Unlock the power of agile content creation to elevate your brand.
Why this matters:
It matters because the Internet moves at the speed of light. And social media has amplified the pace of content consumption to something approaching warp speed. As a result, what was popular yesterday is forgotten today, and the content that gets you noticed today can be a distant memory tomorrow. Embracing agile content creation methods can dramatically increase your brand’s reach, creating a larger, more engaged audience.
By the numbers:
- Brands that employ agile content creation see a 62% increase in customer engagement (Forrester)
- Agile content creation leads to a 35% faster time-to-market for marketing campaigns (McKinsey)
- 24% of marketers state that strengthening brand identity is a core priority in 2023 (State of Marketing Report)
- 40% of marketers say that content creation is a top challenge (Hubspot)
Why Brand Visibility?
Brand visibility refers to how well your brand is recognized globally, but it takes significant time, effort, budget, and repetition to do so. Notable examples such as Nike, Apple, and Google have spent decades developing innovative products and reinforcing their brand values through campaigns and consistent, repetitive messaging. Brand visibility is crucial to ensure your brand stays top-of-mind when consumers are ready to purchase. Nike, Apple, and Google do this well.
In the eyes of consumers, highly visible brands are often associated with quality and trustworthiness, even if that is not necessarily the case. This association further enhances the reputation and credibility, which can position your brand as a leader in your industry.
The 2023 State of Marketing Report highlights the critical role of brand visibility for marketers. The report reveals that 25% of marketers have identified strengthening brand identity as a core objective for this year, while 19% are focused on increasing brand equity. This underscores the importance of brand visibility as a key strategy to foster business growth and success.
Make Agile Content Creation Your Superpower
Agile content development is a model that accelerates how you can ideate, create, produce, and distribute brand stories quickly. However, adopting this approach requires a strategy shift. Once the strategy and operations are in place, it’ll be easier for you to execute agile content creation quickly and efficiently.
An agile content strategy is built on people, processes, and technology and can be compared to a media company:
- People: Hiring the right teams with the appropriate skillsets (analytics, creative, content)
- Process: Building agile processes and workflows, making the content creation processes quick and efficient
- Technology: Investing in the right tools and platforms for trendspotting, social listening, and content publishing
Agile content creation will enable you to keep your content culturally relevant, engaging, and aligned with your brand’s message. By making it your superpower, you can quickly create short bursts of content that cater to the needs of your audience right now. Today.
But don’t take my word for it. Last year, a Deloitte report said the same thing but slightly differently. The report called for brands to pivot because the pandemic forced rapid changes in consumer behavior. So the pandemic just accelerated the evolution that was already happening, media company transformation.
Despite what some experts may tell you, there is no secret to agile content creation. It’s not rocket science, either. It’s about recognizing the opportunity and making smart decisions.
The Core Values of Agile Content Creation
Agile content creation is a methodology that focuses on creating and delivering shareable content flexibly, rapidly, and responsive to customer needs. It’s a long-term strategic approach that will only find success with flawless daily execution.
The core values of agile content creation are repetition, relevance, and value. Repetition ensures consistent and repetitive messaging to remind audiences what makes your product the best in the market. The key is to deliver this content across the whole omnichannel marketing experience every day and all the time.
Relevance is about understanding your customers’ needs and aligning your narrative and message points accordingly. This is one of the hardest things to do because most marketers find it difficult to create content that doesn’t align with a brand’s narrative 100% of the time. The problem with that thinking is that the audience doesn’t care. It’s’ not relevant to what they want or need.
Value is about creating content that is useful and informative without being promotional. This is the sweet spot for brands, but it is also challenging. Please read on for an example.
Agile Content Development Example
Last year, I searched “How to remove a stripped screw” on Google. One of the first results was this video from YouTube. I watched it and removed the screw with ease.
On the surface, this might not seem like a smart strategy. Why would Home Depot create content that might prevent customers from purchasing products online or entering the store? It’s’ a good question, so let me explain.
It goes back to agile content development.
As I’ve said, agile content development is like working in a traditional newsroom. Newsroom staff is responsible for reacting to what’s happening in the world or local communities and being ready to engage quickly. Reporters, creatives, producers, and the entire support staff are prepared to create a story and everything that goes into it immediately.
I can’t tell you for sure why Home Depot created this video. It could have been in response to social media conversations. Or, perhaps they did some research and found “How to remove a stripped screw” is searched 15K times monthly on Google.
The content is 100% valuable and relevant because Home Depot helped me solve a problem. Also, by posting this video on YouTube, they are increasing the shelf life of that content to live in the search results “forever.” Every customer and potential customer who has a problem with a stripped screw in the future will most likely stumble across the video.
And here’s the beauty of agile content creation, when those customers are ready to buy some lumber, repaint their house, or invest in a new kitchen, guess which brand will be top of mind for them? Yup, Home Depot.
Storytelling is Still Important In Agile Content Development
Agile content development is mandatory to stay relevant and top of mind to your customers. While providing information or facts in your content is important, it may not be enough to engage your audience on a deeper level. This is where integrating a storytelling content strategy can be advantageous.
Incorporating a storytelling content strategy typically involves first identifying the key themes, messages, and values central to your brand. These elements are then woven into a cohesive narrative across all campaigns within the PESO model. This approach guides agile content development and creation by providing a clear and consistent narrative thread. It ensures that each piece of content published contributes to the overall story and reinforces repetitive brand messaging.
The best way to prioritize brand visibility is to adopt an agile content development model that tightly integrates a storytelling content strategy. That way, you leverage content across the digital ecosystem and drive repetition. And the storytelling will make it memorable.
My Top 5 Agile Content Creation Tools
There are hundreds of tools available to agile content creators. To help you get started, here are my top five:
Canva is a graphic design platform that enables you to create visually appealing content quickly and efficiently. It offers various customizable templates, fonts, icons, and illustrations that can be modified to suit your brand’s style and message. Canva’s drag-and-drop interface and real-time collaboration features make it a great choice for small teams looking to produce high-quality content without investing significant time or resources.
Flourish is a data visualization tool that can help you create interactive visualizations from complex data sets. Its customizable templates enable you to create charts, maps, and infographics without requiring coding skills. Flourish’s interface lets you quickly craft data-driven narratives that effectively communicate key messages.
Jasper AI is an artificial intelligence-powered writing assistant that streamlines content creation. Its advanced language capabilities can help you produce engaging and well-structured content. Jasper AI’s contextual suggestions and insights can help overcome writer’s block, producing high-quality content in less time.
ChatGPT is an advanced language model that can help you generate high-quality content efficiently. Its ability to understand user input through prompts helps streamline content creation. OpenAI is pushing the needle with innovation, making generative AI for marketing easy. They recently announced ChatGPT plugins that allow seamless integration with other apps and platforms.
Talkwalker is a social media monitoring and analytics tool that can help you stay current with emerging trends across all major social media channels. Real-time tracking of conversations, mentions, and hashtags provides insights into what audiences discuss and engage with. By leveraging these insights, you can craft content that aligns with current trends, ensuring that your content remains relevant and impactful.
For enterprise-level technologies, here are some additional resources: