Agile in Marketing: 5 Principles

From my first interview with ICAgile, I sensed that working on an agile marketing team would be different, and with some time under my belt, I can confirm it’s true.

I received an invitation to interview within a few days of applying, and the entire process took about one week. Three interviews–one of which was with the CEO–provided me with everything I needed to know about the job and organizational culture–and everything they needed to know to hire me.

When my LinkedIn feed was a sea of applicants entangled in several-month interview processes, I wondered how ICAgile made a hiring decision by borrowing only three hours of my time.

The marketing team at ICAgile works a lot like their hiring process. In our collaborative group, we spend less time on ‘red tape’ and more time being adaptable, productive people–and we have plenty of agile marketing examples to share.

So, what is agile marketing, and what is it like to work on an agile marketing team? This article explores some of the principles we leverage to get our work done quickly, efficiently, and with our customers in mind.

Why Is Agile Important in Marketing?

As I continue to learn and implement agile methodologies, I find myself revisiting the idea that today’s marketing landscape requires agile thinking.

Marketing professionals face constant change, from emerging metric-tracking tools and SEO best practices to new customer conversations on social media. It’s challenging to keep up with the evolution, especially for small to mid-size marketing teams that juggle many hats.

Adopting an agile mindset supports marketing teams of every size in working with ongoing change instead of against it. Marketers need to be alert and ready to leverage new data, trends, feedback, or processes to maintain a competitive edge.

In today’s tech-savvy world, an openness to adaptation and continuous learning is critical to improving metrics and value delivery. That’s why agile is an obvious choice for marketing teams that want to stay ahead of the curve.

5 Agile Principles of The ICAgile Marketing Team

You’re probably wondering, “How does agile marketing actually work?” In this section, we share some agile tricks of the trade that help our marketing team pivot without the chaos that often accompanies change in the corporate workplace.

From adopting an agile mindset to data-driven decision-making, these agile marketing best practices provide a peek into the day-to-day of the ICAgile marketing team.

Champion an Agile Mindset

An agile mindset is the foundation of a highly adaptable marketing team, forming a culture that values collaboration, flexibility, responsiveness, and transparency.

A marketing team must be flexible in its strategies to truly be agile, and changes can happen quickly. Decisions and agile marketing processes are rooted in current circumstances, not tradition. Marketing efforts are regularly adjusted based on real-time feedback, market changes, and emerging trends.

The agile mindset concept stems from The Agile Manifesto, written by software engineers to improve the development process. This document recommends ways for all industries to practice agile not only through frameworks and methodologies but also through a set of values:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

On an agile marketing team, you can expect an abundance of change, but the reason why will never be “just because.” Adaptations are made to improve internal or external processes and make work easier. There is room for innovation and experimenting with ideas, but trials are backed with hypotheses and reasoning.

The biggest takeaway from practicing an agile mindset alongside my colleagues is that there is something to learn from every success and failure. Taking ownership of our work and decisions means we’re not always right, but it’s never too late to course-correct.

Establish a Mission of Customer-Centricity

Coincidentally, I realized that customer-centricity remains at the core of both agile and marketing teachings, making the combined knowledge a recipe for success. The obsession with customer needs is commonplace in an agile environment, even more so in an agile marketing team.

At ICAgile, we leverage customer insights to drive strategies and goals. This can involve monitoring online discussions, conducting customer interviews, and analyzing sales data. In doing so, our efforts continuously become more tailored, providing our target audience with the most convenient solutions and communications.

However, the impact of customer-centric marketing stretches beyond positive customer outcomes. Deepening relationships with our customers ushers in significant wins for our organization, including increased engagement, loyalty, and ROI.

Customer-centricity is a shared team mission that drives altruism in an industry that can often get a bad rap.

Leverage Scrum for Marketing

We heavily rely on scrum for marketing practices to ensure optimal project control and enhanced team productivity. Sprint planning, sprint review, and backlog management are vital functions of our scrum marketing system. Some agile marketing teams may include daily standups as part of their scrum process.

Scrum is an agile framework originally developed for product teams. However, it can be adapted to fit the functioning of any business department, including agile marketing teams. Scrum is one of the more popular agile marketing frameworks due to the methodical organization of work and iterative opportunities to make changes, align, and collect feedback.

What is a Sprint?

A sprint is a dedicated length of time for a team to complete its agreed-upon tasks. The duration varies depending on organizational needs and preferences, but the average sprint lasts one to four weeks. At ICAgile, we work in two-week sprints.

In non-agile marketing teams, work is often completed on a rolling basis according to regularly assigned duties. However, working in sprints enables teams to prioritize initiatives together, break them down into manageable tasks, and reconvene at dedicated checkpoints to assess progress and collect feedback.

The sprint process concretely represents the responsibilities of each team member within a given period while providing opportunities to realign along the way.

Sprint Planning

The ICAgile marketing team participates in sprint planning meetings, a dedicated space to strategize the goals of the next sprint and identify a reasonable workload for each team member. We align priorities, allocate tasks, and set realistic timelines for each targeted outcome.

Here are the steps we utilize to estimate our workload for a coming sprint:

Review team backlog
Team leader prioritizes tasks
Collectively estimate effort for each task, in consideration of complexity, bandwidth, and dependencies
The marketing team selects tasks and sets goals for the upcoming sprint
Commit to workload

Backlog Management

Further, scrum teams use project management tools like Jira to maintain a list of pending initiatives, tasks, and deliverables–we refer to this as our ‘backlog.’ Some of these tools include kanban boards that offer the unique advantage of visualizing the work. We continuously reprioritize the backlog based on customer feedback, business objectives, and market changes.

For example, in light of a soon-to-be-released ICAgile course that dives into the fundamentals of AI for agile organizations, we’ve been moving AI-related projects from the backlog into our sprints to align with current priorities.

As mentioned in the steps to estimate workload, the product owner/team leader, or in our case, our senior marketing manager, plays a pivotal role in guiding our task prioritization. She ensures that only the highest-value and urgent initiatives are moving into the upcoming sprint.

Sprint Review

When a sprint has finished, we demo our deliverables to the rest of the ICAgile team, field questions, and discuss outcomes to determine future adaptations.

Our sprint review sessions provide a direct feedback loop to gauge leadership and cross-departmental reactions, allowing us to gather data that applies to future projects.

Advantages of sprint reviews for marketing teams include:

Accountability
Immediate feedback collection
Alignment of marketing team goals & vision
Adaptation of strategies before long-term resource investment

As a team of self-proclaimed, lifelong learners, our sprint reviews contribute to our organizational culture of continuous improvement and enable us to respond to external and internal changes swiftly.

Make Data-Informed Decisions

Metrics are a marketer's bread and butter. Data allows us to measure key indicators like performance and engagement to calculate risks and rewards.

In an agile marketing team, most marketing decisions are made with key performance indicators (KPIs) in mind. This is the most definitive way to build objective stories about consumer behavior and analyze the results of marketing campaigns.

For instance, in a recent marketing meeting, our data analytics expert presented a recent downward trend due to Google’s recent update to their search algorithm, which has widely impacted many organizations. Within the confines of our meeting, we deliberated changes and pivots to our content strategy that accommodated the new SEO landscape.

We regularly measure and analyze performance metrics to make informed decisions about our strategies and brainstorm innovative ways to adapt.

Practice Open Communication

Practicing open communication and transparency is central to maintaining agility. Consistent communication encourages engagement, collaboration, alignment, and faster problem-solving.

For instance, our marketing manager maintains monthly one-on-one check-ins with each team member to acknowledge accomplishments, challenges, professional goals, personal wellness, and upcoming organizational changes.

Trust builds with every transparent conversation, resulting in a team that feels supported and comfortable contributing their ideas to meetings and projects.

Create Agile Pods

Collaboration doesn’t just happen inside the marketing team–agile pods or cross-functional teams are another way to foster open communication and creative problem-solving.

The ICAgile marketing team works directly with the IT department to facilitate smooth updates to our organization’s website. These practices encourage team members to reach across department lines for effective problem-solving and solutions that require particular expertise.

By bringing together diverse skill sets and perspectives across our organization, we can further align strategies, generate innovative solutions, and continue to grow our knowledge.

Conclusion

Being a member of the ICAgile marketing team has highlighted the unique characteristics and benefits of agile marketing. Our efforts are grounded in change, customer needs, flexible structure, data, and collaboration–all pivotal to innovative and timely marketing.

If you’d like to learn how to enhance your team’s marketing performance and deliver more value to your customers and organization, consider ICAgile’s Agility in Marketing certification. This comprehensive course will have you implementing the principles outlined in this article quickly and efficiently for improved internal and external outcomes.

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Agile in Marketing: 5 Principles

Why Is Agile Important in Marketing?