16 Awesome Agile Marketing Resources to Train Your Busy Team

Your marketing calendar is full. It keeps your team constantly working on projects you already know will impact your audience and improve your bottom line. And you know that agile marketing would help everyone work with less overwhelm. If only you had the time to train your team on it so they could work more efficiently—to achieve more while working less. Here’s the good news: in this guide, we’ve listed 16 agile marketing resources you can use to train your team. These resources range from articles and short videos to books and longer video courses. No matter how starved for time you are, there’s at least one resource you can start with immediately. Then, build up from there!

Table of Contents

1. CoSchedule’s Agile Marketing Guide (Online, Kindle, Paperback)
2. Actionable Marketing Institute: How to Implement Agile Marketing (Online Course)
3. AgileSherpas: Introduction to Agile Marketing (Online Course)
4. Agile Manifesto
5. Lynda.com: Agile Marketing Foundations (Online Course)
6. AgileMarketing.net: Templates For Agile Marketing Implementation
7. McKinsey: Agile Marketing - A Step-By-Step Guide (Article)
8. Udemy: Agile Marketing Training (Online Course)
9. Simplilearn: What Is Agile Marketing and Why Do You Need It (Article + Certification)
10. AgileSparks: Lean/Agile Marketing (Workshop)
11. MarTech: Agile Marketing Advantage (Workshop)
12. Death of a Marketer Book (Kindle, Paperback, Audiobook)
13. ANA: Agile Marketing for Marketers (Half Day Workshop)
14. Lean Agile Marketing Book (Kindle, Paperback)
15. Whiteboard Friday: Agile Marketing (Video)
16. VentureBeat: Agile Marketing is About Evolutionary Survival (Article)

CoSchedule’s Agile Marketing Guide (Online, Kindle, Paperback)

Our agile marketing guide helps you get started with the agile scrum framework from a marketing perspective. You’ll be able to set up the same type of workflows that helped CoSchedule grow this fast. Learn to set up a cross functional marketing team, use sprint planning, run daily standup meetings, and hit both your deadlines and marketing goals every time. The guide is available online, as well as in Kindle and print edition.

Actionable Marketing Institute: How to Implement Agile Marketing (Online Course)

Actionable Marketing Institute is a library of 25+ premium, on-demand marketing courses to help you level up your marketing.  One featured course is the Agile Marketing Course, where our resident agile marketing expert Ben Sailer will show you how to implement agile workflows from start to finish. Whatever your current process is today, you’ll be able to start improving your workflows immediately and create better work in less time.  Cost: $99 - or unlock all 25+ courses in the Actionable Marketing Institute for only $250/year.

AgileSherpas: Introduction to Agile Marketing (Online Course)

The Introduction to Agile Marketing course by AgileSherpas is a self-paced course that will get you up to speed on agile marketing in the matter of 80 minutes. With the fast-changing marketing landscape, it’s easy to get stuck with your outdated systems to manage your marketing workflows. With this course, you’ll learn why the agile methodology fits modern marketing, how to implement agile marketing functions in your team, how to drive the adoption of agile, and more.

Agile Manifesto

Although many types of teams have implemented the agile methodology as the core project management style, it originates in software development. Back in 2001, a group of 17 software practitioners wrote what became the Agile Manifesto. It’s based on four core values:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan

They’ve also added that “while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.” You can view the agile manifesto and download a PDF copy of it along with the 12 principles of agile. Hang the agile manifesto printout where you and your team can see it as a daily reminder of the importance of doing the work that matters most.

Lynda.com: Agile Marketing Foundations (Online Course)

Get the hang of agile marketing with the Lynda course on agile marketing foundations. In this intermediate course, you’ll learn the values of agile marketing and get the workflows you can tailor and apply in your company and your marketing team. Another focus of the course is highlighting the importance of data and measuring results in agile marketing, as well as how to create backlogs (which you can do in CoSchedule’s Idea Board), sprints, and roadmaps. The course is less than 75 minutes long, broken down into bite-sized, 3-minute videos that will get you moving in no time.

AgileMarketing.net: Templates For Agile Marketing Implementation

“I often tell my clients who are just getting started with agile marketing to implement it in an agile fashion. In other words, start small and iterate, learning through experimentation and measuring what’s working and what’s not.” This is how Jim Ewel of AgileMarketing.net advises to get going with agile. Luckily, he makes it easy to do so with the help of his agile marketing templates. From marketing scorecards to templates for user stories and project scope, you can get started right away, no fuss or huge changes for you or your team. Simply download the template you want in a single click, and you’re good to go!

McKinsey: Agile Marketing - A Step-By-Step Guide (Article)

This guide from McKinsey is a comprehensive guide on putting the agile marketing team together. It breaks down the concept of the agile war-room team and analyzes what an agile marketing team does. You’ll learn about aligning with leadership, data analysis, testing, and iterations. Then, you’ll learn how to scale your agile approach up so that your entire company can operate in an agile way. The article goes on to share a case study with a 30% customer satisfaction improvement thanks to implementing agile practices into the marketing operations of a retailer. You can also download the article as a PDF for easy reference later on.

Udemy: Agile Marketing Training (Online Course)

The Agile Marketing Training on Udemy will help you and your team work smarter instead of harder to reach your goals. The course dives into the history, values, and principles of agile to lay the groundwork. From there, it dives into team roles within the scrum framework, planning your sprints, using the kanban methodology (our Kanban Project Dashboard is great for this), and reviewing your sprints. Finally, you’ll get to learn from real-life agile marketing case studies from teams of all sizes. The course is 2.5 hours long and comes with 9 downloadable resources.

Simplilearn: What Is Agile Marketing and Why Do You Need It (Article + Certification)

This is an easy to read and reference article that dives into the agile marketing manifesto, the history and background of agile marketing, its application in companies around the world, and tips on learning it. From here, the article dives into the importance of being excellent in agile and scrum before applying the agile methodology to your marketing processes. This will teach you the universal framework that will help you succeed with agile marketing. For this, Simplilearn offers the Agile Scrum Master Certification Training. It includes 20 hours of instructor-led training and 16 hours of content, live Scrum games, a live project and a case study, and an exam.

AgileSparks: Lean/Agile Marketing (Workshop)

This 2-day workshop by AgileSparks starts from the basics and key drivers of agile marketing and builds that foundation up with implementation in planning and execution using scrum, kanban, and scrumban. After that, you’ll dive into real-life application of agile marketing through case studies and scaling agile marketing. You’ll end the second day with planning your own agile marketing implementation.

MarTech: Agile Marketing Advantage (Workshop)

MarTech is running an Agile Marketing Advantage workshop that helps marketers deliver high quality, customer-centric work more efficiently. The workshop covers creating the agile mindset, different frameworks to put agile into practice, structuring your team the right way, and taking your entire company closer to the agile way of working.

Death of a Marketer Book (Kindle, Paperback, Audiobook)

The Death of a Marketer title for a book may indicate what’s inside: marketers have ruined everything, and many are merely surviving in the new era of marketing. Audiences demand excellence, and simply getting by is no longer enough. In the words of the author Andrea Fryrear (who also runs the MarTech workshop mentioned above), marketing excellence requires agility. This book will take you through sprinting, estimating your workload, sprint reviews, kanbans for marketing, and more. And if you’re struggling to make a business case for agile to your company’s leadership, this book will help you with that, too.

ANA: Agile Marketing for Marketers (Half Day Workshop)

Want to get a hands-on agile marketing implementation experience—one that gives you the chance to move fast and get immediate feedback? ANA (Association of National Advertisers) runs a half day workshop on Agile Marketing for Marketers aimed at marketers at any level that plan and/or execute marketing campaigns, as well as executives and team leaders. This workshop won’t just enable you to create your own agile marketing plan, but also to sell it within your company, improve collaboration, and empower your team(s) to iterate quickly. The result: efficient and effective marketing with better ROI. Check the ANA schedule for the next available workshops and their locations (the upcoming one is in New York).

Lean Agile Marketing Book (Kindle, Paperback)

When 11 experts on agile marketing come together, the result is a value-packed book you need in your agile toolkit. Beyond the foundations of agile marketing, you’ll learn to develop the agile mindset, understand different personality types, structure your agile team, and build a customer journey map that aligns with agile marketing. The book is also packed with 9 case studies on implementing agile in the real world marketing and sales teams. You’ll be able to empower every one of your team members to adopt lean agile marketing as the foundation of their everyday work so they can efficiently work on tasks and projects that matter most.

Whiteboard Friday: Agile Marketing (Video)

We mentioned Jim Ewel of AgileMarketing.net a few sections earlier when we shared his templates. Here’s another gem from him: he was a guest presenter on the widely popular Whiteboard Friday run by the folks at Moz. This video will take you through the 6 values of agile marketing:

• Responding to change
• Making rapid iterations
• Testing and data
• Running many small experiments
• Individuals and interactions over one-size-fits-all approach
• Collaboration

Jim also takes us through the 4 benefits of agile marketing. All of that in 7 minutes—pretty impressive!

VentureBeat: Agile Marketing is About Evolutionary Survival (Article)

Yes, agile marketing means we took the agile methodology from software development and applied it to the marketing environment. But no, agile marketing is not agile software development. This article from Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, the CMO at Mozilla, reminds us that marketing isn’t software—it has emotion, brand, persuasion, other elements in its foundation that make it impossible to base marketing on a single set of best practices. The article also shares ideas on convincing your management to buy into applying agile practices to marketing. If this is something you’re struggling with, definitely check it out on VentureBeat.

What’s Stopping You From Training Your Agile Marketing Team?

There you have it—the 16 resources to train your team of agile marketers, easy to get start with right away. Remember: training your team is one part of the process. If you're interested in comprehensive training that covers agile marketing, scrum project management, & more, check out the Actionable Marketing Institute.  The other? Giving them the right tools to implement agile principles and excel at their jobs. AMI's Agile Marketing course outlines tools, templates, & other resources to help you easily (and quickly) implement Agile Marketing within your organization. What are you waiting for? Start learning today.