3 Key Takeaways From The
2019 State of Agile Marketing Report

Today saw the launch of this year's State of Agile Marketing 2019 report from AgileSherpas and CoSchedule which captures the current trends and attitudes around Agile Marketing. The report provides insights on aspects such as adoption, benefits, barriers and practices based on a sample of 400+ marketers (note: 96% were based in North America).

These are my top 3 takeaways:

1. Agile Marketing adoption spans companies and marketing teams of different sizes

32% of marketing departments have adopted at least some aspects of Agile Marketing, compared to 50% who are still using a traditional approach to planning, and 15% who are doing things on an ad hoc basis with no pre-planning or defined processes for managing incoming work.

46% of those marketing departments using Agile have been practicing it for less than 2 years, meaning that it's still a relatively nascent way-of-working for marketers. That said, 50% of traditional marketing teams claim to be planning to implement Agile within the next year.

Agile Marketing seems to span the spectrum of business and marketing team sizes. 45% of Agile Marketing teams operate in businesses with fewer than 100 employees, whilst 31% are in companies with 1000+.

Similarly, in terms of team size 40% of Agile Marketing organisations have 10 or fewer members (including freelancers), whilst 20% have more than 70.

This goes to show that Agile represents significant advantages to both small AND large businesses to manage their growing complexity and accelerating pace of change.

2. Lack of knowledge is the biggest barrier

The biggest barrier preventing marketing teams from implementing an Agile approach is a lack of training or knowledge amongst 31% of respondents.

Interestingly, the third biggest response to this question was no support from management or executives at 11%. This is up from 5% in 2018 suggesting that it could be becoming more of an issue for teams looking to move.

3. Majority are using hybrid Agile methodologies

54% of Agile Marketing teams are using a hybrid approach combining multiple different Agile methodologies together, an increase from 44% last year. This shows how Agile adoption in a marketing context is different to software development. You can't just try to rigidly apply Agile to marketing teams in the same way that it's being applied in other functions such as development, operations or IT. Marketing is different and has its own specific needs and nuances. Marketing teams that therefore use a more flexible, hybrid approach to Agile are shown to be 2-3X more likely to see the benefits.