Frank Days presented on applying Agile principles and practices to marketing. He discussed how Agile marketing emerged in the 2010s as a way to make marketing more responsive, adaptive, and measurable. It involves rapid iteration, high communication, and low documentation. While some marketers only use small elements of Agile, others fully apply its principles like sprints, backlogs, and scrums. Agile helps content marketers adapt to changing digital channels and surfaces with more data and analytics. It provides a transparent process to make marketing teams more effective by focusing on priorities.

1. 
Boston Content Marketing Forum
Frank Days
Tech Marketing VP
AgileMarketingBlog.com
Cohost Marketing Agility Podcast

2. Why I care about Agile?
 A career as a CMO in small, fast growing tech
companies
 Need to be responsive and adaptive
 Never liked marketing plans
 Short shelf life for marketing plans

3. As an senior executive…
Results matter more than
documentation so I need a lightweight approach

4. 
Agile to the Rescue

5. Agile marketing is a high-
communication, low documentation,
rapid iteration process designed to
provide more frequent, more relevant
and highly measurable marketing
programs
- IDC, Agile Principles and Practices, 2010

6. Applying ideas of
Agiledevelopment
to marketing

7. Rebranding Agile
Credit: Scott Brinker
Chief Marketing Technologist

8. Agile Marketing Milestones
 2010
 IDC creates first real report on Agile Marketing
 Marketing Agility Podcast
 2011
 Sprint Zero Meetup in San Francisco
 Agile marketing manifesto
 2012
 Pundits come out of woodwork
 2013
 Agile Marketing meetups gain traction
 2014
 Stories from real people really using Agile in marketing

9. Marketing adoption of Agile

10. Marketers often talk about little “a” agile
(not big “a” Agile)

11. The dominant design is emerging
for agile marketing
Small “a”:
Marketing faster
 Real-time
 Growth hacking
 Lean marketing
Big “A”:
Applying Agile to marketing
 From development
 More responsive
 More effective

12. Interviews with Leaders
 Since April 2011
 Interviewed pioneers
 Lots of chasing
 Many renegades

13. BACKLOG of all work

14. All are using sprints
Image: Wikipedia

15. Three monthly THEMES or EPICS

16. SCRUM at leastthree times a week …
sometimes more…

17. What have you done for me lately?
What did you just finish?
What are you doing next?
What is the problem?

18. PRODUCT OWNER is also SCRUM MASTER

19. PERSONAS for core customers

20. Burndowns are infrequent
Image: Wikipedia

21. Other marketing Agile observations
 Product owner and scum master the same
 Some using user stories
 More frequently small tech companies
 More common in digital/demand gen team
 Some waterfall remains
 Some interesting innovations

22. What is working for my team
 Transparent objectives/priorities
 Adaptive attitude/responsiveness
 Low overhead
 Team cohesion
 Making it happen

23. Personal worst practices in Agile
 Things we could do better
 No post it notes
 No planning poker – accurate sizing
 No burndown charts
 No science fair

24. 
Agile for Content Marketing

25. Good news: content is still king
“$118.4 billion will be spent on
content marketing, video
marketing, and social media in
2013”
- eMarketer
“80% of business decision makers
prefer to get company information in
a series of articles versus an
advertisement.”
- Content Marketing Institute
“Content creation is ranked as the
single most effective SEO technique”
- Marketing Sherpa
“27,000,000 pieces of content are
shared everyday.”
- AOL and Nielson

26. Demos & Videos
Downloads
Modern marketing architecture
Site Traffic
‘Actions’ on Site
Leads
Search Engines
SEO & PPC
Marketo SalesForce Sales
Prospect
Email

27. Many old tricks don’t work any more

28. More data and better real-time analytics

29. We know the value of social

30. Conversation is always happening

31. Disconnect between planning and doing in
content marketing

32. Life is short for a CMO
 Responsible for entire marketing mix
 Often more creative than quantitative
 Sits at table with C-levels
 Ave tenure: < 4 years
 Up from < 2 year in 2009

33. Held more accountable than ever

34. Marketing mix is increasingly digital

35. Forced to test more before diving in

36. Can’t always tell what content will succeed…

37. Or this old content…

38. Less certainty about how things spread

39. Awesome but not viral…

40. Your agencies are probably waterfall…
 Statements of work
 Creative briefs
 Risk reward balance

41. Waterfall prevents bad client behavior

42. Long lead times tasks
 Events
 Media buying
 User conferences

43. Branding and product marketing less “agile”

44. 
Getting started

45. How Agile helps content marketers
 Adaptive for increasing uncertain channels
 Transparent process
 Make team more effective by focusing

46. Free Advice***
 If you are not in charge
 Start small – a single project
 Things that look like software development
 Areas with rapid change
 Something with strongly measurable ROI
 Talk with a developer who knows Agile

47. Agile Marketers Rockstars
 Scott Brinker, CEO, Ion Interactive
 John Cass, Cohost Marketing Agility Podcast
 Jonathan Colman, Principal Experience Architect at REI
 Frank Days, Tech CMO and agilemarketingblog.com
 Jim Ewel, CEO, In Demand Interpreting
 Jascha Kaykas-Wolf, CMO Mindjet
 David Quinn, Director of Communications, EMC
 Neil Perkin, Only Dead Fish
 Mike Volpe, CMO Hubspot

48. Attend an Agile marketing meetup
 San Francisco
 Boston
 Seattle
 China
 Many more

49. Let’s connect
 Frank Days
 fmdays@tangyslice.com
 @tangyslice
 Tangyslice.com
 Agilemarketingblog.com
 Agile Marketing Group on Facebook
 Marketing Agility Podcast on iTunes