15 experts define agile marketing

The character pictured may or may not be an agile marketer. You can’t tell by appearance, only by track record. Faced with all of the changes in marketing over the last few years, marketers have increased pressure to produce results within shorter time frames. As a result, Agile Marketing has come into being. It’s a practice still seeking a single definition so I sought some expert opinions.

Here is how 15 experts define Agile Marketing. Where all appear to agree is it’s not about being right or even having a big idea. Agile Marketing is about taking frequent, customer-centric actions that result in steady, measurable improvements that make innovation and profits happen faster.

1. A high-communication, low-documentation, rapid iteration process designed to provide more frequent, more relevant, and highly measurable, marketing programs. Ultimately the goals are speed and innovation. – Gerry Murray, ICD
2. An acknowledgement that, for many projects, the desired end state is either not fully known and/or in flux. – Marc Strohleim, Outsell, Inc.
3. A process for doing marketing that uses small self-sufficient teams to work on projects meant to be completed in a short time-scale. – Mike Volpe, Hubspot
4. An effective balance of fact-based decision-making and decisiveness despite ambiguity. Marketing agility and enterprise agility are practically synonymous; they can’t be viewed in silos. – Gary Katz, Marketing Operations Partners
5. A transformation of the marketing department from a passive campaign creator into a proactive revenue generator. Becoming good at agile marketing is a gradual process: there will be lots of small steps forwards, and I still have to meet a company that has the “ideal” agile marketing system. – Jep Castelein, Marketo
6. A means to create, communicate and deliver unique value to an always-changing consumer (or business) in an always-changing market with an always-changing product. – Greg Meyer
7. The process of using an iterative approach to marketing processes, and gains its name from agile development. The emphasis in the name, agile, is how a marketing team manages projects and campaigns. – John Cass
8. The ability to adapt/change to market, customer, and competitive signals. Turning that info into actionable insight. – Laura, Vision Edge Marketing
9. The ability to satisfy customer expectations is core to pro? tability. If you’re not agile, you can’t do it, because customer expectations are never static. – Peter Weill, MIT
10. A simple set of principles that define individual team member roles, and a sequence of interactions between these roles, which enable team members to rapidly prioritize and deliver tangible results. The agile method focuses on prototyping and delivery in a series of short “sprints” of days or weeks. Agile works equally well for developing new deliverables from scratch and keeping existing products or projects updated. – Bruce Wilson, Audienz Marketing
11. Is build on the principle of the Agile Manifesto which reads: We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: 1) Individuals and interactions over processes and tools, 2) working software over comprehensive documentation, 3) customer collaboration over contract negotiation and 4) responding to change over following a plan. – Neil Perkins, Only Dead Fish
12. A management approach that adapts agile software development methodologies to marketing projects. I suggested that adopting agile marketing management practices might be the single most important factor in building a successful, ongoing conversion optimization program. – Scott Brinker, Search Engine Land
13. Is in ‘Brand Led Marketing’, where everything is considered and planned to work together effectively. It allows to get much more exposure and success from limited marketing spends. It also allows us to train and work with staff within our Customers, to ensure that they understand what their Brand stands for and the part that they play in supporting the Brand and growing the Business. – Jerry, Agile Marketing Blog
14. An approach to marketing that takes its inspiration from Agile Development and that values: 1) Responding to change over following a plan, 2) testing and data over opinions and conventions, 3) numerous small experiments over a few large bets, 4) 4ngagement and transparency over official posturing and 5) collaboration over silos and hierarchy. – Jim Ewel, AgileMarketing.net
15. A certain type of planning and execution where there was a need to move away from the ‘waterfall method,’ a process known for long planning and coding before any new release, often resulting in stale or late-to-market products. Agile relies on the completion of small chunks of ‘shippable code’ that can be defined, built, tested, and shipped in the time span of a single ‘sprint,’ usually lasting 15 to 30 days. – Klobe Partners

Do these definitions help determine if your organization is practicing Agile Marketing or should be?