Stop Trying to Innovate With Your Content

“Innovate! Disrupt! Your company’s future depends on it!” To me, this ubiquitous advice has always sounded as doable as, “Leap that tall building in a single bound!”

What a relief, then, to hear someone widely recognized as one of the most important voices in content strategy say, “Stop trying to innovate.” Kristina Halvorson wove that message into her talk at Content Marketing World. Instead of aiming for innovation, here’s what Kristina advises marketers to do:

Improve on what you’re already doing with your content. Then improve on it again. That’s where your competitive advantage lies. That’s where your success lies.

Listen. Improve. Repeat.

Now there’s something a mortal marketer can do.

How do you decide which content-related improvements to make? And how do you track your progress as you make one improvement after another? The rest of this article explores those two questions.

Look for ‘adjacent possibilities’ for improvement

Kristina’s message isn’t new. Product designers and manufacturers have followed the principles of continual improvement (popularly but less accurately called continuous improvement) for decades. The idea is that innovation comes not from striving for breakthroughs but from making one incremental change after another.

Expressing this idea in a memorable way in a talk at the Delight conference for user-experience designers in 2014, Forrester Research vice president James McQuivey said:

Don’t try to build the future. Build an adjacent possibility. Build the next thing people need. Let the future find you.

Adjacent possibilities. In two words, James pegs innovation as an evolutionary process. In fact, in an article in Harvard Business Review, he points out that the man who coined the term was an evolutionary biologist.

In the same article, James gives business strategists this advice:

Direct your team to obsess about today’s adjacent possibilities, not tomorrow’s distant improbabilities … There is no way you will anticipate all the adjacent possibilities that will have to combine (over the long term) to accurately predict what products you will sell or how you will sell them that far out. That’s not for lack of intelligence on your part. It’s because most of those adjacent possibilities on which you will ultimately depend have yet to emerge from the combination of other adjacencies on which they will depend.

In his intro to a recent This Old Marketing podcast, discussing the difficulty of making long-term predictions, CMI Chief Content Adviser Robert Rose said something similar:

Instead of looking out for (what’s) coming over the horizon … we can succeed more by really getting good at identifying … trends that are here. Because then you’re not standing in the intersection trying to predict what’s the next kind of truck that will come around the corner and mow you down in the street. You’re looking at what’s in front of you and to either side and becoming better at crossing the street.

What kind of adjacent possibilities – possibilities right “in front of you and to either side” – might you explore today to improve your content processes? Kristina essentially answered that question when she suggested that marketers identify content strategy activities that haven’t been done yet or that need more attention, prioritize those activities, and pick something to improve.

Pick a next thing to do, and do it.

What kind of activities might you pick from? When Kristina talks about “content strategy activities,” she’s talking about activities related to planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content – her frequently quoted definition of content strategy. She mentions the following examples:

• User research: Talk with customers.
• Personas: Share your customer insights with your team.
• Message architecture: Identify and prioritize your main messages.
• Content inventory and audit: Figure out what content you have, and assess it against business goals and audience needs.
• Workflows: Map out who does what when.
• Style and brand guidelines: Document what must be done consistently across all content teams.
• Metrics: Decide what measurements indicate whether your content helps you reach your business goals.
• Content team: Put the right people in the right roles.

Consider the activities that your team might benefit from. Then pick one – one possibility that’s adjacent to what you’re already doing – one activity that could help address your biggest content-related pain point. Start there.

Let’s say that someone created personas years ago, but no one ever mentions them in your editorial meetings, your blog authors say that the old personas don’t help them, your audience rarely shares or comments on your blog posts, and your blog subscription rates are disappointing. You might do a new round of user research and then refine your personas to convey more-relevant insights into your audience’s questions and struggles.

Listen. Improve. Repeat.

Now that we’ve looked at how to decide which activities to improve, let’s turn to how to track your progress.

Track the progress of your improvements

As you improve the elements of your strategy, you might find it helpful to track your progress. One approach would be to create an at-a-glance chart that indicates the status of various content strategy tools your team is using or plans to use. In her Content Marketing World workshop, Content Strategy 101, Laura Creekmore handed out one such chart, which I share here with her permission.

Click the image below to download Laura’s chart as a customizable Google sheet. (Go to File > Download As.)

Customize this chart as you like, adding or deleting tools in the far-left column so that the list fits your team. “You might not need all these things,” Laura told workshop attendees. “Ask yourself where your opportunities are.”

Change the tool names, too, if you like. “The content police are not coming to get you,” says Scott Kubie, a content strategist and designer who works with Kristina at Brain Traffic. In his blog post Put the Work Before the Words, Scott goes on to say:

If stakeholders are confused by a term like ‘content audit’ – maybe auditing makes them tense up with thoughts of the IRS or SEC – just call it something else. Call it a content review. Call it a website analysis. Call it voice QA. Call it Steven. (OK, maybe not that last one.)

In other words, track your progress in a way that works for your team.

Listen. Improve. Repeat.

Conclusion

The pressure is off: You can stop trying to innovate with your content. Instead, improve something. Pick an adjacent possibility – something close to what you’re doing already. Do that.

Listen. Improve. You know.

Track your progress. Eventually, you may look back and realize that you’ve accomplished something innovative after all. You’ve made it over that tall building by taking the stairs.

How do you and your content team improve your processes? How do you track your improvements? Please let us know in a comment.

If you are serious about putting content to work in your business, you won’t want to miss the Intelligent Content Conference March 28 – 30, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Register today and use promo code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute