By Chris Brunau, Content Specialist
Marketing teams who don’t adopt an agile marketing approach may find themselves falling into a production trap. Traditional marketing practices require a considerable amount of planning and production work up-front, and too often they are based on guesswork and “gut” feelings.
On the other hand, agile marketing moves quickly with incremental changes based on what marketers have learned in the past. Agile marketing typically relies on weekly sprints to help prioritize projects and break them down into smaller subtasks to increase productivity.
Learn more about the difference between traditional marketing and agile marketing
Additionally, traditional marketers often focus more on marketing “activities” than they do on strategy or outcomes, leading to marketing campaigns with a lot of deliverables that don’t meet the goals marketers set for themselves.
Focusing on production over results leads to wasted time and budget. Quantity should never come before quality in lead generation.
Marketing teams that follow traditional marketing practices often get caught up in the “production trap” of spending days or weeks producing content, design work, and campaigns that ultimately perform poorly.
So, what causes marketing teams to fall into the production trap? In this blog, we’ll cover a few of the common causes.
A common cause of a marketing production trap is setting the wrong goals. These can include vanity metrics, like web traffic or social media likes, don’t move the needle for lead generation and encourage your team to focus their efforts in the wrong places.
If your marketing team focuses on vanity metrics, your conversion efforts will likely suffer. Instead, focus on creating content that speaks directly to your buyer and helps solve their pain points. This valuable content will contribute to success in lead generation and the traffic and likes will be an added bonus.
Quality should come before quantity when it comes to lead generation and creating content.
Operating in a weekly sprint may keep your marketing team focused and working in an agile marketing mindset.
These sprints will break your long-term projects into digestible subtasks divided throughout the team on a weekly basis. Instead of spending days or weeks working on one big project, your team members can focus on smaller projects that can be more easily adjusted based on new information.
Instead of constantly churning out new content hoping something creates traction, an agile marketing approach creates valuable content that you can improve through iterations backed by analytics and data.
Marketing decisions should always be data-driven. Like we said earlier, going with your gut is never the solution. By collecting and analyzing data, you can determine which content and touchpoints are resonating with customers and contributing to your success.
However, it’s important to ensure you are using the right data.
According to Hubspot, marketers spend about 16 hours per week on repetitive tasks, with data analysis at the top of the list.1 Considering this takes up a significant portion of hours, it’s imperative that you are focusing on the correct data. Hubspot recommends marketers focus on only the metrics used in decision making and forget about the rest. A common example they suggest removing from reports is ‘average time on page’. Sure, it’s helpful to be aware of your website’s stickiness and bounce rate, but you shouldn’t devote too much time and attention to this stat because it may not be a significant indicator of marketing success.
Sure, in an ideal world, all content would be evergreen and never lose its momentum. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case, but there still may be a lot of value in your marketing content that has lost some steam. With a bit of updating and optimization, you can repurpose a piece of content and give it new life.
As Hubspot points out, repurposed content gives you the opportunity to rework your existing, high-quality content into a new form.2 Some common methods of repurposing content include:
Remember, a new campaign doesn’t always require you to start from scratch. Use (the right) data to determine the content that has performed well in the past and consider ways to bring it new life.
You can avoid the production trap with agile marketing and a focus on results over activities. Don’t let your team get caught up in creating countless pieces of content that won’t have any shelf life or value. Instead, focus on the content that will drive results.
Sources
1Hubspot, How Much Time Do Marketers Spend on Routine Tasks? [New Data], June 10, 2021
2Hubspot, 20 Creative Ways To Repurpose Content, February 5, 2021