Agile Marketing

As digital marketing channels have proliferated over the years, marketers have become ever more specialized. We’ve been encouraged to pick our lane and stay there, because no two functions are the same. Email isn’t like social, which isn’t like content or automation. The skills you need to optimize for organic search aren’t the same ones you need to create high performing videos. My digital advertising chops don’t automatically mean I…

While startups may have an easier time adopting Agile principles, large enterprises can’t afford to be discouraged by the difficulty of introducing new processes into their organization. In fact, enterprises have an urgent need to tackle their process problems or risk disruption by emerging startup competitors. The good news is that leaders of marketing teams in established organizations are already paying attention to Agile marketing as a means to streamline…

Few things are more important to an effective Agile marketing team than a functioning marketing backlog, yet this particular practice is hard to get right. Many teams struggle with prioritization, scope, and sizing the work in backlog. These difficulties often lead to frustration and considerable lag time in updating the team’s to-do list. The marketing backlog is the engine of a high-performing Agile marketing team, so it’s crucial to avoid…

In the startup world of “move fast and break things,” deliberately adopting Agile process practices may rank low on leadership’s list of priorities. Even if Agile practices do make it into the organization at an early stage, it’s usually just in the RnD department, where new generation developers are bred Agile from the get-go. “We don’t need process, we need results,” is the cry from startup CEOs trying to fill…

For years our customers have been telling us that using Agile marketing to learn fast, spend wisely, and optimize marketing campaigns has transformed their business. And the benefits don’t just come from our personal experience: a study conducted by MIT suggests that Agile firms grow revenue 37 percent faster and generate 30 percent higher profits than non-Agile organizations. There are three simple metrics you could use today to measure Agile…

A good Agile marketing definition can be hard to come by. The tough part is that it’s a combination of two very easily misunderstood words: “Agile” and “marketing.” For those who haven’t spent a lot of time exploring its nuances, Agile comes to mean merely fast or hyper-productive. Marketers who prowl the internet for a couple of hours and think they’re up to speed on all Agile has to offer…

Over the past twelve months I’ve personally trained around 750 marketers from all kinds of industries and all types of teams, and I can tell you without hesitation that we’re trying to do too much. Here’s how I know: I keep hearing the same things over and over again. “Our team is a good size, but we just can’t seem to keep up with our work.” “I’m in meetings ALL…

Agile marketing certification: a waste of time and money, or a crucial stepping stone on the path to true agility? This question is part of a larger, ongoing debate in the larger Agile community. So this Agile Marketing Minute video attempts to tame the certification circus, at least for marketers. Agile Training Options Some members of the larger Agile community are very anti-certification. They believe that these courses stagnate the…

Getting Agile to scale is tricky in any context, and scaled Agile marketing is no different. Complex models like SAFe feel overwhelming and impossible to marketers who are still struggling to translate the core components of Agile practices to their unique environments. I mean, just look at this diagram: Recently, however, one of the co-creators of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland, has released a new meta-framework called [email protected] For my money, this…

There are pretty much an unlimited number of factors that can impact the success or failure of an Agile marketing rollout. Organizational culture, team structure, strategic priorities, and tool selection are all on the short list of things can totally derail a group’s efforts to go Agile. But if we zoom in a little and talk about the team itself, there’s one role that has an a disproportionate ability to…