Don’t Forget to Add Agility to Your Content Management Process
Xander
When you’ve liberated content and manage it from a harmonized place, you can use the micro-content building blocks to assemble all your channel-specific interactions. Managing this newly revealed category of micro-content means you have to add agile functionality to your content management process.
But why should you add agility? We did some research and found there are a few aspects a new content strategy needs to consider. There are some demands that need to be met in dealing with omnichannel content. Let’s discuss three of these demands and how a content management process providing agility will help you meet them.
What is Agile again?
Agile has been around for a long time and finds its roots in software development. But over time, Agile has gotten bigger and changed into an organization-wide way of working. Using an Agile method means using an iterative and incremental approach.
Time for an example. If you have to run an email campaign, you can choose to send the campaign when everything has been checked and is available to you. But instead of waiting to send the campaign at the end, how about breaking down the campaign into 3 pieces? Prioritize those 3 pieces and continuously work on them during cycles called iterations. When 1 of the pieces is finished, send the email right away and improve upon it during subsequent iterations. That way, you’re able to respond to changes quickly, without having to start all over again.
Agility helps with these content management strategy demands
1. How to deal with the creative process
Before you publish and manage content, a creative process takes place on the business side of marketing. Ideas are built for new products, segmenting customers, design campaigns, and lots more. This creative process is messy, difficult, and incredibly unpredictable to manage. Agility empowers you to stay in control of the demand for new content derived from the ideas coming from the creative process. You decide whether to pick up an idea right away or park it for an upcoming iteration.
2. How to deal with incremental optimizations
If there is something you can do to cause an immediate effect on the bottom line, business owners want it done yesterday. So, if you work with short cycles, it’s a lot easier to keep optimizing constantly. Using iterations, you can streamline and speed up content creation and management processes to deliver new content, results, and improvements faster.
3. How to deal with continuous customer behavior evolution
As customer behavior evolves, your omnichannel infrastructure should too. Just look at the social media sites that have disappeared because users left. Do Google Plus, Vine, or Yik Yak (US only) ring a bell? Customer behavior doesn’t change overnight, so an hourly review is unnecessary. But it does require agility to adapt to changing customer behavior when channels become irrelevant or new digital initiatives emerge.
If you have any challenging use cases such as omnichannel content or optimizing the customer lifecycle, make sure you manage omnichannel micro-content agile! The only thing there’s left is finding technologies to support this approach. And we have one ready to go ;)
