Workfront

 CMO 

Joe Staples

 looks into the elements holding many of us back from adopting agile marketing

What is agile marketing? If you ask 10 different marketers, you’d probably get 10 different responses. Agile seems to be a term that everyone thinks they know, but no one is quite sure if they’re doing it right. 

In a great summary in 

Forbes

, Jennifer Rooney suggests the essence of the agile methodology is reinforcing a culture of agility by providing structure that drives marketers to be iterative, flexible, customer-centered and focused on priorities of high value. For business leaders, an agile marketing team means they can:

• Go to market faster

• Adapt and report faster

• Be more productive

• Identify and prioritize high-impact activities faster

• Deliver customer-centric outcomes

To clear the confusion around agile, Workfront set out to get the lowdown directly from marketers. 

The Workfront Agile Survey

 wanted to find out if marketers have adopted agile and what they think of it – or, if they haven’t, what’s holding them back?

Among the most 

intriguing findings

 are:

• 30 percent of marketers report using agile to manage their work processes; the remaining 70% cite a lack of knowledge or expertise keeps them from implementing it.

• 57 percent of marketers report that their work planning processes are lackluster at best.

• 40 percent say their departments use a combination of different methodologies to manage work.

This mixed methodology suggests that marketers are getting creative and looking to pull the best from the various marketing work management methodologies. They are looking for ways to improve processes. This is most likely due to the overworked feeling many described in the 

last stress report

. 

What is promising is that a majority of marketing teams (71 percent) already have an internal expert to train them on using agile. We foresee that when we run this survey next year, we’ll see a much higher percentage than the 40 percent of marketers who are already using agile or have plans to implement it in the next 4 years. 

It’s encouraging to see the desire for marketing teams to streamline work processes. What this tells us is that we’ve got a lot of work to do, not only in evangelizing about the benefits of agile, but also in explaining it in simple, easy-to-understand terms. Self-described agile marketing nerd Andrea Fryrear does a brilliant job of this with her 

thorough guide to agile marketing

.