Changing content marketing production using agile practices

This thesis studies how an agile approach can be used to improve the content production process in content marketing. The background lies in the author’s experience in website development projects that have been managed in an agile way, and the realization that also website content and other content marketing could be managed using an agile approach. Change leadership emerged as a crucial enabler for the success of the project. The theoretical part studies the frameworks of change leadership, agile methodologies, marketing and content marketing, and combines these in the framework of agile marketing. The difference between an agile approach, agile methodologies and agile practices is explained, and individual agile practices are studied to select the most suitable combination for the case company’s content marketing needs. The empirical research happened in Ruukki Construction’s content marketing team during a two-month period in the fall of 2017. The scope of the project was to improve the effectiveness, transparency and flexibility of the content production process by implementing an agile way of working. The research questions sought to get answers on how agile practices could support the content marketing process, and if work methods could also be developed in an agile way. Analysing and developing the effectiveness of marketing content itself was not in the scope of this project. The research method was action research, which is carried out along the action rather than from the outside, and together with the organization which is being studied. Action research is run in cycles where the object of the research such as content marketing production is assessed and developed, and findings are used to plan the next cycle of the research. Because agile thinking also includes iterative, time-boxed development phases called sprints, the action research cycles and the agile sprints were combined into one-week development periods that we called sprints according to the agile approach. In the beginning and consequently in the end of each sprint was a weekly meeting called sprint review and sprint planning, where the experiences from the previous sprint were taken as base for planning the upcoming sprint. Change leadership practices were used to drive this change in the organization. A questionnaire was used in the end of the project to find out if the content marketing team members thought that the content production process had in fact turned agile, and if the change was beneficial. The result was positive: majority of the respondents agreed that both the content production process and the process to continuously develop work methods had turned agile and easier to follow, and that Ruukki Construction should continue to run content marketing in an agile way. Based on this research, it can be concluded that agile practices can support the content marketing process, and that change leadership plays a crucial role in implementing changes to work methods. Further development should be done on fine-tuning the set of agile practices specifically for content marketing’s needs