Key Takeaways

• Agile marketing applies Agile principles to marketing, emphasizing frequent releases, experimentation, and customer focus.

• Key characteristics include cross-functional teams, data-driven decisions, iterative planning, and transparency.

• Benefits include increased speed, flexibility, collaboration, and competitiveness.

• Adopt Agile marketing practices to improve campaign effectiveness, adapt to change, and deliver customer value.

Agile methodologies helped to transform the way software is developed. It breaks work into small increments, gathers continuous feedback, and allows flexibility to adapt to changes, so software teams thrive.

But what about non-software teams?

This approach has been so successful that other disciplines have adopted Agile practices, including marketing teams. In fact, the 4th Annual State of Agile Marketing Report by AgileSherpas found 51% of marketers already use Agile ways of working.

Whether you're new to Agile or simply want a better way to implement it across your marketing team, this guide is for you. We'll cover the core principles of the Agile Marketing Manifesto, the benefits of this methodology, and the frameworks you need to get started.

What is Agile marketing?

Agile marketing is an approach to marketing that utilizes the principles and practices of Agile methodologies. This includes having self-organizing, cross-functional teams doing work in frequent iterations with continuous feedback.

It requires a strategic vision, as well as short, medium, and long-term marketing planning. Agile marketing is different than traditional marketing in several ways:

• Focus on frequent releases

• Deliberate experimentation

• Unrelenting commitment to audience satisfaction

Like the original Agile framework that grew out of the Agile Manifesto, Agile marketing has its own Agile Marketing Manifesto that serves as a reference and guide. It was created in 2012 by a group that met to share Agile marketing ideas, successes, failures, and consolidate the ideas of other marketing manifestos.

Since then, the manifesto has helped to guide marketing teams looking to become more Agile. And the Agile marketing values, as outlined by the Agile Marketing Manifesto, include: 

• Focusing on customer value and business outcomes over activity and outputs 

• Delivering value early and often over waiting for perfection 

• Learning through experiments and data over opinions and conventions 

• Cross-functional collaboration over silos and hierarchies 

• Responding to change instead of following a static plan

Every Agile marketing implementation looks a little different depending on the organizational context in which it takes hold, but all versions share several key characteristics.

4 characteristics of Agile marketing

There are four important characteristics of every successful Agile marketing team: Agile-based teamwork, decisions based on data, rapid and iterative releases, and adherence to the Agile Marketing Manifesto.

1. Teamwork and collaboration

The foundation of Agile marketing starts with teams that embrace Agile ways of working. Work silos and hierarchies should be replaced with free, cross-team collaboration.

Every team member could be involved in each project in some way. Team-wide meetings and communication channels can be used to encourage collaboration.

2. Data-driven decision making

Agile marketers take a data-driven approach to marketing campaigns. Even though all modern marketers rely on data to some extent, teams that embrace agility are driven by it.

In fact, Agile marketers constantly run new experiments to boost the team’s performance and rely on data to measure and adjust their efforts.

3. Rapid, iterative releases

Agile marketing teams often use sprints. These are short periods during which a scrum team works to complete a set amount of work.

The sprint cycle allows teams to tackle smaller amounts of work within the sprint timeframe and produce iterative releases of work. Because they’re short, sprints offer the ability to adjust your plan of action every couple of weeks.

4. Adherence to the Agile Marketing Manifesto

Last but not least, Agile marketing teams adhere zealously to the values and principles outlined in the Agile Marketing Manifesto, which features five core values and ten principles crucial to achieving marketing agility.

These values and principles underpin all the practices that a team chooses to employ, such as standups, sprints, and Kanban boards. They are the “why” behind the “what.”

What are the benefits of Agile marketing?

For the most effective implementation of Agile marketing, identify your most pressing challenge or desired benefit, and position Agile as the means to achieving that goal. Agile shouldn’t be done for its own sake, especially in marketing.

It’s best to look at a problem or goal and employ Agile ways of working to achieve success. Some of the core benefits include:

Speed and productivity

The first and most emphasized benefit of Agile marketing is increased speed in delivering value. This is achieved through changes in organizational structure and in how teams plan and execute marketing activities.

Instead of grouping individuals by function (creative, marketing technology, etc.), Agile organizations prefer small, cross-functional teams that can finish projects autonomously with few handoffs between teams. This allows teams to cycle through work items quickly without stalling due to project dependencies. 

Along with increased frequency and the ability to quickly implement customer feedback, an Agile team structure provides a significant productivity boost without adding more resources to the team.

Transparency and collaboration

Another benefit of Agile marketing is that it creates visibility into the team’s processes through workflows and frequent touch points. Instead of keeping everything in an intimidatingly large spreadsheet, visualization enhances collaboration across teams and the entire marketing department.

To help you enjoy full-process transparency, this methodology relies on Agile project management tools and views, such as Kanban boards. This view provides visibility into all work and is ideal for teams that frequently meet in daily standups.

Transparency holds Agile teams accountable and helps them develop a shared understanding of all projects in flight. Transparency in Agile extends to customer relationships as well.

These teams tend to use frequent client feedback to ensure they deliver the right work at the right time.

Flexibility

Flexibility is one of the most cherished benefits of Agile marketing. It manifests most strongly in how Agile marketing teams use iterative planning to deliver viable work rather than blindly following an annual marketing plan. 

Agile marketing team success depends on whether teams can react to changing circumstances. The more traditional ways of preparing annual marketing plans didn't help marketers react to the present changing circumstances.

In fact, it often discouraged marketers from reacting to changing customer expectations or market conditions. In an Agile setting, teams focus on defining the long-term goals they aim to achieve and figure out the details along the way.

This gives them the flexibility to easily change course based on data and customer feedback.

Data-driven success

Agile’s emphasis on experimentation means that marketing teams should align marketing campaigns with data to measure success. Agile marketing teams should collect impact KPIs from low-risk experiments, which influence each final campaign they release.

In addition, they should monitor team efficiency by collecting metrics from their processes. At any one time, Agile marketers might keep tabs on task cycle time, efficiency rate, and process throughput to ensure the team moves at a sustainable pace. 

Agile marketing teams run small tests to test assumptions, measure results, and improve campaigns over time. This helps teams make informed decisions about the types of campaigns they deliver, as well as when, where, and how those campaigns enter the market.

Increased competitiveness

Since Agile promotes greater speed and continuous feedback, it allows teams to adjust and adapt marketing campaigns when desired, rather than committing to a long, inflexible campaign.

This prioritizes consumer needs and allows teams to measure the impact of their efforts before campaigns become outdated. The marketing data collected helps guarantee that the lessons learned are applied to the next project.

To keep campaigns competitive, you have to be ready to continuously improve return on marketing investments.

The 3 most-common Agile marketing frameworks

While the scrum framework is the most popular agile framework for software developers, most Agile marketers don’t stick to a specific framework. Instead, they mix and match practices from Kanban, Scrum, and Lean to find the best solution.

Here are the 3 most popular agile marketing frameworks marketers use:

1. Scrum

Scrum was the original Agile software development methodology. It’s a framework that creates a culture of transparency, inspection, adaptation, and a laser focus on a subset of the team’s high-priority work through time-boxing.

Scrum consists of two main components: ceremonies (events) and roles. There are four Scum ceremonies that aim to create a regular, predictable cadence for different types of communication within the Agile marketing team.

1. Sprint planning

2. Daily scrum (also known as daily standup)

3. Sprint review

4. Sprint retrospective

The scrum master and marketing owner play important roles in any implementation of scrum, managing the process, and backlog, respectively. In scrum marketing teams, the scrum master and marketing owner tend to converge in one person: the team lead.

2. Kanban

Kanban is a lean-Agile framework that was introduced as a method of process management for knowledge work, much later than Scrum. 

Due to its visual nature and drive towards continuous improvement (kaizen), kanban quickly attracted the attention of marketers. Kanban requires marketing teams to visualize all stages of the marketing process and every work item that passes through it.

This helps marketing teams manage their process, limit the number of projects they work on, and improve efficiency. The kanban method has six core practices:

1. Visualize workflows

2. Limit work-in-progress

3. Manage flow

4. Make process policies explicit

5. Establish feedback loops

6. Continuous improvement

At the core of kanban lies a paradox that can be counterintuitive to new Agile teams: by limiting the amount of work performed (at once), the team becomes more productive.

3. Scrumban

Scrumban is by far the most popular hybrid approach to Agile marketing. It represents a flexible combination of practices from both Scrum and Kanban. The method is highly customizable and, depending on your preferences and organizational context, may look more like either of the two pure frameworks.

Scrumban is suitable for teams who already have some experience with Agile. It helps to understand Scrum and Kanban ceremonies, roles, and practices. 

Scrumban combines some of Scrum's structural components with Kanban's pull-based nature. Because it’s a hybrid approach, each team tends to implement Scrumban a little differently.

Adopt your Agile marketing framework with Jira

Agile is quickly becoming the standard for modern marketing teams, empowering marketers to adapt, experiment, and stay laser-focused on customer needs. Agile marketing teams consistently deliver faster campaigns, embrace data-driven experimentation, and enjoy greater transparency and flexibility.

Transitioning to Agile marketing doesn’t happen overnight. Start by fostering an Agile mindset, then gradually introduce Agile practices and iterate as you go—just like an Agile team would.

Make this transformation smoother and more effective by using Jira to manage your marketing projects, timelines, and communication. Unlock the full potential of Agile marketing and power your team’s agility and collaboration.

Jira was built to help you plan, track, and deliver impactful marketing campaigns with confidence.

Get Jira for free.