Making “Little Bets” in Content Marketing

How small bets can have a massive payoff

Earlier this month, several people crowded around a seemingly innocuous table in the lobby of a Marriott near the MIT campus. A few of these onlookers took a seat at the table, just as any guest would in the nearly 300 other Marriott lobbies around the country.

As people often do these days, each guest pulled out their phone and set it on the table top in front of them. But that’s where something interesting happened.

LED’s in the table top light up in front of a few of the guests, indicating that their is another person at that table with which they share something in common. The table connects to an app developed by Marriott in conjunction with MIT, and uses information from your LinkedIn profile (school, industry, hobbies) to find you a potential friend for the evening.

The “Little Bets” Approach

This collaboration is part of a much larger focus on bold new ideas by Marriott as they look to redefine the travel experience for their guests. While the MIT project may seem out of form for the hospitality industry, Marriott ran 350 similar proof-of-concept experiments last year alone. At a time of stagnation for the hospitality industry, Marriott is one of many brands pushing for innovation, but their approach is what sets them apart.

Instead of making massive investments in one or two bold new ideas, they are testing hundreds of new ideas every year, and being obsessive about measuring the impact. This allows them to assess a very high volume of ideas, quickly, and to maximize their chances of finding success. They are embodying the concept popularized by Peter Sims in his book “Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries.”

This approach allows companies and departments to pursue dramatic change without a large upfront investment, mitigating risk and using data.

Making Bets on Content

While marketing embodies the ideals of innovation and experimentation more than any other department within an organization, very few content marketers are making “little bets” in a way that yields significant advancement. Marketers are often keen to go all-in on one or two untested ideas, or they fail to track results of their experiments accurately. Content marketers need to change the way they think about analytics.

Marketers have a tendency to slip into what I call the “goal tracking trap.” This is when marketers use their powerful analytics suites to, once a week or once a month, pull their key performance indicators. This is how a huge majority of content marketers use their analytics and it’s not wrong, it’s just massively incomplete. Content marketers should also be using their analytics to track and report on small content “experiments” that can help uncover new ideas or optimize existing ones. Analytics can tell us if our new ideas are worth pursuing or not. When Marriott tests a new concept, they track every step, and consult the analytics to see if the idea is worth pursuing more.

Content marketers are constantly experimenting. New headlines, new formats, new topics, etc. But very little tracking is done on those experiments. Here is the quick and easy way to set up a “content lab” and start testing your little bets.

Record Baselines

The key to effective experimentation is having a reliable control group. This means recording your average baseline statistics so you will have something to compare the results of your experiments to. Without this number, there is not definitive way to understand the impact of your experiments and which ones are worth pursuing. Decide which metric you are trying to impact with your experiment and record the baseline numbers.

Track All Your Variables

The key to effectively tracking your little bets is to record everything. Write down the URL of that page with the new layout. Anywhere you are looking for a click from your audience, created a trackable link with services like bitly. Add that information to a spreadsheet and label it with the particular experiment you are running.

Report on the Results

Set reminders on your calendar to return to that spreadsheet and pull the performance numbers for your new experiments. Try to keep the timeframe as consistent as possible across experiments to make it easier to compare. This document will be a living breathing idea factory and continually source of innovation for your content.

Test All the Things

The most important part of taking a little bets style approach is to test everything. Content marketing is reaching maturity, which means it is in desperate need of innovative ideas to shake things up. Try every new idea you have. You might be surprised at what sticks.

Are you running experiments like this in your own marketing? Let me know in the comments below!