Agile Marketing

The following is another guest Q&A conducted by Claire Schoen, an interview with Barre Hardy of CMG, who will be one of our featured speakers at MarTech later this month. Barre Hardy is Associate Partner, and head of the marketing performance practice at CMG. She created the firm’s Agile for Marketing practice and leads The CMO’s Agenda, an annual study on key challenges and opportunities facing marketing leadership based on insights driven from interviews with …

Insights from the architect of Agile for Marketing Continue Reading »

Marketing has shifted from the business of communications to the business of experiences. It’s the experiences that we give our prospects and customers, from their very first touchpoint with us onward, that “communicates” our brand. And in a digital world, almost all of those experiences are mediated by software. Once you accept those premises, then you will naturally conclude that a modern marketing organization needs to have great user experience, or UX, capabilities. Of course, …

Marketing as UX incarnate, with agile and lean principles Continue Reading »

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of meeting Mark Verone, the Director of Marketing & Product Operations at Gogo, the public company that provides in-flight Internet service on many major airlines and private business aircraft. I was giving a presentation on marketing trends inspired by technology and technology culture, and I included a section talking about agile marketing. As with almost all of my talks and writing on the subject, I emphasized Scrum as …

Using Scrumban (Scrum + Kanban) for agile marketing Continue Reading »

There are many posts, articles, and presentations about “agile marketing” out there — I’ve contributed my fair share — that dive into the process of agile management methodologies (mostly adaptations of Scrum). They’re good patterns for implementation — when you’re ready to dig in at that level. There are also plenty, plenty of high-level remarks out there about how businesses need to be agile — with very little insight about how. Hey, we should all …

A call-to-arms for The Agile Era of business management Continue Reading »

I’m writing this in Frankfurt, where I was honored to be one of the keynote speakers at André Morys’ Conversion Summit, a yearly gathering of several hundred conversion optimization professionals in Germany. My topic was agile marketing, one of my favorite. After 7 years of working in the conversion optimization space, I’m convinced that adopting agile is the single best thing a company can do to improve its results in conversion optimization. Usually when I …

Agile marketing? That would never work here Continue Reading »

Today I’m presenting a new talk on agile marketing that walks through a Scrum-inspired agile methodology and tackles several of the common myths and misconceptions people have about agile management. If you’ve been hearing about agile marketing but are a little fuzzy about the actual process — or if you have concerns that agile is just a euphemism for “work faster” or “do it quick and dirty” or “a lack of a guiding plan” — …

Everything you wanted to know about agile marketing (but were afraid to ask) Continue Reading »

Sometimes an idea is just ready to happen and is simultaneously discovered by multiple people at once. A famous example is when Newton and Leibniz independently invented calculus. Another is agile marketing. Some years ago, after agile software development had gained significant momentum, several different marketing leaders independently realized, “Hey, this agile approach might work in my department…” And agile marketing was born. Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, now the CMO of Mindjet, was one of those early …

One CMO’s advice for getting started with agile marketing Continue Reading »

Kudos to Frank Days, John Cass, and now Amy Callahan, who have kicked started the Boston Agile Marketing Meet-Up back into gear over the past couple of months. In September, David Quinn of EMC gave a terrific presentation of their experience with agile marketing, the video of which is available on YouTube. (You can also read the Q&A I had with David and Amy back in May, how EMC successfully adopted agile marketing.) Last week, …

2 important agile marketing insights from HubSpot’s CMO Continue Reading »

Agile marketing continues to grow in popularity. Why? The old “waterfall” approach to marketing planning and execution simply can’t keep pace with the speed at which prospects (and competitors) can move in the superconductive digital world. In a Forrester report earlier this year, from which the graph below was excerpted, analyst Laura Ramos wrote, “The traditional annual planning routine is ripe for extinction, as 69% of our B2B marketing leaders say that conditions change too …

Debunking 3 myths of agile marketing Continue Reading »

As the clockspeed of marketing continues to accelerate, more and more marketers are exploring agile marketing — the application of agile management techniques in the marketing department — as a way to adapt to this new environment. But agile marketing is not yet a textbook methodology. While agile processes have been well developed in software engineering circles over the past two decades, the application of them to marketing is relatively new. And while there are …

How ReadyTalk successfully adopted agile marketing Continue Reading »