Agile marketing, although a technique initially created for software development use, can be easily applied to help focus marketing efforts in short-term projects, by promoting inter-departmental cooperation, and enabling fast responses to changes in consumer trends. 

There are lots of advantages that come with agile content creation practice. Your writers and artists will get more done and get the right things done without sacrificing efficiency.

Here are just a few tips to enhance your agile digital marketing campaigns: 

Understand the Desired Goals

The objective of every agile project management effort is to enhance performance with the least amount of effort. Without a deep understanding of what overarching objectives your business or customer is striving towards however, your content marketing efforts might fail when it comes time to report on your progress. 

You should begin every agile project by first sitting down with management and make certain your planned content is lined up with company objectives. There may be an expectation for marketing to enhance traffic, increase brand awareness, or even expose gaps in the consumer market. On the other hand, management might want you to possibly focus on short-term efforts, including promoting an upcoming conference or a new product.

Whatever these objectives may be, understanding them is the first thing to developing an effective content marketing strategy. It’s important to make certain your team understands the program goals to ensure they’re pursuing them with every resource available. 

Establish an Editorial Calendar

Without an editorial calendar, it’s tough to keep the group on track to produce fantastic content week after week. Quality over quantity is the word of the day here and ensures your resources are being put to the very best use possible—don’t waste time creating 5 mediocre pieces of content when one amazing piece of content can achieve the same results.

All agile content marketing editorial calendars need the following:

Keyword Strategy

An agile editorial calendar should always have a strong keyword strategy behind it. Content creation groups should research and create a list of core keywords and queries based on the topics your target market is most thinking about. 

Next, figure out which keywords and subjects will help attain your project goals. Should you target high-volume search terms that can increase brand awareness? Or should you focus on long-tail, queries that bring prospective leads onto the site? 

Evergreen Topics

An editorial calendar filled with evergreen, keyword-focused subjects can help your team shift focus at any time to take advantage of related changes in media consumption. Consider preparing your editorial calendar well in advance so your teams have time to prepare with more detailed research through ebooks or case studies.

Varied Content Types

An editorial calendar must be filled with a variety of content types that target various inquiries and subjects. This includes both short-term content like weekly articles and lead generating assets, such as case studies, infographics and even videos, that are produced month-to-month or quarterly. Ideally, the team is constantly producing high-impact, short-term content assets, sometimes in tandem with lead generation properties.

Decrease Production Time

In order to create a marketing project that is truly agile, you need to make sure every task in the process is both affective and effective. Producing an editorial calendar is a good start but you’ll also need to pay some attention to other aspects of the process.

As a best practice, encourage writers to always contribute their ideas for fresh, new content. Collect these ideas in a separate pool and keep them aside for those times your editorial calendar looks a bit dry. 

When you’re planning the next quarter of material, see if any of the ideas your team have concocted align with marketing goals. This will help everyone feel included in the content development procedure.

In order to conserve time throughout the production process, you also need to know what makes a fantastic piece of content. Create templates that your content creators can work with, or at the very least, give them guidelines to refer to. Involve your writers and artists in the QA process, this will save you time and will generally improve the quality of your projects’ content output. 

Adapt your strategy

No matter your objectives are, an important quality of any agile strategy is the ability to adapt content creation method according to consumer trends. Routine observation of analytics can confirm that your content is achieving project goals or alert you to the fact that the strategy isn’t working. 

This versatility is needed when there are considerable news events to cover or new business initiatives to consider. With agile project management, flexibility will be autonomously integrated into your teams’ workflow. 

Don’t skimp on training 

While many of these things will come naturally to a veteran project manager, don’t assume the aims and principles of agile content creation is as clear to you as it is to others. 

Agile only really works when all involved know what their role within an agile framework is and what their roles can contribute to agile environments. 

If you’d like to get the very best from your agile approach, make sure you teams are trained in the latest agile methodologies. Knowledgetrain.co.uk offers excellent agile training courses to help your teams keep pace in an agile work environment.

By Sarah DelRosario