Why agile marketing matters in today's business landscape

Before the internet and social media, companies had complete control of their marketing as there were few mediums, and messaging was one-directional. A brand could spend months coming up with the perfect marketing campaign, and then launch it on billboards, network TV, and magazine ads. The world moved slowly, there were far fewer options, and consumers' reactions went under the radar. Companies created annual marketing plans that didn't change and took months to deliver results, which was acceptable for the time.

Fast-forward to the 2020s, and we live in a completely different paradigm. A simple X post can ruin a brand in a heartbeat if the company isn't agile enough to respond quickly. Taking too long to deliver a marketing campaign may mean that a startup company working out of their garage can destroy your business.

While the world has completely transformed, many companies are stuck with bureaucratic processes that no longer serve them well, yet no one has bothered to change them in 30 years.

Marketing that evolves beyond traditional approaches is necessary for marketers to work in today's world. This flexible way of working allows companies to make data-driven decisions, quickly pivoting when consumer behaviors shift.

Core agile marketing values and frameworks

The 5 values of agile marketing

Before adopting frameworks or practices, it's important to ground your company's mindset around the 5 values of agile marketing, which are:

1. Focusing on customer value and business outcomes over activity and outputs
2. Delivering value early and often over waiting for perfection
3. Learning through experiments and data over opinions and conventions
4. Cross-functional collaboration over silos and hierarchies
5. Responding to change over following a static plan

Once the organization is familiar with these concepts, applying frameworks and practices puts the concepts into actionable new ways of working.

Common agile frameworks for marketing teams

Oftentimes, marketing organizations don't like to follow the "rules" as closely as software teams, so allowing flexibility in applying the right framework(s) will gain better adoption. Here are some of the industry-leading options:

• Scrum in marketing—Sprints, accountabilities, events.
• Kanban for marketing—Visualizing workflow and limiting work in progress.
• Lean marketing—Reducing waste and improving efficiency.

Benefits of agile marketing for teams and organizations

People want to feel empowered and part of the process. Agile marketing allows individual contributors to play an active role in work every step of the way, rather than just creating "widgets" in a large project. An empowered work culture improves employee happiness and productivity.

The collaborative culture of agile marketing allows employees to expand their skills into new areas, learning and growing from team members. For organizations, when a team works well together, they come up with more creative and innovative ideas.

Agile marketing teams have faster execution if structured properly because they have the right players, eliminating the need to go outside the team to make decisions or get approvals. 

Campaign performance improves with agile marketing because of the team's ability to experiment with everything from messaging, design, and calls to action, pivoting to optimize results.

3 ways to get started

If agile marketing sounds like something your company could benefit from, there's no better time to start than now. It's always a good idea to start by thinking about the agile marketing benefit that might make the biggest impact on your organization.

#1 - Build a cross-functional team

If siloed work is slowing your teams down, start by creating a cross-functional team that you can pilot, tracking delivery times with the new team versus the old silos. The team should have the right players to deliver all aspects of work and should be aligned to a common product or business goal.

#2 - Make work transparent

If too many stakeholder requests overload your marketing team and everything's a priority, a collaborative work board is an easy way to build transparency and make everything the team is asked to do visible. There are many tools to choose from, but a few favorites among marketers are Monday.com, Trello, and Asana.

#3 - Plan work collaboratively

When stakeholders have conflicting priorities, planning collaboratively with them can get everyone on the same page. Discuss business goals from leaders, aligning on which ones are the most important. Ideate together on tactics, ranking them by priority and agreeing on the tactics that are most likely to have the biggest impact.

Overcoming change resistance in agile marketing adoption

Change is hard for a lot of people, and there will always be resisters when you're trying to make changes. Instead of changing everything at once, push your teams past their comfort zone. Look for small changes where you can demonstrate results, such as daily huddles that reduce the need for meetings, or boards that are easy to use and help keep everyone organized.

Getting started with agile marketing: Take the next step

Agile marketing is a mindset built from a set of values, principles, and practices. There are several frameworks marketers can apply, and finding the right one depends on the organization's level of structure needed.

In today's fast-paced digital world, agile marketing is needed for organizations to be flexible and adaptable to changing consumer preferences. 

If you're a marketing professional, learning about agile marketing allows you to bring value to your company, demonstrating that you understand the values and principles that make modern marketing organizations thrive.

Enroll in the Agile for Marketing course to gain hands-on experience and start implementing agile strategies today.