Why Agility Works For Content Creators and Not Just Techies

Agility entails analyzing the demands of the customer and ensuring that the product/service delivered matches the demand by incorporating steps such as testing and adjusting the output in your process.

Tenets of Agility entail:

1. Defining the objectives of the project
2. Planning the tasks to reach the objectives
3. Breaking down the tasks into “bite-sized pieces”
4. Prioritizing of various tasks
5. Aligning the deliverables to the customers’ requirements through iterations.

All these steps warrant the coordination of various cross-functional teams which will plan, purchase, deliver, and close the project.
Content creation has now become a highly dynamic field. It is not enough to just keep on working on the same principles and creating content. It is time to adopt “Agility”!

An agile content culture is one that is continually learning about what aspects of content work and what do not and strategizing and optimizing content based on that.

Put simply an agile content is one that undergoes iterations based on the user feedback so as to avoid its failure.
Content is now created in one country and it reaches the global market. Adopting agility in content creation makes it highly competitive.

When a piece of content is created, it runs the risk of whether it will generate sufficient returns on the investment put into it. Agility helps mitigate the risks associated. The main reason is that the content creation involves the consumers. The content is modified after each iteration and this improves its quality and makes it more relevant for the users. This reduces the risk significantly. You will be able to provide your audience with engaging content. The speed of content creation is enhanced.

In a nutshell, you will be producing engaging content at a higher speed that is aligned with the pace of your marketplace and consumers.

Agile Content is content that is optimized according to the goals of the business and the user.

Characteristics of agile content are:

1. It is easy to access and reuse.
2. An agile content will not need to wait for updates from software companies.
3. This will be able to adapt easily to the desktop, laptop, mobiles, etc.
4. It’s a reusable and shareable.
5. Agile content is unbiased.

A typical content marketing system lacks all aspects of agility. In a traditional content marketing process, the planning and scheduling of content are done months in advance. This makes it difficult to adapt to sudden changes. A content calendar is planned for a long span of time. But the drawback of this calendar is that the content that is published may no longer be relevant according to the trending issues on the topic.

However, this does not imply that there should not be some kind of a scheduling process for the content to be published.

One way of having a systematic, dynamic content delivery system is to prepare a list of content ideas and choose from among them based on the trending topics. This will bring the focus on the content to be published at the present time rather than the future!

You can schedule the publishing of your content on a specific day of the week. The content should ideally be completed a few days before publishing with a scope for last minute editing based on any changes on the issue being discussed.

Content should be focused: Since the content is created for a global audience, it should be simple to understand and focused. The content should be accurate and of high quality.

Relevant: Content created should be relevant to the latest trends for the topic being written about. Your audience is no longer interested in the age-old stories about the topic. The audience is looking for something new. It is good to research on the latest in the field and present such content.

Content-based on user’s queries: As per Google’s latest algorithm, content that is ranked high is one that provides answers to varied queries of the users on the topic. Therefore, it is recommended to create content that answers a wide variety of questions on the topic. The more informative the content the better it will rank.

Automation: Automation reduces the cycle time and increases the impact of the content. Deployment of content across countries is helped by automation processes such as translation memories, etc.

1. An agile content culture which analyzes and optimizes the content usually creates content that is up-to-date and based on facts. This reduces the risk of creating factually inaccurate content.
2. If you follow the Agile principle of testing your content, you will be able to test the content on a small section of the audience. Based on the performance, you can modify your content for a larger audience.
3. Agility also means that you don’t have to maintain a fixed frequency of publishing content. You will need to vary the number of posts to be published according to the demands of the market. For instance, it helps to make your presence felt online when there is a discussion on a topic relevant to your business. You can increase the posts published at such a time as at such times customer’s will pay heed to your content.
4. It also offers a business the flexibility in the number of writers it hires. If writing is done on the basis of demands of the market, there are chances that the demand for content will rise and fall with time. So, the business can employee few writers to cater to these needs and hire freelancers when the demand increases.