Getting started with agile marketing? Want to know the two agile content marketing metrics that are transforming my team into a predictable, scalable, and deadline hitting machine? Then this article is for you…
Where my team is at in the agile journey
My content team is in the early stages of an agile marketing transformation. If you’re following the movement or applying it in your company, then you know there are many ways to do it.
But if you listen to any AgileMarketer podcast you’ll hear a common theme: roll it out slow and in steps. As my friend and fellow agile marketer Nicci Shaw said during our conversation today, “do it incrementally”.
An increment I’m working on
I’m working on discovering our initial agile content marketing metrics. I want to know how long it takes to complete common content-types (emails, ebooks, blog posts) that comprise common content projects (webinars, launches, trainings) .
Despite what many agile content marketers say about using time based metrics, I see a way to reliably use it. My hypothesis is once we get these content production metrics, I’ll be able to:
(1) Estimate the amount of work my team can get done in 2-4 week period | SCRUM
(2) Establish how much load each stage in our workflow can handle before bottlenecking | Kanban
Right now it’s not entirely clear what flavor of agile content marketing our team will adopt, SCRUM or Kanban. But what is clear is once I know these numbers, I’ll have the primary agile content marketing metrics to predict what can and can’t get done in a given time or stage.
Here’s what we know so far
Our agile content marketing metrics are based on blogs. They are the pillar of our content program. We research the heck out of topics and often create 2,500-3,500 word posts our audience and Google love.
We have 6 primary workflow stages that go into creating all our content. This standardized workflow gave me the ability to calculate our first agile content marketing metric: published words-per-hour.
Here’s how it works. Let’s say a typical 3,000 word blog post takes us on average:
• 2 hours per 1,000 words to research
• 4 hours per 1,000 words to create
• 1 hour per 1,000 words to edit
• 15 minutes per 1,000 words to proof
• 7 minutes per 1,000 words to upload
• 7 minutes per 1,000 words to preview
Adding these numbers up gives me 7.5 hours per 1,000 words or 130 published words-per-hour.
Knowing this metric helped me plan and predict our content calendar. But I soon realized it’s actually only building block for a much more useful metric.
“Good” and “great” agile content marketing metrics
Knowing how long a single blog post takes was an exciting discovery at first. But I soon realized this metric is pretty limited. It’s good for one person to predict when one content-type can be completed.
However, when I started thinking in terms of team capacity, I needed to know how much total content we could produce. Andrew, a content producer on our team helped me come up with a solution.
We scaled published words-per-hour across the whole team and got a much more useful agile content marketing metric: total published words-per-sprint.
Here’s the “great” agile metric in action
There’s excitement around this agile content marketing metric when I explain it like this:
Think of words-per-sprint like credits. At the start of each sprint we have a bank account filled with “word credits” to spend. Our job will be to look at our marketing roadmap and spend them on the next best projects. We’ll know how much content we can afford now and how much we need to spend later.
As an example, if we need a new sales webinar, we’d look at the webinar as a project composed of different content types. I’ve set up dashboards in our project management software to display each content-type as an individual task.
With our metrics known for each content-type, we can add up all the tasks in the webinar project to know how many “words credits” this project costs.
If the project costs less than the word budget, we will do it all in one sprint. If the project costs more, we will break it up into multiple sprints.
How to figure out your “word budget”
Our agile content is blog based, but I have a hunch other content-types like ebooks, landing pages, and video scripts will hover around a similar delivered words-per-hour.
Even if they don’t, I can still come up with a delivered words-per-sprint. But for the sake of simplicity the example below assumes a similar words-per-hour across all content types.
Here’s how I’m figuring out my agile content marketing team’s word budget:
• Multiply the 6 productive (non-meeting) working hours available per team member by the 6 members to get 36 production hours per day.
• Multiple the 36 production hours per day by 10 working days per sprint to get 360 production hours per week.
• Divide the 360 production hours per week by the 7.5 hours per 1000 words to get total of 48,000 delivered words per sprint.
Using these numbers, we’d have “word budget” of 48,000 words.
Where I’m going from here
I’m sure my “word budget” concept will get reviewed and refined. But prior to conceptualizing this agile content marketing metric, I didn’t have a way to estimate how much or how fast we could get through our project backlog.
Now that I have a “word budget”, only execution will tell me if it’s truly the currency of content I think it is!