Okay, I was just kidding on April Fools’ Day with hyperagile marketing. Apologies to any of you who spent the past week planking through your team updates.
But I am excited to share with you some exciting news about real agile marketing adoption. AgileSherpas and Forrester just released their new State of Agile Marketing 2021 report, and it reveals an important milestone: for the first time, the majority (51%) of marketers surveyed reporting using agile marketing methods in their work.
This is up from 42% in last year’s report and 32% in 2019. That’s a pretty remarkable trendline, given the cultural and operational changes that agile adoption often requires organizations to embrace.
Remarkable, but honestly not surprising.
Pretty much every marketer on the planet has gotten the memo by now about the need to not only engage in digital channels and experiences — but to fully leverage the inherently malleable and adaptive nature of the digital medium when doing so. This is why marketers now have so much in common with software developers. Iteration, experimentation, rapid feedback loops: these are the mechanisms that enable marketing to thrive in a digital world.
76% of agile marketers say their department can handle fast-paced digital marketing work. And in case someone’s going to trot out the old trope that “agile might be fast-paced, but it’s not strategic” — note that agile marketing teams are consistently more strategically aligned (87%) than traditional or ad hoc marketing organizations:
That’s because real agile management isn’t a vague notion of simply being nimble. It’s a set of relatively well-defined practices that were designed to harness the fluidity of operating in a rapidly-evolving digital environment in the service of clear prioritization and performance measurement.
So where does agile get applied in marketing now? Pretty much everywhere:
There are a ton of other great insights in the full report. I highly encourage you to check it out.
No daily plank required.
