Search
Close this search box.
Search
Close this search box.
Search
Close this search box.

Choosing your Agile Marketing Tool

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest
WhatsApp

This post is a continuation/refresh of an earlier post from Yuval’s personal blog 

Tools for Agile Marketing seem to be a hot topic in the various Agile Marketing communities. The Marketing Agility Podcast is talking to some tool vendors and people started to discuss it on the  Agile Marketing Facebook Group as well.

For co-located marketing teams the best approach would probably be to start without an electronic tool and just use a physical board/wall with sticky notes at least until they get the hang of it and learn what they really need. Many marketing teams are distributed and therefore don’t have this luxury. While moving to a co-located setup is definitely a recommended option it isn’t always realistic… So those teams do need to have some electronic tool to support their move to agile marketing.

There’s a variety of tools supporting agile work management. Most of them come from the development/IT world since this is where Agile is coming from. While many of the principles and practices of Agile Development map nicely to Agile Marketing when it comes to tools there’s actually a bigger difference in my experience. I find marketers are typically more visual and artsy than developers. They also have a different language. Many of the Agile Development tools speak the development-world language which confuses marketers.

I’ve seen many marketing departments being asked to use the tool their peers in IT/Development use – mainly to achieve economies of scale (standardize on one tool vendor, easier to support fewer tools, etc.). While this has merit, in many cases it becomes a significant impediment to the success of the Agile Marketing transformation. Tooling should work for the people rather than against them. I’m not saying don’t consider economies of scale and alignment but also consider whether the tool will actually work well in a marketing context. If you have concerns, start small and see. Suggest it as an experiment.

To help marketers make sure they are considering the right tools, here’s my view on what would be a great tool supporting Agile Marketing:

  • It would talk marketer’s language. Not force marketers to learn the language of development/IT.
  • It would be flexible. Marketers are not following Scrum to the letter. It should enable marketers to follow lean/agile principles without forcing the wrong practices.
  • It would be visual and beautiful because marketers appreciate those things. It wouldn’t bog down people with too many grids and lists and instead, use more “Boards”.
  • It would support dynamic teams not just fixed scrum teams. Because that happens in Marketing. (also in Development btw)
  • It would support a combination of Scrum, and Kanban without forcing you to choose one or the other.
  • It would allow different teams in the organization easily adapt their area in the tool to support their own process.
  • It would TEACH marketers how to think about lean/agile flow/behavior. As a complement to frontal training, the tool should proactively support changing marketing culture to support agility.
  • Marketers spend even more of their time doing “Keep the lights on” activities such as cleaning up leads, monitoring campaigns, running webinars, etc. A great tool would find an effective way not just to take that into account but also to help them manage those activities more effectively. Some of the Personal Kanban body of knowledge can help here.
  • Marketing Agility starts with individuals and can scale to hundreds of people. Not all tools need to support scale. But if the organizational agile tool can help the individual marketer become more agile it would help with the adoption of the tool and agile marketing in general.
  • Emphasize simplicity, ease of use, and streamlined flows. Otherwise, it won’t stick. Having a situation where you have special people working the tool because the actual marketers won’t touch it with a stick is unacceptable (a true story I heard in a recent meetup). It should take minutes to onboard a new team. It should take seconds for a marketer to add new work or move work along.
  • Integration into the other main tools of the 21st-century marketer. Integration into email is one key thing. SalesForce when we start to talk about Account Based Marketing? Marketo/Hubspot/etc.? Integration into collaboration tools such as Slack/Flowdock?
  • It should provide some actionable insights – e.g. these items have been in flight for quite a while, worth looking at them in your next daily stand-up. These items took a long time to cross the finish line – may be worth discussing them in a retrospective/five-whys session. These items ping-ponged a lot between states – worth looking at. There seems to be a lot of queueing up for the designer. mmmm. maybe you should look at that (and suggest some tips along the lines of the theory of constraints’ five focusing steps). Why is it important to marketers? actually, the more of those insights agile tools include the better it would be for everybody not just marketers. But since marketers are new to this agile thing, and many marketers aren’t necessarily process-oriented, this can help them along. (If they don’t have a lean/agile coach close by that is 😉

I hope this list helps you choose an effective agile marketing tool for your context. If you need further help in choosing an agile marketing tool, don’t hesitate to reach out. I’m available at yuval@agilesparks.com.

Subscribe for Email Updates:

Categories:

Tags:

Large Scale Scrum
Enterprise DevOps
Agile Contracts Best Practices
Hybrid Work
Agile Risk Management
Sprint Planning
Agile Release Management
agileisrael
Entrepreneurial Operating System®
Jira Plans
Scrum
Sprint Retrospectives
The Agile Coach
Process Improvement
Agile Delivery
ATDD
Webinar
ARTs
Effective Agile Retrospectives
predictability
Lean Budgeting
Kanban Game
System Integration Environments
SAFe Release Planning
Kanban Kickstart Example
TDD
Lean Software Development
Agile Program
SAFe
Risk Management on Agile Projects
Continuous Planning
PI Objectives
Jira
Agile Product Development
AI
Agile Mindset
Advanced Roadmaps
Lean Risk Management
Continuous Deployment
Quality Assurance
The Kanban Method
Systems Thinking
Scaled Agile Framework
Covid19
Nexus vs SAFe
Built-In Quality
Perfection Game
Lean Startup
Agile India
What Is Kanban
Presentation
ATDD vs. BDD
Pomodoro Technique
Lean Agile Leadership
QA
LeSS
SA
Agile Outsourcing
Kanban Basics
ALM Tools
transformation
Kanban 101
Software Development Estimation
Agile and DevOps Journey
Manage Budget Creation
Jira Cloud
Introduction to Test Driven Development
speed at scale
System Team
Operational Value Stream
Lean and Agile Principles and Practices
Agile Techniques
Rovo
Reading List
Lean and Agile Techniques
speed @ scale
Scrum With Kanban
Managing Risk on Agile Projects
Engineering Practices
Daily Scrum
Scrum Master Role
SPC
An Appreciative Retrospective
IT Operations
Releases Using Lean
Kaizen Workshop
Agile Marketing
Agile in the Enterprise
ScrumMaster Tales
GanttBan
Value Streams
Confluence
Atlassian
DevOps
Risk Management in Kanban
Spotify
Games and Exercises
Portfolio for Jira
RTE
Agile Community
Lean-Agile Budgeting
AgileSparks
Agile Release Planning
Story Slicing
Professional Scrum Product Owner
Continuous Improvement
Development Value Streams
Scrum Values
Lean Agile Organization
Lean Agile Basics
Continuous Delivery
Risk-aware Product Development
Slides
Kanban
Code
Accelerate Value Delivery At Scale
Product Ownership
LPM
BDD
Agile for Embedded Systems
Professional Scrum Master
Agile Development
Change Management
Agile Games and Exercises
Business Agility
Agile Games
Agile Product Ownership
Keith Sawyer
Lean-Agile Software Development
Artificial Intelligence
Scrum.org
Implementation of Lean and Agile
Implementing SAFe
Certification
Nexus and SAFe
Legacy Code
Product Management
Agile Exercises
Elastic Leadership
Agile Israel
Scrum and XP
SAFe DevOps
chatgpt
Coaching Agile Teams
Agile
Release Train Engineer
RSA
Scrum Master
Jira admin
Achieve Business Agility
Limiting Work in Progress
Applying Agile Methodology
Sprint Iteration
Professional Scrum with Kanban
Agile Project
Agility
RTE Role
Retrospectives
Lean Agile Management
ART Success
Agile Project Management
Iterative Incremental Development
Rapid RTC
Principles of Lean-Agile Leadership
Managing Projects
Agile Basics
AI Artificial Intelligence
Scrum Guide
Legacy Enterprise
EOS®
User stories
Kaizen
LAB
WIP
Certified SAFe
Program Increment
Self-organization
Agile Testing Practices
lean agile change management
NIT
Agile Israel Events
ROI
Tools
Frameworks
Scrum Primer
Software Development
Nexus Integration Team
System Archetypes
Introduction to ATDD
Nexus and Kanban
A Kanban System for Software Engineering
Amdocs
Video
Nexus
Acceptance Test-Driven Development
Team Flow
Atlaassian
Planning
POPM
Test Driven Development
PI Planning
Tips
Continuous Integration
Lean Agile
AgileSparks
Logo
Enable registration in settings - general

Contact Us

Request for additional information and prices

AgileSparks Newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter, and stay updated on the latest Agile news and events

This website uses Cookies to provide a better experience
Shopping cart