Innovative campaigns might help you gain ground, but traditional project management erodes your marketing efforts. Content doesn’t write itself, so when ambitious plans get derailed and you have to decide which project moves forward and which stays behind, your marketing isn’t reaching its full potential.
Shouldn’t your project management approach change as marketing initiatives and technology change? The industry is rumbling that marketing is at a crossroads, full of potential but trying to stand out in crowded channels and shifting workloads to already lean marketing teams.
The tech industry is shifting to Agile project management to deliver products and services faster and more efficiently. Explore Agile project management with us. We’re discussing the challenges of traditional project management, Agile methods as an alternative, and why marketers are adopting Agile project management.
How Waterfall Project Management is Falling Behind and Becoming a Marketing Challenge
Every unexecuted project erodes marketing efforts, making it harder and taking longer to reach sales goals and meet business objectives. Despite AI’s influence on creative workflows and growth in digital strategies, project delays and cancellations are the norm for many or most marketing teams. Teams have shifted to digital strategies, leaning on martech and data-savvy marketers to drive marketing efforts, but traditional processes can slow asset creation and strategy execution to a crawl.
There is so much content and not enough time. The type of content needed to engage audiences is evolving, making videos, blogs, social media reels, and webinars must-haves in campaigns. Forbes noted video clips, hyper-personalized micro-content, and more humanized content as important trends in 2025 in their article, “17 Emerging B2B Marketing Trends To Watch For In 2025.” Trying to fit these formats into a traditional project management framework can hinder your process and create barriers to completion.
Companies have big marketing objectives and visions to build brand awareness, expand audience reach, and grow sales. Linear process paths require the completion of one step before moving on to the next step, making projects with diverse project contributors, such as SEO gurus, graphic designers, content creators, website developers, and data analysts, prone to frequent delays. However, marketers can transform their approach to increase productivity.
Traditional Versus Agile Methodologies: Key Distinctions
Also known as waterfall, this project management method is a linear, siloed, and predictable way to create and deliver marketing assets. Marketers follow well-defined process steps and often use templates to create different content formats. Project cycles can be long and arduous, with delays as project phases run into contributors’ busy schedules.
While waterfall project management focuses on one long, defined process path and steps with little to no customer feedback, Agile project management follows shorter iterations or sprints, incorporating customer feedback in the next iteration. Agile project management differs from traditional in three foundational ways:
- Three roles – Agile teams have one Product Owner, one Sprint Man, and Team members.
- Sprints – Iterations deliver smaller pieces of a larger project. Iterations allow marketing teams to focus on smaller but key assets or elements to deliver an entire marketing campaign faster.
- Stand-ups – Brief daily meetings provide project transparency on progress, including the previous day’s work, work on that day, and any challenges slowing the progress.
Why Agile Project Management Makes Sense For Marketing Teams: How Agile Can Help Marketers
The Agile methodology is well-known in the software industry for its incremental advantages, feedback-rich adoption, and consistent asset delivery, but marketers are adopting the Agile method in droves. The Agile Sherpas’ “7th Annual State of Agile Marketing” report indicated a high; over 80 percent of marketing respondents planned to adopt Agile marketing processes in 2025.
In an Agile marketing approach, sprints help deliver content more consistently by alleviating project roadblocks and incorporating stakeholder feedback for higher-quality assets. Smaller teams working on marketing projects can shorten the process, decrease roadblocks, and deliver assets with feedback for better branding-aligned content.
A marketing campaign that includes ads, emails, social media posts, and a blog can segment team members working on each asset, incorporate feedback from specific stakeholders, and deliver assets faster. For example, let’s say a campaign is built around a blog. The team members include the copywriter, subject matter expert (SME), reviewer, approver, and graphic designer. Completing the blog in one iteration shifts the team’s focus to one campaign asset, eliminates project conflicts, and delivers a foundational piece of content faster.
The Agile Sherpas report confirmed that 83 percent of marketers report a positive experience with an Agile approach. The report also showed that fully agile marketing teams are more productive, and the iteration or sprint technique is used the most in almost half of the cases.
Respondents in the Agile Sherpas report shared challenges in their Agile project management. These challenges include over 50 percent highlighting managing too many last-minute requests. Consistently working across marketing projects is another example, with 32 percent and limited leadership understanding of what teams are working on at 27 percent.
Why Your Marketing Team Should Go Agile
The benefits of an agile project management approach make it a worthwhile alternative to your well-worn waterfall approach. Sixty percent of Agile Sherpa’s 7th Annual Report respondents called out the production of high-quality marketing as their top benefit. Quickly completing and delivering work was a top benefit for 53 percent, and the prioritization of most important work came in at 52 percent, a close third.
Brands can’t afford to expend more marketing efforts than they get back in results. Agile project management is emerging as the path to take for today’s marketers at a crossroads between digital marketing efforts to compete in a crowded market and waterfall methods to execute campaigns. Shifting to an Agile management approach may be outside your marketing team’s comfort zone. Still, the benefits outweigh its challenges with faster project completion of high-quality assets and a greater focus on priority projects.
Julie Breaux, Founder, The Art of Marketing and AMA Colorado Board Member
