Certain Agile concepts and ideas have been part of the content marketing conversation for some time now. Scrum is one concept that’s often part of these conversations. But bundling it with Agile causes all kinds of confusion.

Hi, I’m Cally, from the International Institute of Digital Marketing. Let’s look at a Scrum-based approach to content marketing.

The iterative approach of Scrum gives the content marketing team clearly defined increments of work, which can be analyzed and modifiedquickly without wasting time on something that provides no value to the blog, the company, or the readers.

Scrum provides a great structure for organizingthe work in a way that makes clear who is working on what and why something is being done.

The product backlog is a prioritized list of everything needed for the product. For a content marketing team, that product may be successful content pieces that bring in leads and boost conversion rates (or anything else that your team is focusing on).

When it’s time to start a new sprint, the development team pulls the product backlog items needed to reach the sprint goalinto the sprint backlog– a list of ordered PBIsto be worked on in that sprint.

Scrum meetings are held regularly and help improve teamwork and the product.

The sprint planning meeting happens before a sprint starts. At the planning meeting, the product owner suggests product backlog itemsthat the team should work on and the development team then discusses what to take on and the best way to do the work.

During brief daily Scrum meetings, the team talks about what they’ve done, how everything is going, and what they plan to do that day. It’s the perfect opportunity for the team to identifypossible bottlenecks and impediments and come up with a way to resolve them.

After the sprint, the Scrum team members meet to review the work accomplished. They talk about what they did well and what could be improved in future sprints. The sprint review is also the chance to showcase the team members’ work.

The sprint retrospective focuses on how the team collaborated as a unit, the obstacles they ran into, and how they can become a more productive and collaborative team. The purpose is not to assign blame but to have a positive meeting that reinforces the feeling of belonging to an ever-improving unit.

For more information, visit www.thedigitalmarketinginstitute.org