What is Agile? The ability to start and stop fast? Or perhaps it is the ability to create and respond to change to succeed in an uncertain and turbulent environment. The second definition comes from the software world. It also utterly describes marketing’s reality.
No surprise this approach – a move away from waterfall planning to fast iterative improvements – is gaining marketing ground. At its heart, it replaces a features-led ‘push’ approach with an insight-led, customer responsive approach. Agile marketing is rich with sporting metaphors (scrum, sprint). Other Agile marketing terms are especially interesting when applied to content – lean, iterate, stand-up, user story.
Why does Agile impact content? Because in B2B, content remains a major element within marketing. Unless the content is ‘fit’ it actually gets in the marketing team’s way. Time is wasted on the wrong material.
With our current approach to content creation, we may suspect we are ‘carrying’ a player. Yet pressured to create more content, knowing much is seen as spam, what’s the answer?
Ask, create, learn, revise
In October 2015 Ben Harper published this 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 – the ability to create, learn from and improve content, live.
First, tools need to be smart enough to make interactive content simple. This way we focus the most valuable team resource – brain-time – on original content and insight. Editor tools can incorporate branding, optimise reading structure and help assemble dynamic elements fast. To iterate and improve there needs to be feedback – perhaps a little more specific than Jurgen Klopp’s ‘Boom’, but just as clear!
By structuring analytics around the reading experience – page-by-page, element-by-element – we receive direct feedback on what to shift. And if our creation and editing tools are ‘match fit’, we can immediately change the content, even when the ball’s in play.
See the blog in Turtl.
Turtl will be expanding – or stretching – on Agile Content at B2B Marketing InTech on Thursday 23 February @B2BMarketing #InTech
