Content marketing is all about producing quality content and making it reach your target audience. It’s a sort of strategically planned content development which is supposed to lead to profitable actions by the customers. The traditional “heads-down” content production is how things were done before Agile. Now, Agile is bringing in some serious changes.
When we’re talking about Agile marketing, we’re talking about innovation. It represents a non-traditional approach to work organization and structure, which makes room for positive changes and better workflow. In order for you to understand how going Agile works in content marketing, we’ve prepared useful facts and explanations. Let’s take a look.
The Development of Agile
The Agile methodology was initially introduced for software development in order to help software developers who are working on complicated projects in large teams. It helped them divide the work into smaller projects and ensure satisfying results.
In time, it has been adapted to content marketing as well.
Its main purpose is to allow the team members to work faster, to adapt to changes, to respond to unpredictable workflow and, as a result, produce better and more quality content. It differs from your traditional approach to content marketing in its structure, work organization, setting goals as well as the relationship with your client.
It gives a fresh perspective on the hierarchy within a team and the roles of each individual. Let’s learn something more about the Agile processes and how they work in content marketing.
A Different Kind of Team Work
It takes a couple of people to develop any content, produce it and share it with the world. There’s the editing, the content creation, the design, the copywriting etc.
In the traditional approach, each department takes care of its own part of the job and sends it over to the next one. Each person is in charge of one partof the job and doesn’t have anything to do with the rest.
In Agile, the teamwork is different. It’s based on the following principles:
- cross-department collaboration
- daily meetings of all team members
- everybody on board from the beginning
- no explicitly defined roles
Instead of the “waterfall” or person-to-person process, the whole team works together in order to produce better content faster. This kind of team organization leads to creating unique content easily.
There’s no waiting and no inefficient pauses. There’s no taking a step back to have your colleagues make a change in their previous work. There’s only quality workflow.
Short Phrases and Flexibility
In agile content marketing, you avoid spending time on creating long-term, detailed strategies for each specific client or project. You avoid “sticking to the plan” at any costs.
Instead, it’s all about being flexible:
- Keep the audience in mind
- Follow the main plan-flow but allow stepping away from it
- Adapt according to new insight
- Test a hypothesis and go from there
- Reassess the work frequently
It’s all about the learn-try-iterate work strategy. Dividing the work into small phrases allows you to see results faster. Using those result, you adapt your current strategies. You learn about your audience and use that knowledge for your next step.
Closer Relationship With Your Client
At the beginning of any new collaboration, you are far away from knowing your client. Why would you create a long-term strategic plan for that client at that point?
With Agile marketing, you:
- work closely with your client
- try to get to know him/her
- adapt to any new insight
- develop a deep understanding of their needs
- change and adapt along the way
This leads to more quality business relationships and overall better results. You work with what you learn and that only makes you improve.
Review and Change
With agile content marketing, there is no one ultimate solution or method of working. There’s only adaptation to the current situation.
This means you need to:
- check the numbers frequently
- make decisions based on the newest data
- review and revise any previous strategic moves
- adapt and change accordingly
Conclusion
The Agile methodology brings positive changes into your workplace. It brings innovation which benefits your team in terms of new ideas, real-time decision making, team building etc. It’s different from what you used to do, but it opens a lot of new doors.
It takes time and effort to adapt to the Agile methodology to your content marketing team. You need to have everyone on board. However, once you start getting it right and feel the first positive changes, you’ll embrace it completely.
