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At the last responsible moment

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At the last responsible moment

The following is a selection from the e-book “MarTech’s agile marketing for leaders.” Please click the button below to download the full e-book.

There’s a big misconception in agile marketing and that’s, “We’re agile—we don’t have to plan.” Well, that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, agile marketing involves even more planning than most traditional marketing, but there’s one key difference — you always plan at the last responsible moment.

Let’s say you want to take your dream vacation to Europe in two years. Now, what if I told you that today you needed to know where you were going to eat each day and what meals you were going to order at the restaurant. That seems pretty ridiculous, doesn’t it? Yet that’s the same mentality we’ve had in marketing planning for years — trying to know everything upfront.

Now, pretend that you actually did decide what restaurant you were going to eat at, what time and what meal. Wow, you’re really on top of your game! But guess what — two years goes by and more than half of the restaurants you chose aren’t even in business anymore! Could your marketing plan also be irrelevant if it’s too detailed too soon? Absolutely.

Let’s dive into the idea of planning at the “last responsible moment.”

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At the last responsible moment
Diagram of ‘Last Responsible Moment’ planning

Quarterly planning across all teams

If you’ve been doing annual planning, the first step in agile marketing planning is to move towards quarterly planning. A year ahead is just too far into the future and your efforts may be a big waste of time. Some companies work off of an annual budget, so if you can’t change that at this point, see if you can at least move from specific deliverables to “buckets” of types of work for funding approval.

Read next: 7 leadership behaviors for marketing agility

There are three key deliverables that should come out of quarterly planning: Wildly Important Goals (WIGs), a marketing roadmap and an initiatives backlog. These are all items that should span the entire marketing department and encompass all teams.

A key thing to remember is that planning needs to be collaborative. At this point, marketing leads, strategists and product owners, along with stakeholders, should be involved.

Wildly Important Goals (WIGs)

Setting Wildly Important Goals (WIGs) across all of marketing is what aligns everyone to a common mission. This should be one, maybe two things that everyone can rally around and it impacts the entire marketing department. These are the key things that everyone believes must happen in the coming quarter to consider it a success.

Some examples are:

  • “Promote the opening of our new hospital to residents in the surrounding community.”
  • “Share the latest scientific research around COVID-19 with the public.”
  • “Promote our smart refrigerators beyond the home user to new markets, such as offices and clinics.”

Marketing roadmap

The marketing roadmap should include large initiatives or key themes that need to happen across the marketing organization to meet the needs of the WIGs. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but everyone involved needs to come up with these initiatives and themes together and agree that they are key priorities. Your leadership team should also set goals and success metrics for these initiatives.

Here’s an example for the smart refrigerator:

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1648852487 274 At the last responsible moment
Sample roadmap

Initiatives backlog

The initiatives backlog is simply taking the portfolio level (i.e. strategic) roadmap items, getting agreement on their order of priority and putting them in a tool for further decomposition — the process of breaking down user stories into smaller user stories and tasks — by the agile teams. Make sure the list is ordered top to bottom and there can’t be multiple number one priorities!

Here’s an example:

  1. Awareness Marketing to Corporate Office Managers
  2. Awareness Marketing to Hospital Office Managers
  3. Lead Generation Campaigns
  4. New Product Pages on Website
  5. Promotional Offers for New Customers
  6. National TV Ad Campaign

Planning at the team level

The agile teams will also create their own WIGs, which should tie into the overall marketing department’s WIG, but it may be a little bit more specific to what the team hopes to accomplish in the coming quarter.

An example may be, “Launch a grassroots campaign to get lobbyists to talk about vaccination success.”

While the team may still work on other campaigns or projects during the quarter, this is the big North Star that the team knows is really important. It helps ground the team in what success looks like and allows them to say no to stakeholder requests that may derail them from that goal.

Team roadmap

A roadmap should be created by every agile team giving a high-level look at what they plan to accomplish in the upcoming quarter. This is the best document the team can have to communicate what they’re working on to stakeholders without getting into the weeds.

The team roadmaps should be reviewed often with stakeholders to see if the planned work is still the most important thing, whether or not new priorities have come into play or if timelines are shifting. It brings a great level of transparency between the team and the stakeholders, but ultimately it’s owned by the team.

Marketing backlog

The marketing backlog is the team’s ordered list of everything it plans to do in the future. The backlog can begin with roadmap items, but typically those are very large, so they get broken into even smaller chunks, which are referred to as stories. Anyone can add work to the marketing backlog, but a single team member should be accountable for prioritizing the work with input from stakeholders.

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The marketing backlog is a fluid artifact that can and should change daily based on market response and new information learned.

Sprint plan

The sprint plan is where the team meets to decide what they will commit to working on in the given sprint (a sprint is a time-boxed period, typically one or two weeks in duration that stays constant). The team looks at the prioritized marketing backlog of work and determines how much they confidently feel they can accomplish. They spend the time discussing how they’ll approach the work and what tasks are needed to get the work done.

The sprint planning meeting is something that leaders need to stay out of in agile. The team should be transparent about what they’re doing, but as an agile leader, your job is no longer to manage work.

Daily standup

This daily meeting, which should be short and sweet (15 minutes or less) is really the team’s way to touch base, get help from each other and discuss what might be getting in their way. Daily interaction is important to do with all team members because it helps them solve problems quickly and allows everyone on the team to know what’s happening.

As you can see, there really is a lot of planning that happens in agile marketing. However, planning at the last responsible moment and with flexibility is what makes it agile.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

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About The Author

Why leading an agile marketing organization requires a vision for

Stacey knows what it’s like to be a marketer, after all, she’s one of the few agile coaches and trainers that got her start there. After graduating from journalism school, she worked as a content writer, strategist, director and adjunct marketing professor. She became passionate about agile as a better way to work in 2012 when she experimented with it for an ad agency client. Since then she has been a scrum master, agile coach and has helped with numerous agile transformations with teams across the globe. Stacey speaks at several agile conferences, has more certs to her name than she can remember and loves to practice agile at home with her family. As a lifelong Minnesotan, she recently relocated to North Carolina where she’s busy learning how to cook grits and say “y’all.”


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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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