How to agile marketing with visual content?

Agile, or lean and scrum methods in project management, leadership and software development have been pop for as long as I remember (I checked the internet, the actual number of years is almost twenty).

In marketing I feel like going agile has been a fairly new buzzword for 2018 (but if someone out there is more aware of the buzzword game, please correct me wrong). Even still it has seemed to been buried somewhere under data, AI, privacy and sexual harassment.

Agile has been there for marketing though. It has been there strong. It has been important. It has for sure changed the game.

At Brink Helsinki we do creative visual content production. So we get to enjoy the heart of change towards agile marketing - rapid development of large amount of assets for testing.

In this blog I go through how we, you, us together can take advantage of agile marketing with visual content to adapt to the ever changing rules of digital marketing.

But as usual in my long ass blogs: first, the background.

What is agile marketing?

Don’t take it from me, trust the mega established McKinsey&Company’s Article:

“Agile, in the marketing context, means using data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly iterating.”

That means start now, start small, analyse often, move fast and build from victories.

Why you need agile marketing?

As Stephanie Bohn wrote in her great Adweek Opinion:

“Today’s marketers are faced with a dizzying array of social media platforms that offer unique consumer experiences, ad products, policies, targeting options and analytics.

Therefore, the smartest (some would say only) way to market on social media is to develop a large array of assets and see what sticks.

There is no longer a beginning and an end to a campaign. Agile marketers are in a constant loop of producing new creative, learning and optimizing.”

It’s not only that you need agile marketing because our (audience’s) media consumption habits have changed from only watching TV to rapidly evolving digital media channels.

It’s also, that thanks to all this technology, you now can take advantage of agile marketing.

Why it’s more important with visual content?

So we need to be constantly creating, producing and iterating. Check. These agile marketing methods can easiest be applied to text content.

All the glory to the written word, heck, that’s what I’m using here, but unfortunately the agile marketing methods most importantly need to be applied to visual content - pictures and videos.

This is because visual content is the most consumed content. Visual content gets your audience’s attention and keeps it.

So creating more agile visual content is the key to succeeding in agile marketing. The most popular of all visual content, video, is of course the hardest of them all.

Why it’s harder with visual content?

Simply: it takes more time and money. By far the two biggest concerns in content production.

Creating several different assets quick and cheap, but obviously still in high quality and ideally appealing enough for some of them to succeed, can seem merely impossible.

But worry you not. Brink Helsinki is here to help. Just follow these 3 simple stages and you will be a world class agile visual content marketer in no time.

1st Stage: How to get started?

Start with the most important: a clear goal. As long as the goal is not clear there are no changes of scoring (was that a Wayne Gretzky quote?).

Once the business need is set, our professional visual content team is quickly put together based on your unique situation.

Given your target audience, market, channels, current visual identity and those resources of money and time - we tailor you a proposal of what assets to use right now, how they can be taken advantage of in the following stages and how all this is exactly done.

2nd Stage: Start delivering value

Your first round of efficient, but still high quality and genuine visual content are out and tested.

Together we analyse the performance, and start improving your visual content to systematically offer value to your audience and to drive results to you.

This is done by continuously outputting new visual content, usually in a form of series, to save you even more money and time.

The lessons from the first stage have now been well learned, but at the same time we keep growing from that very same content, so none of the earlier work goes to waste.

Methods of agile marketing live and breathe with us at all times to forever keep testing, iterating and improving as we get more and more successful.

3rd Stage: Break free from the competition

The final stage: conquer the world.

As we grow together we keep publishing more epic visual content that your audience is raving about and your sales is praising.

Now your visual content is not anymore about communicating your value proposition, but really good visual content, like your at this point, is part of your value proposition.

We’ve learned so much by now together, that we are creating longer and bigger visual content to keep your hungry audience satisfied.

Damn, I think maybe we even make a short movie for your brand ;)