How to Create Engaging and Effective Content by Experimenting
Experimentation: something content creators aren’t used to doing because we’re scared of under-delivering. Management gets nervous hearing about it for fear of damaging their reputation. There’s no need to sweat. This is not an origami contest, nor a game of roulette. Adopting experimentation in your team’s workflow is easier than you think.
We can borrow the process of experimentation from the scientific method in order to improve the impact of your content. Because there’s a triple challenge you have to tackle with your content marketing:
Your team needs to create the right content for the right audience as fast as possible.
Solution:
A lean approach for content creation through ‘Minimal Viable Posts’.
Focus is on appearance rather on process
As a creative, you have to practise different habits if you want to improve the quality of your content. The old waterfall process doesn’t cut it anymore. Working your pants off and hoping your audience likes what you’re firing at them, is not enough.
Also, the ways we package our stories has dramatically changed in the past couple of years. Through social media, 360 videos, VR, GIF’s, DataViz, infographics, interactive storytelling, etc. people have access to a diverse media landscape. Few creators, however, change the way they develop its contents.
Therefore the real innovation lies in the roads, exits and turns you take towards your goals while crafting content.
For example, extensive market research is necessary, but that doesn’t mean you have to wait to publish your work. What if publishing becomes part of your research?
Adopting experimentation as part of your process will get you to your goals quickly and accurately.
It involves the implementation of a lean approach:
Experimentation is not roulette; there’s a method behind it
Experimentation is where innovation and progress happens. Many startups use the lean startup methodology for innovation. This is a process created to figure out which roads are the best to take to achieve your goals.
As a result of implementing parts of this methodology, you can reduce wasted time, money and effort. Moreover, experimenting will increase the impact of your content.
With the LEAN Startup Methodology, startup success doesn’t have to rely on that lucky shot in the dark, it can be learned. You can apply the same methodology to your content marketing production. Lean allows you to:
- Eliminate uncertainty.
- Work smarter, not harder.
- Develop a Minimal Viable Product.
- Validate your learnings.
Making the right things using Minimal Viable Posts
To create the right content for your audience you need to do many small experiments instead of a few big ones.
Quality is born out of Quantity — Tony Jing
While testing small, you keep iterating and continually conducting new experiments. The experiments consist of three core activities:
Build → Measure → Learn (as seen in figure 1, 2).
Staging experiments is a huge part of progress. Through hypotheses, experiments have clear definitions of success, which can tell you unambiguously whether you’ve succeeded or failed. Without being able to fail, you cannot learn.
Experiment: a scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery, test a hypothesis, or demonstrate a known fact.
It is a method which allows us to figure out what we need to build or create. But first, we want to know what we want to test.
Test your hypotheses
A hypothesis is a measurable proposed statement or a prediction of what is going to happen. You create a hypothesis from some early findings. For example, from your audience research. When producing your first piece of content see what kind of hypothesis you can create to get to know your audience.
Say you work as a content marketer for a large buffalo (do not confuse with the American bison) farm who sells mozzarella.
You’re creating content marketing for this company. In your research, you find that your potential customers use Instagram for posting pictures of food and YouTube for watching recipes.
You can do a problem/solution analysis: Not enough people see the quality of our buffalo mozzarella. So your hypothesis can be: If I create content of original mozzarella recipes, then people will share the content four times more than our current average sharing figures.
It’s worth it to go a step further with crafting your hypothesis. It will help you get the proof when something is or isn’t working.
From this hypothesis you could create:
- a YouTube video starring an Italian chef.
- well crafted pictures of mozzarella dishes for Instagram.
These ideas sound cool but trust me when I say that only luck will give you success with these ideas. You do not have enough evidence that your audience will like or even need this piece of content.
Before gambling all your money on a column at the roulette table, first experiment with something your audience can interact with. It could very well be people are actually interested in the buffalo’s. The real hero’s in this story. Create a Minimal Viable Post (MVP) as little experiments to test if your’re on the right track.
Enter the loop, again and again, Build → Measure → Learn
Create hypotheses, start experimenting—with for example content curation —quickly, learn from engagement and start building again with the new knowledge you received. It’s all part of a lean strategy. These are tools to decide what to create as well as what to add to your potential customer experience.
With each piece of content, no matter how big or small, you’ll get to know your audience better. You’ll know what your audience wants, where they are and finally maybe even what they need. With many small experiments, you learn quickly and adapt rapidly. This process will define your content strategy success and will lead you to the added value your audience craves.
We’ll keep on refining this article through the feedback we receive. So if you have more ideas, please leave a comment. ✌️
