Adding Jira into your Content marketing mix
Content marketing is difficult, it’s difficult for many reasons, hosting larger training courses at conferences and running dedicated content marketing training at companies of all sizes, there are usually the same pain points;
- Do we have the right output?
- Are we coming across as the authority?
- What is the best format to display your content?
- Can it be compelling enough for the right audience?
- Is our content too niche?
- Can we track success?
- What are the right KPI’s?
- How do we distribute?
- Can we ensure we have the right tools to assist us?
- Can we get the right buy in?
Usually there is a canonical answers to most of the questions, unfortunately when it comes to the right buy in or the right tools it’s very much individual to your business.
As content marketers we use a great deal of tools, from gantt charts to google docs, to expensive project management tools and as most marketers know it usually takes three or four core tools to get the right blend to ensure the right management of the projects for success.
Why Jira:
In my most recent move I went back inhouse and identified the need to introduce content marketing at a larger scale across our different business channels.
The business typically runs off sprints, fortnightly sprints managed in Jira, because of it’s agile nature Jira wants you to work in short sprints from a week to a month like engineers typically work.
Jira has been a core tool the company, it has been so intrenched into the business a number of different teams work with Jira as their primary task management tool.
Identifying this trend and wanting to achieve the maximum buy in I introduced Jira into our marketing team and created dedicated growth boards with content marketing a core component of our boards.
Transparency is key
Another benefit of Jira is it’s completely open and you can share business wide what you are doing and when. This transparency helps to improve your visibility to the business and allows both the technically minded and technically challenged to easily see your sprint within one easy to understand window.
Using the backlog tab it highlights the amount of work you have planned (marketers don’t get hung up on backlog, replace with pipeline/roadmap where applicable) and what you achieved in previous sprints.
How we use Jira & Content Marketing Together:
If you plan your content marketing campaigns weeks or months ahead you often know the calendar dates when you will need to start the project and what actions and deadlines you will have.
Jira (or competitor tools) is a perfect tool for this….
The key reasons why; you want a content marketing project lead (assign them within Jira), you know the dates of the projects (add into specific sprints alongside the deadline).
You know the tasks and sub-tasks required (attaching information, mind-mapping, design brief, style guide, asset creation, content sell in, outreach if required, social shares etc etc).
Jira helps you to manage this and counts down to deadline dates.
Jira also centralises communication within the comments section and keeps track at project level. If you have a product team or data team Jira typically controls their day to day so its great to get them onboard and invite to collaborate.
This also applies if you create reactive and real time campaigns, add as a story or epic and then add into sprints by dropping and dragging into the required or active sprints.
When sprints are complete, you have reports on delivery and what actions were complete and those that were on time. This feature can be great by highlighting the output of your team especially in those marketing teams that might do a lot of work but struggle to communicate their outputs other than social media posts, blog posts or really large ATL projects.
My tips running content marketing in Jira
- Integrate with connecting tools.
If your business is using hipchat, Jira also integrates in so you can connect chat with ID’s.
We actually use slack company wide however there is a Jira connector for slack (click here for tool) will help manage these core projects. - Review your work in a quick wiki entry.
We also use confluence as our internal wiki, confluence is also directly connected to Jira, we leverage a number of the features, I personally love the ease of use and the ability to have hierarchal levels so you can group projects together under pages and sub pages with analysis of the content marketing campaign and recap key learnings and takeaways.
You can also create blog posts and connect to pages to make it more personal and talk to the wider business. - Ask other departments to communicate through Jira.
Ensuring all communications are centralised is a no brainer but ensuring as much communications with other teams are centralised in Jira. - Use backlog feature for long term planning:
I recommend using the backlog feature and adding in all content marketing projects big or small to ensure you can easily move around between sprints and have multiple project leads managing projects and boards, as you know Google docs and excel spreadsheets can become messy or hard to understand progress. - Link to other assets:
If you add analysis or a write up always add into comments in Jira, let other team members or departments know what the success was or where you felt it went well. This will help improve your Jira experience and improve comms. - Have many project leads but one leader:
Have a clear leader managing closure of sprints and gathering updates where possible, this will ensure Jira works the best team and company wide.
There are many marketplaces for Jira, the calender (click link here) and excel integrator (click link here) are great add ons and zapier (click link here) have some great zaps to help you manage other tools and software.
Jira definitely is not for every business and has it’s hurdles in the first sprint but if you want to project manage large campaigns and apply to businesses that have specific ways of working Jira will be a great tool for transparency and getting projects completed efficiently with wider business units brought into content marketing at scale.
If you have any questions on how or why we implemented jira to our content marketing mix please comment or message me on twitter @Dannydenhard or over on facebook messenger.
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