You should rethink your marketing mix by considering the needs of your audience.

Marketing budgets are usually allocated on a yearly basis. This makes it so that your mix is as well, and many of your campaigns are planned many months in advance (and they should, of course, as they require time to prepare, create and produce).

But are you keeping a good chunk of agility in your marketing mix?

Or does this agility manifest itself usually 30 days before the end of the year, when your contingency budget hasn’t been fully used and you don’t want to lose that amount for the following year?

This agility is key in today’s marketing budget.

Content marketing, video marketing and branded content require that you be agile, with a capacity to create, produce and deploy quickly.

And I’m not talking quickly just to do respond to emergencies, but quickly to be able to measure, analyze and adjust in a timely fashion.

Traditionally, marketing budgets put great emphasis on paid media, mostly controlled by media agencies. This approach has created a dependency cycle in which you must commit long in advance so that you get good pricing, but losing agility at the same time.

Your mix must take this into account, and although paid media is necessary and a great tactic, you should (if you don’t already) turn to content and owned media, as they allow you to keep control of the entire chain, its agility capabilities and its results.

The Relevance article I am recommending today was published by Dan Curran, founder of PowerPost. Of course, Curran doesn’t need convincing in regards to content and owned media, but his thoughts and suggestions are definitely something to think about. He details some process elements that can help a brand who is relying a lot on more traditional tactics into integrating more agility and content into its mix.