Recommended Reading

Articles by Stacey Ackerman

Stacey Ackerman is a contributing writer on Agile Marketing for MarTech Today, the leading publication for marketing technologists, as well as numerous blogs.

Agile estimation techniques help marketers manage workload

While estimating work can feel like an upfront drag, I’ve seen it drastically improve project completion predictability and workload that a team can take on. This is one area where marketers can learn a lot from software teams.

How to choose the right agile marketing framework

A lot of marketers have started agile marketing with no framework at all. While that may work in a really small, lean organization that is well-aligned to the agile marketing principles and values already, most marketers are transitioning from a traditional culture, and therefore benefit from a proven way of implementing agile marketing.

How a corporate giant can work like a small start-up with agile marketing

Agile marketing is a lot like running a small start-up company. People have to wear many hats, you have a small team, you work quickly and you innovate. If you’re a big corporate giant, this may feel impossible, but thinking and working like a small start-up will help you achieve better agility.

How to build an agile marketing organization without authority

While a lot of marketers who are new to agile marketing think it’s a process change, but that’s only a small piece of the puzzle (and that’s the easy part). What’s trickier is changing culture in an organization, especially when you’re a team member without authority and you must navigate through big egos and office politics.

Create a healthy partnership with your internal teams using agile marketing

A lot of marketers find themselves in the position of being an order taker with their internal stakeholders who have lost sight of the value we bring to the table. With agile marketing, we can gain empowerment to do the right things with our teams while also building healthy partnerships with stakeholders.

How to use agile marketing to prioritize high-value initiatives and improve productivity

We’re so caught up in the world of being busy, that we’re barely able to come up for air. Then we wonder why our marketers are burnt out, deadlines are missed and quality stinks. The best companies I’ve worked with have streamlined corporate initiatives that focus on value, which actually helps productivity.

How Marketers are Adapting Agile to Meet Their Needs

While agile is the same at its core no matter what department uses it, marketers are finding their own flavor that meets their needs. Learn how marketers are making agile work in their world!

Broaden your marketing skills to succeed as an agile marketer

If you want to be hired on an agile marketing team, you have to approach everything as “What’s best for the team?” rather than “What’s best for me?” There are two kinds of people that don’t work well in agile marketing—the hoarders and the single-laners.

Agile marketing is the fastest growing area for agile adoption

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!

How to get started with agile marketing

If you’re thinking about getting started with agile marketing, that’s awesome! I’m really glad you came to that decision! Agile marketing can help marketers focus on the most valuable work, get work in the hands of buyers and prospects faster, eliminate wasteful process overhead and create teams that are empowered and not overworked.

How agile adoption will change the way we work in 2020

Working in agile has been around on the software side for a few decades but the martech industry has been getting on the bandwagon in the past few years. While it’s still the early adopters running full-fledged agile marketing teams, it continues to be the way that companies are headed to be more mainstream in the coming year.

3 things marketers need to focus on in 2020

Marketing is one of the fastest-changing professions today. And like fashion trends (glad that bike shorts with blazers phase is over), as a marketer, you don’t want to find yourself “oh, so last year!” Read on to hear what’s hot for marketers in 2020 and how you can get ahead of the game.

Implementing agile marketing experiments lead to leadership buy-in

Too often companies approach agile marketing as a new process for the team, but in reality, there are often substantial organizational changes that need to be made. The companies that do well implementing agile marketing have both elements in play: real agile experimentation on the ground with teams and leadership buy-in.

Is your social media policy agile?

Social media by its very nature is fast, bi-directional communication, but many companies are plagued with social media policies that hinder agility. Is your social media policy agile? If not, it’s time to jump into modern marketing and have your brand be part of a conversation, not a pushed message.

An agile marketing company uses social media to have one-on-one conversations with customers, and social media policies must encourage, not discourage this type of rapport.

Agile marketers are often forgoing the Scrum Master role, but is this wise?

A trend among agile marketing implementations is to forgo the Scrum Master role and to absorb this into a single role that combines Scrum Master and product owner responsibilities into one “marketing owner” role. While this is what’s happening in the marketplace, let’s explore the pros and cons of this practice.

Let’s start with three reasons for not having a dedicated Scrum Master.

How marketers are changing agile practices to meet their needs

Agile has been around the software world for a few decades, but now marketers are getting on board – with a few modifications.

I’ve had the pleasure of helping companies in both software and marketing transition to agile. Today I’ll share with you some ways that I’ve seen first-hand how marketers have made agile more relevant to how they work.

If you want to be agile, you may need to change your company’s culture

If you want to jump on board with the agile marketing bandwagon, that’s great! But before you do, realize that your company culture may need a substantial overhaul before you can really reap the benefits.

Before embarking on an agile transformation, you need to be culturally ready to embrace a new way of working. Adapting agile practices at the team level may lead to some process improvements and efficiency, but agility is not just for the worker-bees – it’s about organizational change.

Here’s why experiential learning is better than being right

As marketers, we’re taught that the more we research and plan, we improve our chances of getting our marketing right. But is getting it right always the right approach? By doing small, experimental campaigns and learning from them, we can refine our marketing along the way.

How agencies can use Kanban to manage client work

Kanban is a process that came from the Japanese manufacturing industry in the 1940s. It’s best known for its car manufacturing process at Toyota, and the company’s ability to keep work flowing through the system and eliminating bottlenecks.

The word “Kanban” literally translates to “billboard” in Japanese. In Kanban practice today, this is referred to as “visualizing the work.”

It’s not about your company: Why modern marketers need to be customer-centric

Marketing has historically focused on what the company needs—like better sales numbers or add-on sales. While sales are important and necessary, your customers don’t care. And if they sense at all that your messaging isn’t genuine and authentic, they’ll find someone else to buy from.

Many companies are turning to agile marketing because decisions on campaigns and messaging are influenced by customer feedback instead of executives.

How agencies can better engage with clients using agile

Agencies are faced with a growing challenge – many of their corporate clients are transforming to agile and the ways they’ve always worked together needs to change, but how?

I’ve seen corporate marketing departments embark on their agile transformation journey, but they forget to tell their agency partners about the change. The agency becomes the last to know and it causes tremendous strain to the relationship.

Agile marketing: A step-by-step guide

- David Edelman, Jason Heller, and Steven Spittaels

In a world where people decide whether to abandon a web page after three seconds and Quicken Loans gives an answer to online mortgage applicants in less than ten minutes, eight weeks for an email test pushes a company to the boundaries of irrelevance. For many large incumbents, however, such a glacial pace is the norm.

Welcome To The New World Of Agile Marketing

- Morgan Kelleher

When my CEO approached me about changing the mindset and practice of our marketing organization, I was excited, nervous and intrigued. He handed me a book titled, Lean Six Sigma for Service: How to Use Lean Speed and Six Sigma Quality to Improve Services and Transactions and said, “This is going to revolutionize the work you produce and expand the capacity of your team.”

Agile Marketing: Five Tips To Do It Right

- Christopher Ryan

Agile marketing purports to make marketing departments more effective by using agile software principles that allow marketers to move faster in response to customer-centric needs. Agile marketers work in sprints — focused, one- to two-week projects — under a scrum master in cross-functional teams. In our practice, we have found the fail-test-succeed iterative nature of agile to be extremely helpful in ensuring that business-to-business (B2B) revenue growth is based on the right drivers, especially locking in customer value.

Agile Marketing Examples & Case Studies

- Andrea Fryrear

The theory of Agile marketing sounds great. I mean, of course we all want to be more nimble and responsive; nobody is standing in line to be slower and less adaptive to change.

But the same questions continually come up: if this is so great, where are the Agile marketing examples? Where can I find a good Agile marketing case study?

What You Need to Know About Agile Marketing

- Amanda Retzki

Though agile methodologies are most often associated with software development, the adoption of agile and lean practices in manufacturing and other industries has become pervasive. This disciplined and organized approach to project/process management promotes a continuous improvement mindset, transparency among teammates, accountability and alignment with company goals and client needs. Yet, as its name suggests, an agile approach also remains flexible and adapts to changing needs.

How 3 Brands Use Agile Marketing Tactics

- Adobe Marketing Cloud

Agile management methods, experts say, provide a framework for making better decisions and improving overall productivity.

“One focus of agility is understanding the relative value of the initiatives you want to work on and prioritizing them,” said Barre Hardy, senior director with marketing consultancy CMG Partners. “A lot of companies are not great at doing that today.”

How Our Agency Uses Scrum for Agile Marketing

- Michele Lopez

The marketing world is consistent in producing bigger, better, and bolder outcomes moments at a time. Strategizing in terms of months, quarters, or even years will ultimately leave you in the dust and questioning where it all went wrong. An environment where revolutions happen in a matter of weeks, days or even hours, has forced the need for a shift in the way we operate and organize.

Agile Is The Mindset Of The Modern Marketing Organization

- Giselle Abramovich

The ability to innovate in marketing and customer experience is inherently intertwined with moving fast enough to keep up with the ever-changing expectations of always-on tech-empowered consumers.

But moving fast can be hard for large enterprises—until now. Some organizations today employ agile marketing, a set of methodologies based on agile software development. The idea is to collocate a group of people across business units to work on solving a common problem via focused collaboration, testing, iteration, and data insights.

Agile marketing: On the way to real-time advertising

- Tobias Weidemann

Car rental company Sixt was already carrying out agile marketing a few years ago before the term itself had even been invented: a poster for Merkel’s “Neuland” speech a few days after she gave it, a motif for Ulla Schmidt’s company car used in Spain (“I promise: next time I’ll rent from Sixt”), a spontaneous campaign centering on the discussion about Boateng as a neighbor (“For everyone with someone like ‘Gauland’ in the neighborhood”, with a picture of a removal van).

How Adopting Newsrooms Practices Can Make For More Successful Agile Marketing Initiatives

- Gemma Joyce

When updates to big stories arrived, every second counted. A quiet, ‘heads-down’ atmosphere immediately became lively and shouty, with reporters, editors and the photo and video team working speedily to get the latest out there accurately before anyone else. As points of a story came to light they were carefully integrated into already existing articles with new pictures given priority and slotted into paragraphs with rigid structures that allowed for readability and ad slots. Multiple people would be working on the main story at once to get it perfect.

How to Use Scrum for Content Marketing

- Jug Babic

Certain Agile concepts and ideas have been part of the content marketing conversation for some time now. Scrum is one concept that’s often part of these conversations. But bundling it with Agile causes all kinds of confusion.

This article focuses on how a Scrum-based approach to content marketing could work, as told through the experience of a hypothetical content marketing team.

What is agile marketing and should you be sprinting to it?

- James A. Martin

Agile marketing is hot. At the March 2016 MarTech conference in San Francisco, attendees buzzed about whether their marketing organization was “agile” or if it was still following the “waterfall’”process.

In short, agile marketing is now officially a thing. The benefits of achieving an agile marketing organization can be enormous — but the challenges in getting there can be equally big.