This definition is from the software world. It also utterly describes marketing's reality, where 80% of executives feel overwhelmed and underprepared for the challenges facing their business.
No surprise that the 'agile' approach is gaining marketing ground, a move away from waterfall planning to fast iterative improvements. It replaces a features led ‘push’ with an insight led, customer responsive approach. It also challenges us to focus, start and stop fast.
'Agile' is rich with sports metaphors (scrum, sprint). Other 'agile marketing’ terms are especially interesting when applied to content - lean, iterate, stand up, user story.
Sometimes I feel like the ball, not the player....
But why should 'agile' impact content? Because in B2B, content remains a major element within marketing. Unless the content is ‘agile’ it actually gets in the marketing team's way. Time is wasted on the wrong material.
With our current approach to content creation, where content demands heavy resource investment and is increasingly viewed as 'spam', we may suspect we are ‘carrying’ content as a player: that it's not really pulling the weight it should in the marketing effort. Yet pressured to create more content, how can we make sure our content really is 'fit'?
In October 2015 Ben Harper published Think Lean to Win at Content Marketing on CMI's blog - a beautifully simple exposition on lean content. The thrust was to focus brain-time on creating the right stories by building in early learning from ‘live’ proto content.
This is where an agile content approach begins: with the ability to create, learn from and improve content - live.
To work, tools need to be smart enough to make creating interactive content simple - and fast. Editing tools can now automatically incorporate branding and 'structure' content to deliver the highest performing reading experiences.
This allows us to focus the most valuable team resource - brain-time - on original content and insight. Agile tools help assemble content elements, push button fast. Agile tools help assemble content elements, push button fast.
However to genuinely iterate and improve there needs to be feedback - just as clear as a coach's half-time team talk!
The approach outlined in 'Think Lean' relied on compiling data from multiple sources to assess effectiveness. By contrast, a cloudbased platform (such as Turtl) structures analytics page-by-page, element by element.
By tracking reader interaction with the content in a way that mirrors how Stories were made, platforms can actively tell us what we need to improve. We can see which headlines and images are converting readers into deeper content. We can see which parts of the Story they chose to engage with.
Like a good coach, we can then focus on what to improve, what to do less and what to do more. And with our agile and match-fit editing tools we can immediately change the content: even when the it's live and 'in play'. Like a half time team talk, we can intervene and improve end results based on what we see happening real time. It’s okay - even good - to make mistakes. That's how we learn! But with the right tools and processes, we can maximise performance whilst minimising pain.
To learn how Turtl can make your content more agile, please contact: Ben.McGill@turtl.co or call on + 44 (0)7971 484373 https://uk.linkedin.com/in/benmcgill @turtlben