How Should B2B Apply Agile Marketing Principle in Content Strategy for 5x Growth?

Agile marketing principles focus on quick responses to change, inter-departmental collaboration, data pulling, continuous testing, and short-term campaigns. A 2018 research confirmed that almost 37% of marketers had embraced an agile marketing strategy. Most teams are able to complete 30-40% more work than ever. Given the ability to keep pace with the changes without compromising performance, this statistic is not surprising.

For this reason, B2B companies should not shy away from adopting agile marketing principles. They can deliver high-quality content in less time and achieve the desired ROI. This blog post addresses how B2B enterprises can apply agile marketing for unprecedented growth.

1. Analyze Business Goals

Before applying agile marketing principles, executives should sit down with the department heads to ensure that their business goals are aligned with the strategy. They can then call a meeting where the sales, marketing, and product development teams are briefed with the goals and objectives.

Without a proper understanding of business goals, it's impossible to generate leads, increase brand awareness, or improve traffic. Implementing agile in B2B marketing boils down to less effort and improved performance. Irrespective of what the short-term and long-term goals are, the entire process begins with knowing them in-depth.

2. Create an Editorial Calendar

Producing great content every week is difficult without forming an editorial calendar. Without tracking the content outcome effectively, key insights may get buried under the rubble of different types of content. B2B marketers also need to prioritize quality over quantity while incorporating the agile marketing principles. They should ensure that their resources are being utilized effectively.

With a focus on high-impact, short-term campaigns, B2B marketers need the following information to create the editorial calendar:

• Keyword strategy: Based on the search volume of topics, B2B marketers can create a list of primary and secondary keywords. The agile editorial calendar should have a detailed keyword strategy with a great emphasis on high-volume search phrases.
• Evergreen topics: Every niche contains keyword-focused, evergreen topics that must be a part of the B2B agile editorial calendar. Based on company changes and industry news stories, marketers can shift topics around. In-depth assets such as case studies and eBooks published quarterly are good examples.
• Type of content: A great mix of content types is what defines an agile editorial calendar. That includes weekly blog posts, quarterly case studies, ebooks, monthly videos, and infographics, etc.

3. Understand the Agile Process

An agile marketing program involves planning, production, and promotion stages. Understanding the business goals and forming the editorial calendar are all part of the planning process.

Let's understand the three stages in detail below:

• Content Planning: Agile facilitates collaboration. B2B companies should encourage salespeople, marketers, content creators, product developers, etc., to pitch in their ideas during this stage. The most important and refined topics from this list should be added to the editorial calendar.
• Content Production: This stage involves the implementation of ideas shortlisted during the first stage. B2B marketers can analyze the needs and preferences of their target audience to produce different forms of content. For instance, they can provide engaging information through video content. Another example can be talking about a case study using a storytelling blog format. Using marketing automation, B2B companies can schedule the time to post these types of content.
• Content Promotion: This stage is as important as the planning and production stages. For the target audience to read and appreciate the content, they must first be aware of it. Identifying the best channels through data analysis (a crucial part of agile) is necessary for content promotion.

4. Measure the Impact

A great benefit of adopting the agile marketing principles is that B2B marketers can measure the impact in real-time after each iteration. By evaluating the quantifiable results, marketers can make desired changes in the subsequent iterations. The performance metrics, however, depend on the program goals.

For instance, if the goal of the B2B agile marketing program is bringing quality organic traffic, then the performance metrics would be bounce rate, time on site, new users, focus on sessions, etc. On the other hand, if the goal is lead generation, then lead quality, conversion rate, CPL (cost per lead), and CPC (cost per click) would be the performance metrics.

For engagement campaigns, determine the number of brand mentions and social shares.

5. Pivot the Strategy

The most crucial part of implementing the agile principles in B2B marketing is realizing that one must pivot the strategy if it's not working. Since agile necessitates regular performance check-ins, this isn't difficult to achieve.

New company initiatives and events make flexibility indispensable in the B2B space. Make room in the editorial calendar for articles related to company events, new products, and conferences.

The Bottom Line

B2B content marketing, more often than not, is a time-consuming endeavor. Achieving ROI becomes challenging as a result. By incorporating agile marketing principles, businesses can develop valuable content, improve collaboration, and pivot quickly with the changing trends.