Knowing where your business could fall down will aid success and make the road to agility far less bumpy.
Adopting an agile approach does not mean starting out without a vision. Knowing where you are going and what your objectives are is crucial to success.
Software developers don’t just randomly ‘create’ – they know what the bigger problem is their looking to solve. They just keep an open mind as they progress and learn from different efforts to solve that problem.
Given that many content marketers are still operating without a documented strategy in place does not bode well to the success of a content marketing plan. But keeping that plan flexible and adaptable to new learnings is crucial.
Planning is essential but do not hyper focus on the editorial calendar. Time and resources are valuable and you don’t want them all deployed in planning when they should be creating. And crucially it needs to be flexible to allow for adjustments along the way.
An agile approach requires the commitment of the whole organisation. A content team could create some well executed and meaningful work in an agile manner only to have its distribution delayed by another team whose approach differs.
The traditionally deadline driven executive that focuses on trying to avoid mistakes could easily hinder progress by focusing on the minutiae, expecting it to be perfect first off, not allowing for mistakes and thus embarking on a lengthy review process sooner than necessary.
It’s become a bit of a content marketing mantra … ‘we lack the time and resources’. Training up a core team in how to adopt an agile approach is key to ensuring success. Investing in this upfront will pay dividends in the long run.
There are numerous tools out there that can massively aid an agile and responsive approach but many marketers remain unaware of them. Taking the time investigate how to strengthen your content marketing tech stack pays off in the long run.
Marketers are drowning in data. And data is only ever any good if you know how to properly read and act on it. Two things can help here. Make sure that your strategy has clearly defined objectives to ensure that you know exactly ‘what’ you need to measure. And secondly, having a granular and effective analytics platform installed to capture all the salient data that you need.