Agile marketing strategies are all about doing the right work at the right time. That approach enables teams to accomplish far more with less effort and stress. Here we break down what goes into such strategies, the Agile practices, metrics, case studies, and FAQs you need to understand so you can understand how to unlock their benefits for yourself.
With all the volatility marketers are dealing with these days, it’s never been harder to develop a great marketing strategy and ensure it stays relevant while you execute it. Add to that the increasingly common reality of departments with reduced budgets asking to simply “do more with less” then throw in a “could you implement AI while you’re at it?” and it’s clear why CMOs are feeling overwhelmed.
This is the economic reality we face today. However, there are proven marketing strategies that can actually enable your teams to do what’s being asked of them without sacrificing their mental health or work-life balance. Below, we’ll take you through five strategies that we’ve seen deliver excellent results in all kinds of marketing teams.
All that said, we’re going to start with some fundamental concepts that experienced marketing leaders will be familiar with, so feel free to skip over those sections if you’re ready to dive straight into the strategic gold.
Marketing strategies are broad plans for leveraging a company’s unique value proposition to reach its strategic goals.
Ideally, this will result in an overarching message expressed through a variety of marketing activities like digital ads, emails, and even sales communication. But a great marketing strategy doesn’t just focus on the company side of the equation, it needs to be tailored for the right audience.
This means that any off-the-shelf marketing strategy is going to suffer from the fact that it’s not tailored to your specific value proposition, customers, and goals. Not to mention the fact that you’re unlikely to triumph over your competitors with an off-the-shelf strategy. That’s why the strategies we’re sharing below aren’t full strategies, but ideas that can form the basis of a successful marketing strategy when tailored to your circumstances.
While marketing strategies are long-term and focus on the overall mission a marketing department is aiming to achieve, marketing plans focus on the actual activities marketers will undertake to achieve that mission.
In other words, marketing strategies are more about the “what” while marketing plans focus on the “how.”
For example, your marketing strategy might be to become thought leaders in your space, while your subsequent marketing plans may involve creating podcasts, hosting LinkedIn Lives, or publishing an eBook. Real marketing success requires getting both right, as either a great marketing strategy without great plans or the reverse isn’t going to bring the results you need.
What sets an Agile marketing strategy apart from its traditional counterpart is its scope and ability to evolve.
Often, traditional marketing strategies are developed with great detail laying out what will be done and when. This usually means that exactly what work marketers will do is laid out months in advance. The result is that marketers end up wasting their time executing strategies that have long become outdated.
Agile marketing strategies tackle this problem in two ways. First, they focus more on the ‘what’ and less on the ‘how.’ Instead of being rigidly prescriptive about precisely what marketers will need to do to execute the strategy, they focus on laying out the strategic goals that should be achieved. It’s largely left to the marketers themselves to determine the best way to achieve those goals.
By starting off with a less detailed Agile marketing strategy, it becomes both easier to produce the strategy in the first place and evolve it with time. As the team moves into the execution phase, they will gather data and learn new things that can more easily be incorporated into the strategy itself. In this way, even a strategy that spans months can remain relevant and impactful right until the end instead of gradually drifting into irrelevance.
The pace of change marketers have to cope with is increasing year by year. For example, this year we’re already seeing the release of around 6 new AI marketing tools every day. But AI aside, the rate at which marketers need to adapt and evolve to remain competitive makes every day feel like a sprint to a finish line that keeps moving away.
Considering how traditional marketing strategies were designed for another slower era of marketing, this is hardly surprising. Fortunately, Agile marketing strategies were purpose-built for just this kind of environment. By embracing change and continuous improvement, these strategies are able to evolve, improve, and adapt to the changes happening around you.
To take AI as an example, fully Agile teams are more than 3x as likely to have implemented AI compared to those that are only partially Agile. Using an Agile marketing strategy enables such teams to experiment and test more, making tough challenges like AI training and implementation far easier.
Of course, creating and using an Agile marketing strategy requires some preparation. Typically Agile training is necessary as a foundation. Here, marketers learn basic principles and Agile ways of working they can use towards creating and executing such strategies.
Let’s begin here with a hard truth. Too often, we marketers get caught up in trying the latest thing. That might be advertising on a new platform, experimenting with digital live events, or just jumping into a new strategy shortly after trying the last one.
Chasing effectiveness in what’s new and shiny often leads to us neglecting the real fundamentals of marketing efficiency and causes us to end up stretching limited resources. The balance you need to create is between the strength of the strategy’s long-term vision and the capability to adapt as you go.
Creating a truly effective Agile marketing strategy begins with a solid foundation of the Agile principles and techniques. No strategy is perfect and you will always face the inevitability of diminishing returns, so effective strategies are always built with an eye on flexibility and adaptability.
Perhaps the single problem that holds back most marketing strategies is poor prioritization. That’s why we’re starting with this before we dive into the 5 individual strategies. Even when your marketing strategy produces an excellent list of priorities, without a consistent way to decide when to work on what (and when to finish work in progress instead).
That means a systematic way of determining priorities backed up by a transparent way of sharing that information.
Prioritization is how you ensure you end up with efficient and effective marketing strategies instead of great ideas that go nowhere. It’s no wonder the latest State of Agile Marketing Report found that better prioritization is both the most desired outcome of Agile marketing and the one Agile marketers are most likely to achieve.
Most of us are guilty of focusing on what new things marketing can do to achieve its goal without considering what we should stop doing as well. This is particularly important when budgets are getting cut. That’s when some marketing activities that produce results might still need to get the ax so more resources can go to where they will have the greatest impact.
So when you’re developing an Agile marketing strategy, you need to be all in. If 20% of your resources and attention are still going to something that’s not going to help you achieve your strategic goals, you’re simply going to be less likely to achieve them.
For example, if you’re running a digital ad campaign that’s getting decent results but is totally unrelated to your new strategic objectives, it shouldn’t continue running! Simply put, if that strategic objective isn’t your number one priority then it’s not a real strategic objective.
Another common mistake we make when creating marketing strategies is neglecting the proper use of data. For example, if our strategic objective is to become a thought leader in a space, how do we know when that’s been achieved? It’s vital that goals be tied to trackable data that can be monitored over time and used to adjust tactics.
In practice, this means beginning with baselines before structuring experiments, tracking, and learning. Data has to be the main driving force behind decision-making both in terms of how you develop your marketing strategy and how you execute it.
All that said, you also need to be wary of vanity metrics. These are numbers that can feel important but are difficult or impossible to translate into actual ROI. For example, likes or comments on social media posts can make us feel like our content is connecting but if they aren’t translating into something concrete like conversions, then they’re only going to lead you in the wrong direction.
Marketing objectives are what enable you to translate marketing strategy into marketing plans. That’s why every effective marketing strategy uses Objective Key Results (OKRs) to keep everyone focused on the goals and metrics that will actually translate into ROI.
That said, plenty of teams create solid OKRs only to stick to them long after it’s clear they’re not working. It may sound odd at first, but creating OKRs and staying laser-focused on them until they’re either achieved or new information indicates new OKRs are needed is the way to go.
But the question then is: when do you know it’s time for a change? It’s easy to let the sunk cost fallacy trick you into changing far too late. This is why setting a cadence for reviewing OKRs is so useful. When those monthly or quarterly meetings are already on the calendar, it’s easier to take a step back, get out of our own heads, and make an objective decision about whether OKRs need to change.
We all have the tendency to emphasize our successes and try to forget about our failures. But a great Agile marketing strategy is built on past failures just as much as on past successes. Whether a particular marketing plan or strategy ends up succeeding or failing, it’s vital that we communicate that result and strive to learn from it.
This kind of open communication is also important for building trust and transparency on your teams. It tells your team members that failing is okay as long as you learn from it. The result is teams with greater psychological safety that are more likely to experiment and develop better ways of working.
In other words, communicating results is how marketing strategies evolve and improve over time.
Lastly, while we’ve talked a lot about the importance of data, iterative improvement, etc. you can’t forget to simply celebrate success. We can hardly count the number of times we’ve seen marketing teams that don’t feel like they’re succeeding even when they are because those successes aren’t celebrated.
A marketing strategy that gets celebrated this way will feel like a meaningful achievement for everyone involved, helping inspire and motivate them to achieve the next set of goals.
Before seeing the first the invaluable Agile metrics for measuring strategy success, why don't you check if bad processes are dragging you down?
If an Agile marketing strategy relies on measurement and continuous improvement, what exactly do you measure? Of course, you can run tests to improve common marketing metrics like ROI or CPL, but when it comes to honing your processes, some specific Agile metrics come into play. These metrics are specifically designed to enable marketing teams to produce more work more efficiently, spotting and addressing bottlenecks with ruthless precision. That in turn drives strategic success.
If there’s one Agile metric you should focus on to understand how effective an Agile marketing team is, efficiency is your best bet. The way to measure efficiency is to calculate the ratio between the time tasks spend waiting to be worked on and the time they spend actively being worked on.
The goal here is to minimize the amount of time tasks spend waiting to be worked on and thereby minimize your Work In Progress (WIP). So instead of having lots of tasks in progress, you can become more efficient at starting and finishing them in small batches to deliver their value quickly.
This Agile metric is refreshingly simple. Cycle time is the difference between when work begins on a task and when it is completed. Obviously, this is closely related to efficiency, but cycle time provides another way to spot bottlenecks and understand when you may be working on too many tasks at once.
The final main Agile metric to use is throughput, a measure of the amount of work your team typically completes in a set period of time. The way you measure this can change depending on how you structure your work or size your tasks, but the goal is to understand generally how much work is moving through your team.
These metrics are all interrelated, as a higher task efficiency score and lower cycle time will translate into greater throughput. Using all three helps you understand how your team’s processes are working and whether you should consider making adjustments to improve how you operate.
While many marketing strategies focus on quickly producing a large number of high-quality campaigns, this can rob marketers of time for reflection and improvement. This was the case at Charles River Laboratories. There, switching to an Agile marketing strategy led teams to begin using data and Agile practices like reviews to understand and improve their performance.
The result was, ironically, a 50% improvement in time to market alongside improved morale. Focusing on speed had come at the expense of the fundamentals: honing the processes that really drive strategically relevant marketing.
Marketers at this healthcare organization faced the common complaint of marketers everywhere: feeling like order takers instead of strategic partners. Instead of developing impactful marketing strategies, their time was taken up simply by fulfilling requests from stakeholders.
To address this, they undertook a strategic transformation of their entire marketing function. One key element was using Quarterly Big Room Planning (QBRP) to gather stakeholders and really lay out a strategic vision for marketing. This served as a foundation for more effective marketing strategies designed to actually deliver on the organization's strategic priorities. It also helped marketers push back on work that doesn’t contribute to those priorities so they can remain focused on what matters.
This case study spends some valuable time diving into one key benefit of an Agile marketing strategy: its efficiency. We talked about Agile metrics in the section above, but here you see them in action. In this case, they use a burndown chart to track their velocity, enabling them to improve that velocity by around 50% in less than a year.
An Agile marketing strategy is one that focuses on what needs to be achieved without prescribing how it should be achieved. Such strategies are designed to iterate when new data and learnings come in, enabling them to adapt and evolve with time.
An Agile marketing team may break its work into two-week sprints. During each sprint, they will work on tasks and test ideas for campaigns, process improvements, etc. At the end of the sprint, they will see what worked and design new tests to further build on that success. In this way, they continuously improve both their operations and marketing itself.
The principles of Agile marketing include “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of marketing that solves problems,” “We welcome and plan for change. We believe that our ability to quickly respond to change is a source of competitive advantage,” “Deliver marketing programs frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale,” and more.
Strategic agility is another way to describe the application of Agile ways of working to marketing. Here, marketers adapt and iterate as new lessons are learned to ensure they remain competitive and effective in a fast-changing environment.
By now it should be clear that an Agile marketing strategy offers a way to make even limited resources have a real impact. By focusing on the work that matters, continuously honing processes and testing ideas, and more easily implementing new technologies like AI, Agile marketing is ideally suited for the challenges of modern marketing.
But unlocking all that value begins with fostering effective Agile leadership. If you’re ready to begin your journey to better marketing strategies, we offer self-paced and instructor-led courses in Agile Marketing Leadership that will equip you with the fundamentals you need.