For the last two decades, if you’ve been around the software development space, you’ve probably heard plenty about agile. And while the original Agile Manifesto and the Scrum framework began by a bunch of techies, the philosophy and framework isn’t technical at all!

Companies that have been attempting large agile transformations have suddenly had the light bulb go off, realizing that the whole company needs to be agile to transform!

According to ICAgile, Agile Marketing was their fastest growing certification in 2019.

What is agile marketing and why is it growing so fast?

Agile marketing simply means that corporate marketing departments and agencies have come to realize that they need to be more responsive, quicker to market and more focused on customers.

By turning their decision-making outside in, they’re able to quickly deliver micro-campaigns to learn and test their marketing ideas from actual customers, inspecting and adapting their findings and iterating from there.

Several years ago I tried applying agile into marketing, but the resistance was difficult to overcome. Marketers thought that agile was just for software people and they weren’t quite willing to jump on the bandwagon, until recently.

Now, marketers have seen how efficient and effective agile practices have been for their software teams, and realize they can reap the same benefits.

With social media marketing, public customer reviews and entire brands like Uber and Spotify taking market share from traditional companies, marketers know they need to work differently.

How marketers are benefiting from agile

According to the State of Agile Marketing report in 2019, companies that have started applying agile in their marketing areas reported three top benefits:

Ability to change gears quickly

Higher quality of work

Faster times to getting things released

By ditching the stodgy 5-year marketing plan and working off of a flexible, ordered backlog with the most important work, marketers can quickly change gears as new priorities bubble up to the surface.

While I discourage marketers to get into agile in the first place to be ‘faster’, faster time to market is definitely a great outcome. Without taking on more work, agile teams are able to get the right people on the team to get the work done from start-to-finish, eliminating costly hand-offs and delays.

By ditching the stodgy 5-year marketing plan and working off of a flexible, ordered backlog with the most important work, marketers can quickly change gears as new priorities bubble up to the surface. are marketers applying agile concepts to their world?

Overall, I think there are more similarities in agile marketing compared to agile software than most people realize. However, there are some trends and differences I’ve witnessed such as:

Marketers are more reluctant to adopt a strict framework and tend to apply more of a Scrum-ban (combination of Scrum and Kanban) approach.

The work marketers do isn’t about product development, so terms like product owner, product backlog, etc. tend to be talked about more in terms of campaigns rather than a product life cycle.

Marketers are earlier in their agile journey than software teams, so education around the basics is essential.

Where is agile marketing headed?

Agile marketing is continuing to grow, and it’s becoming more and more mainstream. Fifty percent of traditional marketers plan to adopt agile marketing this year, according to the 2019 State of Agile Marketing report.

It’s an exciting time for companies and for marketers as they learn to iterate, innovate, and work on empowered teams to deliver high-quality micro-campaigns to customers.