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“We’re agile”.
A phrase heard in many marketing teams, however dig below the surface and, in our experience, marketing operations are rarely truly agile. According to the 2026 State of Agile Marketing Report (the 9th edition, surveying 430 marketers), 95% of marketers applying agile ways of working report a very positive experience, and the vast majority say agile improved their productivity (figures as of September 2026).
However, signing-up for Trello, configuring the Kanban board view and creating columns for In Progress, Up Next and Someday tasks doesn’t make you an agile team. Conducting your meetings with everyone standing up doesn’t either.
If you want to learn more about how Kanban can be specifically applied to marketing, see our guide: What is kanban marketing?.
The lack of proper agile implementations has led to an entire set of terminology to describe improper agile implementations, including fake agile, faux agile, dark agile and agile theatre.
Agile marketing is a way of running marketing that applies agile principles to campaigns: work is delivered in short sprints, tested against real customer data and adjusted quickly, rather than locked into a long, fixed plan. Teams prioritise customer value, speed and continuous learning over big upfront bets and activity for its own sake.
What is Agile?
It was in Snowbird, Utah, around 25 miles outside Salt Lake City, at a mountain ski resort that a group of 17 software development practitioners gathered in 2001 to define The Agile Manifesto. Little did they know the result would change the world of software development, as well as many other business functions.
Agile prioritises self-organising teams, experimentation and welcomes change, though agile is arguably best known today for its iterative approach to work and projects. If you want to learn more about how agile principles are applied to project management, see our guide: What is agile project management?.
The Agile Manifesto includes 4 values and 12 principles, the group came up with the following as a definition:
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
The 12 principles of the agile manifesto are as follows:
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Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
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Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
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Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
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Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
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Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
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The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
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Working software is the primary measure of progress.
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Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
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Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
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Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.
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The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organising teams.
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At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
What is agile marketing?
Agile Marketing takes many of the original values and principles from agile software development and applies them to the world of marketing. It is a way for marketing teams to work in a way that delivers greater results to the business.
For a comprehensive look at the latest trends, data and insights on agile marketing adoption, see our State of Agile Marketing Report.
Watch the video below from Jim Ewel provides an excellent overview where he describes agile marketing as an operating system for marketing.
There are many principles and best practices when it comes to using agile for marketing, but to keep things simple, we believe the two that are cited most often and that result in the biggest impact for marketing teams are:
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Speed - releasing work in small increments rather than big upfront bets (we have previously written about testing velocity). Large projects are broken down into chunks of work known as sprints.
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Customer focus - continually gathering customer feedback and always delivering work with the customer in mind (rather than delivering to a pre-conceived plan).
Agile marketing principles
The Agile Marketing Manifesto below sets out the principles in full. In day-to-day practice they come down to five habits:
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Focus on customer value and business outcomes, not activity and outputs.
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Deliver value early and often instead of waiting for perfection.
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Learn through experiments and data rather than opinions and conventions.
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Collaborate across functions instead of working in silos.
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Respond to change rather than following a static plan.
The Agile Marketing Manifesto
In June of 2012 the first conference for agile marketers was held in San Francisco. The conference, called SprintZero, gathered 35 agile marketing practitioners with the goal of developing a manifesto agile for marketing (following the precedent of the famous 2001 agile manifesto detailed above).
The Agile Marketing Manifesto was centred around 5 core values as follows:
To keep up with the speed and complexity of marketing today, we are adopting new ways of working:
- Focusing on customer value and business outcomes over activity and outputs
- Delivering value early and often over waiting for perfection
- Learning through experiments and data over opinions and conventions
- Cross-functional collaboration over silos and hierarchies
- Responding to change over following a static plan
In line with these values, in May 2023 Growth Method partnered with the Agile Marketing Alliance to further support experimentation and data-driven marketing practices.
Agile marketing process
The exact rituals vary by framework, but most agile marketing teams follow the same loop:
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Build a backlog. Capture every campaign and experiment idea in one place.
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Prioritise. Rank the backlog by its likely impact on the team’s goal.
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Plan a sprint. Commit to a small batch of work, usually one to two weeks.
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Launch and measure. Ship the work and record the before and after numbers.
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Review and adapt. Hold a review and retrospective, then feed what you learned into the next sprint.
Agile marketing methodology
There is no single agile marketing methodology. Teams usually start from one of four frameworks, compared below, and adapt it to their own work.
| Methodology | Best for | Cadence | Work-in-progress limits | Main trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scrum Marketing - Promotes rapid iterations and feedback loops. Enhances team accountability and clarity of roles. Structured approach simplifies complex project management. | Planned campaign work with clear roles | Fixed sprints, typically one to two weeks | Set by the scope committed to each sprint | Less room for urgent mid-sprint requests |
| Kanban Marketing - Enhances workflow visibility and team collaboration. Adaptable to changes in marketing priorities. Focuses on continuous delivery and efficiency. | A steady flow of small tasks and requests | Continuous, no fixed iterations | Explicit limits on each column of the board | Without sprints, review and learning steps are easy to skip |
| Scrumban Marketing - Merges the structure of Scrum with Kanban’s flexibility. Ideal for projects needing frequent reprioritisation. Supports continuous improvement and adaptability. | Teams that need structure and frequent reprioritisation | Short planning cycles with continuous flow | Column limits, with planning triggered when work runs low | Hybrid rules take time to agree and maintain |
| Lean Marketing - Maximises customer value with fewer resources. Encourages rapid experimentation and learning. Identifies and eliminates waste in processes. | Small teams with limited resources that need to learn fast | Build, measure, learn loops | Implicit, through small batches of work | Needs discipline to measure, or speed turns into busywork |
What we have discovered
At Growth Method we have implemented our agile marketing platform with a wide range of companies, from solo-founders to multi-national corporations. Here are some of what we have discovered along the way:
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In a fast-paced world of B2B business, sprints just make more sense.
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Many marketing teams are too busy delivering on outputs to find the real opportunities that will deliver outcomes.
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The more sprints you run, the more you’ll learn.
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It is easy to be flexible and agile as a small team, but things get exponentially harder as teams and companies grow.
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A huge percentage of work that is delivered in traditional marketing teams is waste.
About Growth Method
Agile marketing has always been a loop: plan a small bet, ship it, learn from the result, repeat. What has changed is who runs it. High-agency generalists and AI agents now run campaigns end to end, and long linear plans and output counts (posts published, tasks closed) tell you very little. Our view is that agile only works when every sprint is tied to one goal and judged on your own first-party data, not opinion.
That is what Growth Method is built for: the agentic marketing platform for B2B teams. Agents read your strategy and live data, draft campaigns and prioritise them by their likely effect on your goal, then go live with the before-metrics already recorded and analyse each finished campaign so you know what worked. Every campaign moves through five stages, from Backlog to Complete, and agents only act on their own when you allow it.
Get started to plan, launch, analyse and repeat with your team. First month free, no credit card required.
Frequently asked questions
What is agile marketing?
Agile marketing is a way of running marketing that applies agile principles to campaigns. Work is delivered in short sprints, tested against real customer data and adjusted quickly, rather than locked into a long, fixed plan.
What is the agile marketing methodology?
Agile marketing methodology describes the frameworks teams use to put agile into practice. The most common are Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban and Lean marketing, and many teams blend elements of more than one to fit how their work arrives.
What is the difference between Scrum and Kanban marketing?
Scrum organises work into fixed sprints with defined roles and a planned scope, while Kanban is a continuous flow of work visualised on a board with limits on work in progress. Scrum suits planned campaign work, Kanban suits a steady stream of small requests.
What are the agile marketing principles?
The core principles come from the Agile Marketing Manifesto. Focus on customer value and business outcomes over activity, deliver value early and often, learn through experiments and data, collaborate across functions and respond to change over following a static plan.
What is the agile marketing process?
Teams keep a backlog of ideas, prioritise them against a goal, plan a short sprint, launch the work, review the results and use what they learned to plan the next sprint. The loop repeats, so each sprint builds on evidence from the last.
Is agile marketing only for software companies?
No. Agile started in software development in 2001, but agile marketing is used by teams in B2B, B2C, agencies, banking, healthcare and many other industries. It suits any team that needs to respond quickly to customers and market change.