Prologue
B2B marketers swear by the philosophy of agile these days, whether it is about developing their human resources or optimizing their marketing strategies, content marketing being no exception.
The crucial question that follows though is how to blend agile concepts & ideas to optimize.
Agile Content Marketing doesn’t essentially require a new content creation tool or platform but adapting to the agile ways of content creation, which are faster to deliver, easier to test run & capable of optimization to deliver higher value than ever before.
An agile content marketing tactic is characterized by the proper documentation of the content creation process i.e. creating a proper workflow for content creation & deployment.
According to research by CoSchedule, based on the marketing execution tactics infers that marketers who document their endeavors are 466% more likely to succeed at it as compared to those who don’t.
Clearly, documentation in terms of content marketing is beneficial only if the marketers incline their endeavors for increased conversions or else associating murky goals with content creation doesn’t help the cause of agile content marketing.
Benefits of Implementing an Agile Content Marketing Strategy
Writing codes were the sole purpose of developing agile methodology & it differs from creating a good & scalable piece of marketing content, yet marketers can benefit majorly by adopting agile content marketing.
Agile Content Marketing breaks down the work into manageable pieces that can be finished, tested & tweaked quickly.
By opting for ideas mirroring agile methods, marketers can steer up their content efforts towards achieving optimized revenue goals.
The Framework of Agile Content Management
According to research by CoSchedule, marketers who use agile project management are 252% more likely to report success. According to AgileSherpas the first Agile Manifesto appeared in 2012 & had the following values:
- Validated learning over opinions & conventions
- The collaboration focused on optimizing customers’ experiences over silos & hierarchy
- Adaptive & iterative campaigns over the Bigger whined campaigns
- The customer discovery process was prioritized over static prediction
- Flexible vs. rigid planning framework
- Responding to change instead of ardently following a fixed route
- Running small experiments over indulging in larger ventures
For driving agile content marketing an agile marketing team can work quickly in an organized manner towards the goal of constant testing & process improvement.
Agile marketing particularly emphasizes the five bfunctionalities namely visibility, experimentation, iteration, collaboration & efficiency.
According to Techvalidate, one-third of the marketers say it takes 7 weeks to create a piece of content & according to research by Serious Decisions 70% of the content that we create is never utilized.
In such a scenario architecting an agile content, strategy becomes extremely important for the marketers. An ideal content marketing team consists of content creators as well as Sales representatives, C-suite employees, product development and most importantly the associates of the customer service team.
Becoming an Agile content marketing team can help one in creating well-tested, quality content that helps one accomplish one’s content marketing goals. The final piece of an agile team is made of the task owners. Each task should be assigned to an appropriate person within a team who would be responsible for the completion of the task. One can take help from the team members, though it’s entirely the responsibility of the person who has been assigned the task to complete the task.
Truly, agile was meant for content marketing & the marketers can benefit from the agile content marketing in the following ways:
1.
Delivering right, relevant & contextual piece of information to the right individuals at the right time:
The right marketing strategy starts with the audience. Marketers need to deliver relevant pieces of content to the prospects researching across omnichannel. Serving the prospects with the right pieces of information resonating with their pain-points & areas of interests ensures that the experiences of the prospects across omnichannel are improved & the sales cycle is expedited.
Furthermore, the timely delivery of contextual information keeps the dialect of “marketing” in content marketing intact.
2.
Repurposing the pieces of content after researching the industry & Competitive Benchmarking:
One of the best benefits of employing agile content marketing is that it allows the marketers to introspect the pieces of content & make changes in real-time as & when required. Oftentimes, having a piece of outdated information in a whitepaper for example and prove to be deteriorative for the overall reputation of the company.
The marketers can get their content strategies right through marketing & can tweak changes even at the last minute to avoid delivering something which is outdated, misaligned or inapt.
3.
Frequent delivery of pieces of content – spontaneously or over a specified time frame:
Each channel or media format has its own nuances and timelines for content creation & consumption. From spontaneous social media posts to long-form whitepapers, agile content marketing is about strategizing clear & realistic goals & about timely content delivery cycles to meet the expectations of the clients.
4.
Allows collaboration among content creators & business people:
Leveraging an agile content marketing strategy is all about making the best use of collaboration. There should be continuous inter-departmental dialogues about the progression of work, prioritization of work, roadblocks in content strategy. Often a product manager or a managing director needs to take full responsibility for the execution of a successful & highly effective content strategy by minimizing the challenges that crop-up.
5.
Employs Motivated Individuals for the Job & Provides them With the Environment to sustain & flourish & get the task Done:
The content creators often need the right blend of motivation & commitment to get the job done. They need to feel trusted by their team members & management to provide high-value output. Brands need to provide content creators with the right apparatus to be successful.
6.
Encourages Face-to-Face Conversation to convey Information:
The content creators, subject-matter experts & product managers indulge ineffective & direct two-way communications to get their agile content marketing strategy right. Vital communications requiring prompt actions must be discussed in face-to-face meetings instead of conversations happening over email.
7.
Agile Content Marketing is About Creating Content for ‘Marketing’:
The success of an agile content marketing strategy is measured using different metrics such as leads, conversions, sales, upselling, cross-selling, etc. It is important for marketers to comprehend, analyze &
co-relate the vital KPIs related to the agile content strategies with the business objectives of an organization at large.
8.
Agile Content Marketing is mutually beneficial for the sponsors, content marketers as well as the audiences:
A well-tuned factory can produce predictable, sustainable & at a high-throughput capacity. It is important for marketers to think about the sustainability of audience groups. Audiences should only be fed with stackable information which they can consume & this happens by delivering them with an accurate piece of information at the right time to resonate with the pain points of the customers.
9.
Scales Up Content for Lower Editing Costs, better reusability & faster Completion:
Rigor on asset production makes the repurposing of pieces of content easy. Agile content marketing allows rebranding & makes content updates more efficient. Writing excellence & high standards lead to lower editing costs, better reusability & overall faster completion time.
10.
Makes Things Simple:
Agile content marketing cuts on unnecessary cycles & makes the process of content creation straightforward & simpler. The writers focus on a niche while they write & create the pieces of content to match up to the requirements of specific personas that curtail irrelevance & help to create high-value content.
11.
Collaboration generates better ideas as teams Self-organize & Brainstorm:
Higher accountability & divergence of individual responsibilities ensures that a culture of ownership & accountability is created that is capable of adapting to diverse situations with strong resilience & evolving under stressful conditions.
Grasping the best perspectives through brainstorming ensures that marketers can employ agile content marketing to help the brands accomplish their long & short-term revenue goals.
12.
Agile Content marketing is all about test-running, Evolution & Optimization:
Going agile is all about continuous improvement. Within an agile framework, honest reflection & evaluation provide the scope for test-running various content strategies for optimization.
13.
Allows the Use of Agile Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMs) for adapting to dynamic Business Requirements in Real-Time:
With agile ECMs organizations are transforming into entities with easy access to quality information that can be used for an array of business activities in real-time. Agile ECMs such as
IBM’s FileNet & those from
Laserfiche, Nuxeo & Alfresco are all open repositories based on standards where content is automatically integrated into processes. Leveraging these platforms, content can be easily integrated into processes. These tools can be easily integrated with other business intelligence platforms & can be easily adapted as per the changing business requirements. Using the tool the pieces of content can be managed by content strategists & tweaked in real-time with little or no training & these tools can be quickly developed without disrupting the entire system.
Bringing It All Together
Agile methodologies can be easily applied to content processes without compromising on the quality of content. Agile methodologies come with inherent risks. Sometimes, trying to craft ads, messages & other pieces of content for customers without involving them in the process can lead to deteriorative results.
All the same, agile content marketing remains an impeccable tool for marketers to improve the goodness-of-fit of the pieces of content to match up to the interests of the audiences. This leads to the improvement in the attention spans of the prospects, improves their experiences through multi-channel provenances & helps in improving the business revenues for the brands.
We, at Valasys Media, extensively research the business requirements of our B2B clients and help them optimize their marketing endeavors by providing them with our custom-made services viz.
lead generation,
account-based marketing, lead nurturing, event promotion services, list building services & content syndication services.
For onrushing the trajectories of perennially healthy sales pipelines,
get in touch with our team of experts.