How to choose the right tools for agile marketing

What is agile marketing?

Everyone wants to be “agile” these days. If you work for a software company you’ll be used to developers spending their time in “scrum teams” and daily “stand-ups”, estimating the effort to build new features in “story points”, and delivering iterative improvements in 2-week “sprints”. But how does agile relate to marketing?

“The life of a marketing team sucks unless it becomes agile”

In short, agile marketing helps you break down big ideas into manageable component tasks without getting bogged down in the dependency hell of more traditional “waterfall” project management methodologies.

When done right, it enables marketing teams to continually align their activities to their strategic goals ensuring a shared sense of purpose and direction no manner how their environment changes over the course of a financial year. The result is a near continuous flow of positive deliverables that create sustainable momentum in the execution of your marketing plan.

Why do you need agile marketing?

Put simply, the life of a marketing team sucks unless it becomes agile. Without it a typical week will consist of a series of aimless activities with a frequent sense of disappointment as plans set months before rarely materialise. If you’re still planning your campaigns using spreadsheets you’re almost certainly engaged in such waterfall-style projects.

Sometimes well-intentioned teams claim that they’re being agile because they organise semi-regular “sprint review” meetings. Unfortunately, these are often laborious “show-and-tell” sessions where stakeholders assemble to hear from team leads how well things are going. Collaboration is sub-optimal.

Deconstruct your strategic goals

“Agile marketing forces you to deconstruct your strategic goals so that your team fully understands what it is you’re trying to achieve”

I never did a marketing degree. Instead, I chose what I considered at the time to be more academic subjects like politics and international relations. A career in international diplomacy beckoned until I realised how badly it paid! ;)

Although being far from vocational, taking these subjects did show me the power of ‘deconstruction’ - the discipline of taking big, complex ideas and purposefully breaking them down into smaller, more understandable components. Once deconstructed, components can be re-assembled iteratively with the benefit of the learnings made along the way. Rarely does the end result turn-out exactly the way you intended at the outset.

Similarly, agile marketing forces you to deconstruct your strategic goals so that your team fully understands what it is you’re trying to achieve and by when. With this clarity of insight, your team can work together to co-create the tactical delivery of your vision.

Selecting the right tool for you

Choosing the right tool to help you and your team adopt agile and sustain the delivery of your plans through four quarters is crucial. There are many to choose from so in this blog series I’ll be looking at three of the most popular tools available today - Asana, JIRA and Trello. Stay tuned!