Always Build Content – Agile Marketing Priniciple #5

photo by http://flickr.com/photos/kmtucker

This is the fifth in a series of posts on Agile Marketing – the working definition of which is to

“Create, communicate and deliver unique value to an always-changing consumer (or business) in an always-changing market with an always-changing product.”

Even if you’re not shipping today (or next week) you have the opportunity to make it easier for your customers to understand what you do – you can do this by the ABC method – Always Build Content. Read the first Agile Marketing post here.

Agile Marking Principle 5: Sustainable marketing requires you to keep a constant pace and pipeline

What does it mean to Always Build Content? For starters, it means that you can produce information that will help your customer learn more about your product and – in the process – grant more room for unexpected “we won’t ship this week” or “remember that thing we told you about? it changed” moments. Content can take a few forms, and ideally should conform to a calendar with daily, weekly, and monthly activities. The quality and pace of these activities is really up to you and to the needs of your business, but consider these tools when you are thinking about the ways you can continue your Agile Marketing activities at the same frenetic pace as your developers.

Reaching out Every Day Builds Ideas for Content

Your customers are talking to you every day – whether on social media, through emails or phone calls, or in person – and you can gain really valuable insight from them just by making sure you have (at least) a few customer contacts every day. This is an excellent way to find out what people don’t know, and to check your knowledge of where they are encountering problems with your existing product. You might have the best information in the world (but they can’t find it.) You might have thought of a great scenario (that they have trouble mapping to the way they use the product.) Or things might just be harder than you thought. So take it upon yourself to talk to and listen to customers as your content-building pipeline.

Do you think of your content as a Curriculum, and your Customers as Students?

If you think of the customer lifecycle as an arc that goes from no knowledge of your product to total knowledge of your product, you should be building content for all points of the product knowledge/experience continuum. A great place to start is at the top of the funnel, by producing a great, easily digestible “get started in 3 minutes” document and video. This is not meant to replace other forms of learning – it’s just the first place your customers will come into contact with your marketing efforts and it should identify a clear reason they should use your product and demonstrate how easy it is to get started. (If it’s not easy, please break the startup steps into something that seems easy.)

As customers become more familiar with your product or service, they will want more demanding topics. Keep a list of these topics and when you hear them more than a few times, create some content to address that issue. And there’s always the “compilation post” where you explain the content you’ve built already and share different ways to use it.

Today’s content may lead to tomorrow’s sale (or loyal customer)

How many Tweets, blog posts, Knowledge Articles, and Customer contacts will you have today? At least some of the items in that content pipeline will generate future business (you just don’t know which ones will provide the most lift yet.) The Long Tail will help in this regard, and so will some luck (it helps to be both lucky and good.)

 

Balance what’s cool with what people will actually use (and buy)

It’s easy to think when you’re starting a new product (or even coming up with a new feature for an existing feature) that not only have you found the newest, coolest way to do things but also have unlocked the secret to users and usage – or making sure that people will actually use the thing.

“Should I make sure that they learn how to do this new thing?” you might ask yourself, while also asking “but what do they really need – and are willing to pay for?“

Avoiding the shiny object conundrum

photo by http://flickr.com/photos/abbylanes

If it’s sparkly, it must be good (no, great). Social log-in, private messages, mobile social local, posting to Facebook while driving in your car (while on a handsfree device of course) could all be useful features in the service of solving the user’s problem. But if the user doesn’t have that problem, you might have a problem.

So how would you know if this is a “bright idea” or a genuinely good one that might lead to sustained usage over time?

Ignore Your Idea the First Time You Have It

Yep, the first time your idea pops up, just ignore it. (Or jot it down on a post-it note if it seems particularly important and you’re worried about losing it to the idea gremlins of the world.) If an idea manifests itself more than once (and especially if you hear your existing customers saying it), it’s probably more than a one-time concern for them as well.

If it isn’t the first time you’ve had the idea, try to generalize it so that it appeals to a broad group (read: broader than you) and make it specific enough in the problem it solves that you can test it out on some people who don’t have any stake in proving that your idea is valuable.

Test Your Idea with a Simple Statement

Remember, when you’re asking people if they would use your idea to solve their problem, you need to ask them in a way that solves a specific problem that they have (not whether they think your idea is cool.)

You might use a template like this: if you’re a ______________ who does ______________ and repeats it _____ times a _______, would your life be easier if you could _______________ by doing ___________ and learning _______________.

This works equally well if your idea is an online or offline idea. Now go and ask 30 people you know (and make a survey to ask 30 people you don’t know.) If you start seeing patterns before these people see prototypes, wireframes, or shiny web apps, you’ve probably thinking about something that can create, communicate, and deliver unique value. And that’s something that will keep people coming back (even when things don’t look so shiny.)

 

 

You know you’ve made progress when users say, ‘it’s better!’

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Agile Marketing – the working definition of which is to “Create, communicate and deliver unique value to an always-changing consumer (or business) in an always-changing market with an always-changing product.” See the original post here. We know that we’re always promising something along the lines of “I think that will be shipping with our next release.” The best way to help your Agile Marketing efforts is to Just Ship It.

Agile Marketing Principle #4: Working Software is the Principal Measure of Progress

People only know that you’ve made progress when they can see for themselves how things have changed. Notice that the headline above doesn’t say “finished software,” but instead says “working software.” This is a critical notion that makes some product managers quite nervous because they measure progress by looking backwards after they’ve finished, not by measuring whether users can achieve the tasks and stories the users want to do with the “not-quite-finished” software.

Working software generates progress because people can measure the difference between how they want to use the software and what it actually does. Even though the rounded corners on the UI may not be done, the point at which the software works (or alternately, requires the user to do something that doesn’t make sense to them) is the key turning point that drives user adoption. (Note: you might need to finish your software to the nth degree to make your users ecstatically happy. But I don’t think that rule applies to the 80% of users who only use 20% of your features.)

If we accept that working software is the principal measure of progress, it means that both internal and external users of your software need to know how things are supposed to work for the most common use cases and why they work that way. It also means that fewer, more easily understood features usually trump increased functionality and edge cases (for the 80% “good-enough” user). Finally, when you do deliver “the next version” of the feature, it will feel like incremental, easily understood progress to the user, rather than a brand new set of cases to learn and master.

How then, can you make “the way things work” most consistent, understood, and discoverable? You can increase consistency in your product by having a glossary of terms and actions, describing both the nouns of your product (what is that thing I’m looking at?), the verbs (what should I be trying to do here?), and the overall grammar (now that I understand what it is and what it does, how can I make a new activity with that thing and expect it to turn out in a way that seems familiar?).

You can make the product better understood by asking, speaking with, and listening to your customers. It’s neat that a team can find really great ways to use its own product, but if the customer (because the customer is not you) can’t figure out what they’re supposed to be doing or how to do the things they want to do, your product will never gain wide adoption (which, by the way, might be ok if you price it correctly.) Also, figure out the easiest ways for your customers to get help (it’s usually to call or email you directly.)

Consistency, discoverability, and ways to get help – then you can ship even when it’s working, but not yet finished. And use your customer feedback to take it from working to finished – you’ll know and your customers will know how you are progressing if the software you deliver just works (or is very clearly described so that they can make it work)

 

Tiny Habits Build into Great Behaviors

I signed up this week for the TinyHabits program from BJ Fogg at Stanford. The program – a way of training yourself to take small steps that will build into specific behaviors – intrigues me because it mirrors a few practices I’ve done over the past two years that have made a huge difference in my life. Keeping a daily and weekly log, trying to answer all of my email promptly, and always asking people how I can help them are three small habits I’ve followed that have delivered big benefits.

What did I do? (Keeping a daily log)

I can’t take too much credit for this one – it’s T.A. McCann who introduced me to it – but simply keeping a list of the major things that you do each day and who you did it for can give you great insight into how you’re spending your time. I don’t get much value from logging every tiny thing that I do – but I try to capture any activity that takes more than 30 minutes of time. Keeping this log (in Evernote) gives me access to what I’m doing today, what I did last week, and keeps that list with me wherever I go. It’s also a great place to plan – just ask yourself 3 things: “what did I do?”, “what am I doing next?”, and  ”where do I need help?”

How can I answer all of my email as fastly and efficiently as I can?

There are plenty of ways to manage email and to be productive, and I don’t claim to have reinvented the wheel on dealing with email. The key thing is to spend less time finding the emails that need action, and then to act on them with deliberate speed. I use a modified GTD approach to manage my email load, identifying each piece of mail to file, forget/delete, or to act upon it immediately. And if there is a quick item that I can send as the action and it will take less than a minute or two, I do it now. Added to this is a quick sweep in the morning and evening of any emails that are lingering in my inbox (yes, I know this is ferboten for some, but I use my inbox (and Gmail’s priority inbox) to let me know how I’m doing.) I never make it inbox zero, but on most good days I’ve maintained the email equilibrium and don’t have more than I had at the beginning of the day. Also, consider using the excellent email filtering tool Sanebox to make it easier to go through all of the bacn that would otherwise clog your inbox.

How can I help you?

This habit has produced the most divergent and interesting answers and opportunities. Simply asking “how can I help you” yields nothing … and everything. It’s really cool to just ask people a question and to see how they respond – it opens up opportunities to really help people. So just make a habit of the question that works for you, ask it to the people in your life, and see how it changes things. Good luck!

 

3 Things We Can All Do To Make Our Emails Better

I hope that you’re enjoying a pause right now and thinking about the people and things that matter most to you.

A friend shared this article with me about Volkswagen’s effort to limit after-work conversation and it struck a chord with me – that we should all think about ways to improve our communication style and that there are simple, concrete things we can do to improve this communication.

Tell people what you’d like them to do, not how you’d like them to do it

The better you can share what needs to be done and to make it factual, the more likely you’ll be to get the results you want. To that end, keep emails short and to the point – emotional conversations should happen using the phone or in person. There are lots of great resources to help you do this, including the Three Sentences technique.

Ask for what you want

In each email, make it very obvious what you’re requesting. If you ask for one or two things in each email – detailing who you expect to do the thing, what it should look like when it’s done, and by when it should be completed – you’ll have a task blueprint that should be pretty clear to another person (and not just to you.) There are many frameworks for these goals – one common one is the SMART goal.

Be a Great Copywriter

Finally, imagine that your email (just like your blog post) is competing for attention with everything else someone might be doing in a day. To that end, you really need to write a great headline or subject to your email to make sure it gets read. It’s best if that subject line is actionable – giving a call to action, a hint at the result, and seems bite-sized enough to represent the smallest big thing that someone might decide to do today. To that end, please try to implement these three suggestions in your next email.