A new way to navigate agile marketing

There’s no easy, consistent way to implement agile marketing. At least there hasn’t been until now. We tapped several members of the agile marketing community, from marketing VPs to on-the-ground agile coaches, to help us answer the question, “How can we help our community better implement agile marketing?”

As an agile coach and trainer, I want to make going from agile theory to agile in practice easier than it is today. So often, my agile marketing students were always asking me, “Do you have a roadmap or guide for what I do next?” And, of course, I’d answer with, “Agile implementation is unique and different at every company, so experiment and see what works for your organization.” While that’s not an untrue statement, I don’t think it’s the most helpful answer. 

For some companies, bringing in an agile coach for several months is a great way to help get agile marketing off the ground. However, not all companies can afford a coach, but even small companies can benefit from agile marketing.

There are some great agile frameworks today, such as Scrum and Kanban. And they’ve done a fantastic job working as intended with software teams around the world. It’s only because of the consistent, widespread adoption that agile is now the norm in software development.

However, what we’re seeing in marketing is a different story. The frameworks are being modified, cobbled together, or altogether implemented in new and unintended ways, hurting the adoption of agile marketing. 

We knew that marketers deserved a solution suitable for them that appeals to the fast-paced and highly creative work that happens in marketing. Marketers shouldn’t have to learn multiple frameworks and adapt them to their world. 

In September 2021, the agile marketing community held #sprinttwo. They updated the Agile Marketing Manifesto, the guiding set of values and principles that all marketers should align to if they want to be agile.

It was refreshing to see the community coming together to shape agility in marketing. We knew a framework couldn’t just be written in a book or by a single company. The only way to fix this problem was to use agile ways of working to creatively get the answer—by iterating on the problem with a cross-functional team of people who could bring in different perspectives.

So for the past six months, we have collaborated as a community. It took longer than I’d expected, and everyone did have their own viewpoint. We had a lot to talk about. But what we got, in the end, is a comprehensive, flexible framework for agile marketing that’s tried and true. It’s what we know already works because we put in what we already know, so marketers new to agile marketing don’t have to guess.

We made it easy. We made it flexible so that marketers can pick and choose which pieces are relevant to their company. It’s not a framework that says, “You’re doing it wrong.” There’s too much of that already in the industry, and we wanted to keep it positive.

Introducing Agile Marketing Navigator, a flexible framework for navigating agile marketing.

Agile Marketing Navigator has four parts:

1. Collaborative planning workshop
2. Launch cycle
3. Six key practices
4. Six roles

I can’t wait to share more with you about Agile Marketing Navigator. Watch for more articles where we go into depth on the four parts and how you can start using them at your company.

Read next: More on agile marketing from Stacey Ackerman

Many marketers struggle to apply agile marketing in a way that adds value to team members. Learn how to break that pattern in this free e-book, “MarTech’s Guide to agile marketing for teams”.

Click here to download!

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Stacey knows what it’s like to be a marketer, after all, she’s one of the few agile coaches and trainers that got her start there. After graduating from journalism school, she worked as a content writer, strategist, director and adjunct marketing professor. She became passionate about agile as a better way to work in 2012 when she experimented with it for an ad agency client. Since then she has been a scrum master, agile coach and has helped with numerous agile transformations with teams across the globe. Stacey speaks at several agile conferences, has more certs to her name than she can remember and loves to practice agile at home with her family. As a lifelong Minnesotan, she recently relocated to North Carolina where she’s busy learning how to cook grits and say “y’all.”