Our annual State of Agile Marketing reports consistently reveals a lack of understanding about Agile marketing as the primary barrier standing between marketers and greater agility. Agile marketing webinars and podcasts offer a great way to bridge this gap.
There's lots of fantastic written Agile marketing content, including tons of free resources here on AgileSherpas.com (see also Death of a Marketer by yours truly, Hacking Marketing by Scott Brinker, and Scrum: Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland, for starters).
But sitting down and powering through a massive blog post or a whole book isn’t always the right move (or the preferred means of learning).
Things like podcasts and webinars may be more inline with some learning styles and opportunities, so we’re pulling together a list of these additional pieces here.
Note: some of these may require registration to view.
Speakers: Scott Adams, Creative Project Manager, Starbucks; Nicholas Scholz, Solutions Marketing Manager, Workfront
Summary: Experts are saying that Agile Marketing practices will be ubiquitous by 2020, so how can you get your team started and ahead of the curve?
To get started will require choosing the right variation of Agile, and being willing to assess and reassess in order to get the best from your people. This webinar will answer the questions, “What kinds of Agile might work for us?”, “What should a new marketing team be looking for when we assess our methodology?” and “What kinds of questions should we be asking to get the most out of Agile?”
We establish a series of six actionable steps—using insights from industry experts—to becoming an Agile marketing team.
Speakers: Raechel Duplain, Sr. Marketing Program Manager, Workfront
Summary: In the ever-changing world of digital marketing, operational efficiency, quick turn around times, testing, and adapting to change are crucial to success. However, 46% of marketers are working with a mix of project management ideologies, and many more continue to struggle with lost productivity, missed deadlines, and too much rigidity.
Agile Marketing is a growing trend among marketers that is proven to yield great results. The problem is, most marketers know next to nothing about Agile, and they don’t have easy access to Agile experts who can help.
This webinar will provide a 101 level education about Agile for marketers, including:
Speakers: Andrea Fryrear, Co-founder, Agile Marketing Coach and Trainer, AgileSherpas; Zoe Randolph, Content Marketing Associate, Kapost
Summary: When we teamed up with AgileSherpas to survey hundreds of marketers for the 1st Annual State of Agile Marketing Report, we found that 37% of marketing teams are using an Agile process. And that number is only going to grow, with 61% of traditional marketers planning to go Agile within the next year.
Want to find out how your team can increase its agility?
See what we found out when we sat down with Andrea Fryrear, Co-founder, Agile Marketing Coach and Trainer
Webinar Highlights
Speakers: Andrea Fryrear, Co-founder, Agile Marketing Coach and Trainer, AgileSherpas; Matt Dion, CEO, Mintent
Summary: In an increasingly crowded marketplace, marketers are struggling to rise above the noise with better quality content, and more of it. With multiple campaigns, a myriad of content assets at different stages in the workflow cycle, globally distributed teams, and ramped targets it’s no wonder content marketers are feeling the burn.
But Agile Marketing is changing the face of marketing for the better. Becoming agile is the answer for marketers who want to work smarter, not harder, and get more done.
In this 45-minute webinar, our speakers will show you how it is possible for any marketing team to adopt an Agile Marketing methodology within their own organization. Stop pouring time and resources into tactical work, and start managing more efficiently and with strategic intent.
Speakers: Andrea Fryrear, Co-founder, Agile Marketing Coach and Trainer; David Lesue, Creative Director, Workfront
Summary: Are you struggling to keep pace with rapidly changing customer needs and market demands? Slowed down by organizational silos, hierarchies, and processes? It may be time to get Agile.
More than 90% of marketers who have adopted Agile marketing say it has improved their speed to market for ideas, products, and campaigns.
Whether your marketing organization is just curious, starting the transition or all in on Agile, the time to learn about Agile marketing is now! Join Agile marketing expert Andrea Fryrear, and Workfront Creative Director David Lesué, as they explore what it means to be an Agile marketer and provide practical tips on how your organization can make the transition.
Attend this webinar and learn how to:
Speakers: Tina Moffett, Senior Analyst, Forrester
NOTE: Forrester membership or $300 fee required
Summary: Customers expect brands to connect with them in the right context at the moment of need. Marketers cannot afford to stick to the annual marketing planning process; they must have flexibility to shift budgets to accommodate for today’s savvy consumers.
Marketers must adopt an agile planning process that has clear guardrails for goal setting, flexibility to test media allocation across channels, and integrated analysis for optimized executions. This webinar provides marketers with the guardrails needed for a more agile marketing planning and execution.
Agenda:
Refocus the marketing organization to plan in a flexible way that incorporates guardrails to better set goals, test strategies, and optimize investments in-flight.
Find tangible next steps for moving toward a more flexible marketing planning process.
Speakers: Andrea Fryrear, Co-founder, Agile Marketing Coach and Trainer, AgileSherpas; Carolyn Ghaie, Director of Activation Services, Aprimo
Summary: How a well-structured marketing organization is required to enable agile marketing and how to get started. Also touches on technology’s role in the overall solution.
Speakers: Tina Moffett, Senior Analyst, Forrester; Eric Yale, Principle Consultant, Forrester
Summary: Marketers struggle to keep up with their customers’ changing needs and preferences. Why? In part, it's because marketers dawdle on the drawing board while buyers go at lightning speed from awareness to decision to transaction.
Fortunately, there’s a solution: an agile marketing planning process that permits quick shifts in strategy and fast responses to today’s savvy customers.
During this webinar, Senior Analyst Tina Moffett and Principal Consultant Eric Yale discuss how you can use agile methodologies to transform your marketing approach. They will help you:
Speakers: Elizabeth Shaw, Research Director, Gartner
Summary: The modern marketing organization shoulders broader, more complex performance expectations than ever. Marketing leaders must build a diverse, adaptable range of team capabilities, while keeping their brands competitive amid rapid marketplace shifts.
In this webinar, discover the four steps you must take to build an agile marketing organization that can address rapidly evolving market demands.
Discussion Topics:
Speakers: Andrea Fryrear, Co-founder, Agile Marketing Coach and Trainer, AgileSherpas
Summary: The worlds of software and marketing are converging, but that doesn’t mean the two groups look the same when practicing Agile. Scrum, while still the dominant choice for developers, often fails to translate in a marketing environment.
But by incorporating more flow-based practices from the Kanban world, marketers can take Agile and make it their own.
This session draws on new research from hundreds of marketers, as well as on-the-ground experience from an Agile marketing coach. So if you’re struggling with Agile outside of IT, you may need to start going with the flow.
Speakers: Yuval Yeret, CTO, AgileSparks; Peter Herbert, Terminus
Summary: In this webinar, you’ll hear firsthand about Agile marketing and why it gives you a competitive advantage in your marketing operations. Agile Marketing experts from AgileSparks and Terminus will dive into the strategy and tactics behind Agile marketing.
They’ll also share an example of how a leading B2B account-based marketing team was able to successfully achieve marketing agility.
Yuval Yeret of AgileSparks, and Peter Herbert of Terminus cover the following:
Speakers: Meagan French, Director of Marketing, Redbooth
Summary: Implementing agile at the team level typically improves productivity by 50-75%, yet internal marketing teams and agencies still struggle to adapt the methodology that was originally invented for product development.
In this informative webinar, Director of Marketing Meagan French examines how the Redbooth marketing team uses agile to help the team be more productive and drive bottom line revenue. We’ll focus on practical steps that marketing leaders can take to implement a holistic, iterative approach to improve team productivity and focus on the projects that grow the business.
In this webinar, you will learn:
Speakers: Andrea Fryrear, AgileSherpas and Jeff Julian, Enterprise Marketer
Summary: Agile marketing is one of the best ways to create a content marketing program that produces high-quality work consistently over a long period of time, but how do we get there from here?
This webinar will show you how.
Andrea Fryrear, a certified Scrum Master, Product Owner, and agile marketing practitioner, and Jeff Julian, a CMO who has been practicing agile for over a decade, will go beyond high-level theoretical discussions of agile principles to show you agile tactics for your content marketing team.
In this on-demand recording of Andrea and Jeff's webinar, you will learn:
Speakers: Bruce Brien, Chief Strategy Officer at Hive9 and Anji Ismail, NewsCred’s Director of Product
Summary: A common misconception about the agile marketing methodology is that it means you don’t need a documented strategy. But in fact, the opposite is true. Take a look at these two pros discuss the ins and outs of agile marketing’s impact on content and planning.
You’ll learn:
Speakers: Andrea Fryrear, Co-founder, Agile Marketing Coach and Trainer, AgileSherpas and Ed Breault, CMO, Aprimo
Summary: What’s Agile Marketing? If you don’t know you betta ask somebody, or just listen to this episode.
Join Aprimo's CMO Ed Breault and AgileSherpa's President and Lead Trainer Andrea Fryrear for a retrospective discussion of...
Speakers: Dave Dame, Professional Scrum Trainer
Summary: Dave explores how Scrum can help marketers deliver better products faster while collaborating with their teams and continuously learning about their customers. Dave shares real-life examples of how marketers have used Scrum to move their products forward.
There's nothing better than a podcast for long drives, boring treadmills runs, or lengthy plane rides. Here's a collection of some of the best Agile marketing podcasts out there for your listening pleasure.
From the Lean Agile Management Podcast by Kanbanize
Speakers: Yuval Yeret, CTO, AgileSparks
Summary: In this episode of Lean Agile Management Podcast, Yuval Yeret explains what Agile Marketing is and what it is not. He reveals the problems of the traditional approach to marketing and shows how you can set your team on the path to Agile avoiding the most common mistakes.
We got the answers to these questions:
From the Actionable Content Marketing Podcast
Speaker: Jeff Julian, co-founder of Enterprise Marketer
Summary: When it comes to marketing, all of us want to work smarter and faster. In order to do that, marketers need to have not only the know-how, but also excellent project management and organization skills.
Some of the topics we’ll talk about today include:
Speaker: Roland Smart, VP of Social and Community Marketing, Oracle
Summary: Roland Smart is both a student and visionary of marketing practices, procedures and continuous improvement. Not being a formally trained marketer, Roland is constantly learning and feeding his results back in a test driven development process.
He performs his own research for his agile marketing podcast, has authored a book on the same subject and spends is daytime hours at Oracle as VP of Social and Community Marketing.
In this episode, Roland and I talk about Agile marketing and how traditional marketing planning has become extinct and given way to more nimble Agile methods. Innovation is fueling marketing resource turnover in Fortune 500 brands and concurrently surrendering market share by disrupters in just about every industry.
Roland gives us some statistics on what he sees in his own research about organizations making a successful transformation to agile marketing and what steps you can take to begin the journey.
Speakers: Katie Tuohy, Account Director, ClearEdge Marketing
Summary: Agile marketing is based on concepts that were developed for software development, which has long used the strategy to focus on rapid iterations of project execution. Katie shares how in a past position as VP of Global Marketing, her marketing team took the same approach as her company’s software team to become more productive and focused on high value activity.
Her team adopted the tenets of agile marketing and achieved:
Wondering how agile marketing works? It still involves a long-term strategic plan like traditional marketing, but agile focuses on running highly focused projects within two-week sprints.
Using a physical scrum board, similar to those that developers use, it shows the backlog of work, to-do list, in-process items, completed items and waiting list items. This offers incomparable visibility into project progress.
Katie also explains how agile marketing is beneficial in large organizations where there are a lot of requests being made from outside of the department.
For example, by the sales team, tech team, etc. Agile is also incredibly helpful when a marketing team simply has a lot on their plate! Agile marketing lets teams stay focused on completing one project at a time and holds everyone accountable, while at simultaneously keeping overarching company goals top of mind.
Speakers: Kate Moore, VP of Marketing, LeanKit
Summary: What does Agile and the Kanban framework look like at the Leankit marketing department? Their VP of Marketing shares learnings from the journey of her 20 person marketing group.
Speakers: Andrea Fryrear, Co-founder, Agile Marketing Coach and Trainer, AgileSherpas
Summary: Massive marketing campaigns with bright shiny content are sexy. They showcase all the bells and whistles that a team has to offer their company and the audience.
But are they the best method in the long run?
Andrea posits that the answer is no.
Borrowing from the world of software development, she and her AgileSherpas are retraining the marketing world to work smaller, harder, and leaner.
Focusing on smaller campaigns with limited roll-outs while the content is still developing allows your team to respond to customer feedback in close to real-time. Being able to make quick adjustments early on leads to a campaign that is ultimately more relevant, more engaging, and more successful.
To support this approach of small yet highly adaptive projects, marketers need to cut the fat off the projects they are working on. Keeping the plate half or two-thirds full allows for a cushion to adapt and react as customers begin responding to your campaigns. Lastly, breaking down silos and ensuring there is a natural cross-functional flow is necessary to limit the number of project handoffs during the campaign.
Speakers: Jeff Julian, co-founder of Enterprise Marketer
Summary: An agile marketer isn’t necessarily someone who is up to date on the latest trends and able to create content quickly based on what their audience wants to consume.
While that type of marketer is absolutely necessary, every marketing department must be full of people who can wear multiple hats. In this podcast, Jeff Julian, author of Agile Marketing: Building Endurance for Your Content Marketing Team, shares how marketers should “major” in certain disciplines, but “minor” in others: Marketers must be agile.
Speakers: Stu Fisher, Principal Consultant, Sentient Consulting
Summary: Topics covered include:
Speakers: Andrea Fryrear, President and Lead Trainer, AgileSherpas
Speakers: Many!
Of course this list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the Marketing Agility Podcast, co-hosted by Roland Smart and Frank Days. It’s been around for a loooong time, and it’s had some spectacular guests (as you’ll see from this abbreviated list).
So if you’re not a subscriber, go fix that now. You'll also find links to several specific episodes below.
Speakers: Many!
Hosts: Eva Jackson and Muhammad Yasin
Billed as "the premier podcast for process-minded marketers," you'll find tons of real talk from practitioners here.
Speaker: Justin Zimmerman, The RedX
Summary: In this episode we talk with Justin Zimmerman who leads the content team at The RedX a company that develops software to support real-estate professionals.
This is Justin’s first foray into adopting Agile—like many marketers he’s educating himself and learning on the job. We’ll hear how he’s approaching adoption, what’s working, and what’s not.
We were interested in hearing how he scoped the teams work based on words written per iteration. He also, shared some interesting insights on how he won executive buy-in by representing their previous work in the context of Agile boards.
This episode offers inspiration for those content marketers that are getting started.
Speaker: Jayson Gehri
Summary: In this episode we interview Jayson Gehri who serves as the marketing director for IBM’s Hybrid Data Management group. This is Jayson’s second tour implementing Agile having previously worked in the Dell marketing group.
This time around they’re taking a different, more flexible, approach to rolling out Agile. With full CMO buy-in and support, the organization is about a year into the transformation.
In this session we’ll hear from Jayson about how he came to Agile, what he’s learned along the way, and how they are approaching scale at IBM. We tend to think of companies like Big Blue as committed to well defined processes and “interlock” but our conversation seems to indicate that big changes are afoot—at least in the marketing function at IBM.
Speaker: Nicci Shaw, Intelligent Demand
Summary: This episode features a conversation with Nicci Shaw of Intelligent Demand, a full-service integrated marketing agency. She’s a Scrum certified marketer who spent time at web-design shops and has significant experience working with technical teams.
Like many marketers, that was her introduction to Agile. We don’t hear from that many agency leaders so if you’re at an agency or work with them this conversation should be of interest.
Intelligent Demand’s clients typically do not have an Agile practice in-house already, so Nicci talks about how to introduce Agile without presenting it as “process change” or outside the scope of the engagement.
Some of the other topics we touch on include:
Speaker: Ferdinand Goetzen, Recruitee
Summary: In this session we’re thrilled to be joined by Ferdinand Goetzen who serves as the head of growth at Recruitee. Ferdinand is based in the Netherlands but came up working for a number of companies across Europe including The Growth Tribe Academy.
In this session, he speaks about how his Agile journey was inspired by The Lean Startup and our good friend Eric Reis. Today his focus is on fueling growth through experiments and testing that are coordinated with both product and marketing teams.
Listen in to learn about:
Speaker: Cameron van Orman, CA Technologies
Summary: In this session we’re thrilled to bring on another marketer from CA Technologies, Cameron van Orman is the Senior Vice President of Product Marketing. He oversees product marketing for the entire CA portfolio and reports into the CMO and the Chief Product Officer.
In the past, we’ve spoken with people on Cameron’s team so this is an opportunity to up-level the conversation and understand the perspective of a senior executive.
This session touches on a range of topics related to the challenges of scaling Agile. Listen in to get a glimpse into:
Speaker: Rachel Krug, Right Networks
Summary: In this episode we talk with Rachel Krug who leads the marketing function at Right Networks, a firm that helps companies bring their accounting systems to the cloud. Rachel was familiar with Agile from her work as a product manager at Constant Contact, but found herself adapting Agile for the marketing function in her current role.
She manages a small cross-functional team including a content lead, field marketer, marketing ops lead, and a partnerships leader. Plus, like most marketers at smaller firms, she relies on outside contractors and service providers.
When Rachel arrived the team was operating in a reactive fashion without a rigorous operations or planning practice. In this session, she talks about introducing Agile with a handful of rituals and how those have made a huge impact on how the team functions and the results they produce.
Listen in to learn about why she focused measurement and tracking out of the gate, and how Agile later influenced a major product launch.
Speaker: Kirstin Falk, Charles Schwab
Summary: In this episode we welcome back an early guest from the show, Kirstin Falk who serves as the managing director of brand innovation and social at Charles Schwab. When we originally spoke with Kirsten she was leading the marketing function at Red Brick Media.
In this episode Kirstin speaks about why she did not introduce Agile right away, in favor of deeply understanding the endemic culture at Schwab.
In fact, it took a full year before she started introducing the approach. Four years later they are still at the beginning of the Agile journey but she’s seen significant mindset change.
Where there was resistance previously, she sees more awareness and significant demand for Agile. In fact, Agile training is now available to all marketing employees.
Speaker: Mathew Sweezey, Salesforce
Summary: In this episode we talk with Mathew Sweezey an author and speaker who serves as a marketing insights leader at Salesforce. Mathew joined Salesforce via their acquisition of Pardot, a marketing automation service, and was introduced to Agile through a close working relationship with the development team there.
In this session, he talks about how Agile is becoming the default operating system for marketing—though he acknowledges that many marketers are still not yet aware of an Agile Marketing movement. In fact, he shares that his own experience with Agile started before his team called it Agile.
Mathew is a content marketing expert to follow—he educates internal teams, clients and prospects about Agile marketing and marketing modernization. Enjoy! Also, in this session, Mathew mentions a film called Art&Copy that’s worth watching.
Speaker: Claire Drumond, Atlassian
Summary: For this episode we reached out to Claire Drumond who is a content strategist and product marketer at Atlassian. In this episode we touch on:
Fair disclosure, we’ve been Atlassian users over the years so bring that as context to our conversation. We look forward to bringing Claire back in 6 months or so after Atlassian has done more to integrate Trello into their portfolio.
At present on the most common things that we hear from marketers is that Jira is built for technical users rather than business users. Presumably Trello will help address this but that discussion was a bit premature for this episode.
Speaker: Marina Simonova, Agile Space
Summary: In this episode we’re expanding our horizons a bit by interviewing Marina Simonova about her work bringing the Agile approach to marketing and sales teams.
Marina is a Moscow-based Agile Coach with Agile Space and has worked with more Agile sales teams than anyone else we’ve met. She’s a certified coach and Scrum Master who has found techniques for bridging the marketing/sales divide with Agile practices.
Marina’s recent article 10 Steps of Agile transformation of sales is a great primer on why Agile is a good fit for sales, how to get started, and what some of the most common challenges area.
It's fascinating to hear from a practitioner who is coming to Agile from the sales side first. In this conversation we discuss:
Speaker: Mark Verone, Gogo
Summary: In this episode we talk with Mark Verone about his work adapting Agile to marketing and operations at Gogo. I initially got to know Mark through a six-part Forbes series on the topic of Agile Marketing. If you haven't come across this content it’s worth a read.
In this conversation we really delve into operational aspects of Agile. Mark has a proper enterprise context that means integrating many systems that support his practice. Thus the conversation covers both marketing practices but also some of the platforms that support the practices.
Mark’s team relies heavily on Jira. It's interesting because many marketing teams initially struggle with more robust solutions like Jira and prefer lighter-weight applications like Asana or LeanKit. There’s some fascinating bits in here about how he’s customized workflows to support his team practice.
We also touch on why Mark’s team gravitated to Scrumban and how they’ve organized themselves with respect to aspects of the supply chain he manages.
Additional episodes are available here.
Speaker: Alan Annis, SWD Urethane
Summary: The podcast is hosted by Alan Annis, Marketing Director at SWD Urethane. In this episode, he is joined by Andrea Fryrear, Agile Trainer and Coach and Co-Founder of AgileSherpas. Andrea shares her best practices for Agile Marketing, as well as tips for setting up a new Agile team. Some of the topics covered include:
Speaker: Andrea Fryrear, Frank Days, Software CMO and Startup Advisor
Summary: In this episode of the Marketing Agility Podcast, Andrea Fryrear of AgileSherpas joins Frank Days to discuss Scaling Agile Marketing. She shares stories from her recent client work along with insights that she has collected as she collected research for her upcoming book. Some of the highlights include:
Speaker: John Cass, Co-founder of the Boston Agile Marketing Meetup
Summary: The pilot episode of the podcast features Alan Belniak, Senior Product Manager at VHB, who shares his experience drawing from a decades long career at various B2B tech companies. Alan gives you the unique perspective of a person who started his career in tech and later transitioned to a marketing role. Tune in to hear about:
Speaker: Alan Annis, SWD Urethane
Summary: The podcast is hosted by Alan Annis. In this episode, he is once again joined by Andrea Fryrear of AgileSherpas. This time, Andrea shares the worst practices for Agile Marketing and solutions for the situations when you might already be guilty of one or multiple worst practices. Tune in to hear the long list of mistakes that you should avoid at all costs to achieve true marketing agility. Here’s a glimpse of the mistakes that Alan and Andrea cover in their conversation:
Speaker: Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org
Summary: In this series of five episodes, Dave West is joined by David Carmichael of Avanade and the Research Director of SiriusDecisions Simon Jones. Together, they examine the benefits of agility in marketing, how an agile operating model affects marketing, brand ownership and more. Here’s what each episode covers in closer detail:
Speaker: Frank Days, Software CMO and Startup Advisor
Summary: In this episode of the Marketing Agility Podcast, Kiley Vorreiter, a creative program manager at Vrbo (formerly HomeAway) shares her experience in scaling Agile marketing. She gives an interesting perspective from the position of someone who is in (what she refers to as)the “messy middle” of scaling agile. Tune in to:
Speaker: Scott Ingram, Strategic Account Manager, Relationship One
Summary: Episode 71 of Relationship One’s podcast features Todd Linden, eMarketing Manager at Thermo Fisher Scientific. Todd gives insight about a project his team recently took. They combined content and agile marketing to help his colleagues be involved in the entire customer journey from start to finish. Tune in to learn how to:
Speaker: Benjamin Shapiro, Brand Development & Growth Marketing Strategy Consultant, benjshap LLC
Summary: In the past year, the Martech Podcast has released five consecutive episodes on topics related to Agile marketing. In their camp, Agile Marketing Week featured Roland Smart, VP of Marketing at Pantheon and focused on:
Speaker: Eric Piela, Senior Marketing Manager, WEX
Summary: In this episode of Actionable Marketing Podcast by CoSchedule, Eric Piela is joined by Andrea Fryrear, AgileSherpas co-founder, and Agile marketing coach. During the podcast, she shares findings from a survey of 447 marketers identified as the top benefits of implementing an Agile marketing approach to their work. Some of the highlights of the episode include:
Speakers: Andrea Fryrear, Co-founder, Agile Marketing Coach and Trainer, AgileSherpas
Summary: What’s Agile Marketing? If you don’t know you better ask somebody, or just listen to this episode.
Andrea Fryrear joins the If You Market They Shall Come Podcast to discuss all things Agile Marketing including:
We’ll keep adding to this list as the topic continues to explode over the coming months.
If you’ve been on/seen/heard/ a piece of content that you’d like to see on this list, let me know at andrea[at]agilesherpas[dot]com.
Happy learning!