In this guest blog, Scarlett Brown shares how she applies agile for content marketing. Summing up, agile made it easier for her to reach customers the right way at the right time.
Working as a technical writer with the software development team has taught me a lot of things. First, software development is not an easy job, and secondly, managing clients is never easy.
With so many methodologies to come up with a bang on solutions to meet client needs. Waterfall method for some, rapid for some, and spiral for a few, among all the methodologies that I have learned with the team the one that I personally find useful and quite sorted is Agile Methodology.
Adopting the methodology has made it easier for me to manage my work and come up with interesting elements in the work that makes my content more readable and business-oriented. Let me brief it here.
What Is Agile Methodology?
Agile is basically a simple methodology where the team manages a project by breaking it into several parts that involve input from stakeholders, continuous development, and iteration at every stage. It starts with the client explaining his needs to the team and winds up with the deployment of the solution. It involves the cycle of planning, executing, and evaluating- which may change the final product to fit the client’s needs.
The key thing here is continuous collaboration.
You must be thinking “How it has helped this girl increase her productivity as a technical content writer?” As content marketing becomes more professional, one can easily benefit from the first purely digital profession: software development. Well, let me explain.
Agile Methodology Made It Easier for Me to Reach the Customers the Right Way at the Right Time
The naysayers who don’t understand the importance of Agile methodology, I share a personal experience here and it is 200% more effective. As we have discussed above, the methodology runs around 5 important areas, transparency, innovation, ingeminate, participation, and organizing the work. Now let me throw some light on how this method helps me come up with better work.
1. Transparency
Transparency clearly means listing everything out here. EVERYTHING. The content plan for the next month, various contents, team members’ responsibilities, audiences, and every other thing that could matter. This makes it easier to plan your month and trust me saves a lot of time and increases your productivity several folds. Not just this it saves time too.
To keep things under check, I use sticky notes. This is a gentle reminder of my schedule and management.
2. Innovation
Because we have frequent discussions, we do get suggestions from the team that makes it easier for me to add new elements in my work. The simple idea here is you can’t come up with a perfect plan yourself. With people involved you can experiment with the work and who knows what may work. It is important that you always consider a plan that is safe to fail, short term, well designed and, iterative in nature.
Be ready for the changes always.
3. Ingemination
When you embrace, ingemination, you reconsider your work expanding proven ideas, adding values, functionalities, and other changes over time. With the work being reconsidered and polished with a different approach, the quality and results have improved too. The work comes out better and with some new lessons each time.
4. Participation
A content writer with a system in a cabin won’t be as creative as the one that works with a collaborative team with an audience-centric perspective. With the team participating in each project, we get to explore various perspectives of a single work and work on those aspects that need modifications. As we have increased interactions and feedback processes things have become much easier and simpler for us.
It has brought freshness in the work and has helped us impress our readers.
5. Organization
With the better organization of work and a plan to stick to we save lots of working hours. Working with the agile methodology has one advantage, getting to accomplish more with less work done. The methodology is associated with speed and productivity which is personally feel is really true. With a plan in hand and various people discussing things together can help us not just save everyone’s time but reduces rework on the same thing.
There Is No Doubt for me Why Agile Methodology Is the Best and Most Reliable Working Methodology!
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With the right methodology, things actually get simpler. In my years of experience as a content writer, I have never found any solution close to this. It has made me and my team productive, efficient, and quite engaged now. We feel different energy altogether. I have practiced this for over a year and can say from experience there is a reason why the best software developers use methodology like this for customer satisfaction. With this methodology in action, we have a team that is happier, and more committed.
Scarlett Brown is a technical content writer with A3logics.
Applying agile beyond software development
Thank you Scarlett for sharing your experiences with using agile for content marketing.
Where the agile manifesto is aimed at software development, agile has shown to be suitable beyond that. In one of my workshops I explored how to use agile and Scrum beyond software development, for example in marketing, sales, support and in management.
In 2018 I stated my expectation about business agility, remaking the whole organisation to be customer centric and responsive, resilient and able to cope in the VUCA world that is the business ecosystem today. Given the direct relationship that content marketing has with your customers as Scarlett explains, it makes a lot of sense to work in an agile way.
Additional to agile I recommend using Lean Startup if you want to learn about the needs of your customers. Blogging about new ideas can be a way to involve your customers early during ideation.
Finally, as Scarlett mentioned: Continuous collaboration is a key thing. I fully agree with her! There are many ways that you can improve collaboration, for example by creating a shared vision, fostering a culture that supports and promotes collaboration, and applying collaboration practices.
Have you used agile in content marketing? Please share your experiences by commenting on this article!
