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:

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