Here’s a quick riddle for you: what do lean development and content marketing have in common?

Originally, the first response to cross my mind was nothing. After all, lean development is focused on eliminating waste, while content marketing is all about generating content with the end goal of driving consumer action. If I were asked to give a good analogy, trying to find common threads between lean development and content marketing would be like trying to compare apples to spaghetti – it just doesn’t make sense to do that!

At least, that’s how I used to think.

A Common Connection

A recent discussion over lunch with a friend of mine changed the way I viewed content marketing. My traditional understanding was that content marketing was singularly focused on content generation. The whole point is that the content – if well written – promotes action in a consumer to buy a product, or will help to attract and retain a customer base. If you look up various definitions of content marketing, you’ll find that this really is the underlying purpose of content marketing. However, there is one very important attribute about content marketing that I consistently overlooked.

Value.

For a company, it’s not enough to simply produce a product and hope to profit. A business needs to produce something that has value for a consumer. This idea is key for both lean development and content marketing.

For a marketing team, in order to have impact and really spark a connection with a potential customer, generated content must have value. It’s not enough to simply talk about how shiny a product is (unless of course you are marketing diamonds). The marketing team has to go one step further and really understand what the customer finds valuable, so that meaningful conversations and connections can be made between a customer and a business.

The story is the same with lean development. The purpose of implementing lean practices is to maximize value wherever possible. Looking at agile software development, short development iterations are structured to deliver the maximum amount of value possible per unit of time. Usually, through meaningful conversations and collaborations, the development team (in concert with the Product Owner) figure out what has the most value to the customer, and prioritize work that will deliver it.

Acting on Evidence

The big trick for lean development and content marketing is that they both have to act on observable evidence of what customers find valuable. It’s not enough to have a gut feel for what we think has value. As Dave wrote about in a previous post, it’s easy to overestimate how valuable we think a solution is when working on an interesting problem. Every step of the way, we need to evaluate how effective our solutions are, and get feedback from the people who are likely to buy the product.

In this way, lean development and content marketing have a common requirement: both of them have to keep an eye on their customers, and constantly solicit them for feedback. This feedback system needs to be occurring on a regular basis. Like living systems, customer needs evolve over time, resulting in a constant redefinition of what is valuable.

Delivering Value

All this talk about finding value leads to a very obvious problem: how do you discover and deliver value back to the customer?

Here’s where I get excited, because as it turns out, both lean development and content marketing can use review data to help discover this automatically. To demonstrate what I mean, let’s create an example of an online service where consumers can view and create product reviews. For a small fee, consumers can quickly and easily create comparisons between products to understand what the strengths and weaknesses are of the items they are interesting in buying.

The service is updated frequently by the development team, who works in short iterations of roughly 2 weeks. Right now, the marketing department is working hard to try and attract consumers to the site, so that they can increase their subscriber base, and ultimately increase revenue. Let’s also assume that Sentiment Radar discovered the following information about the online service.

Figure 1: An example Sentiment Radar analysis of the online service.

As you can see in Figure 1, there are 6 features that Sentiment Radar found. For each feature, the green area of the bar represents positive sentiment, while the red area represents negative sentiment. In this example, you can see that roughly 80% of the reviewers who talked about Customer Service are generally positive about it. As you can see, there are also a number of areas that could use improvement.

Looking a little closer, the Search feature has garnered a lot of attention – 48 comments to be exact. When compared to feedback about other features, Search is clearly the most talked about, making it a higher priority item when it comes to future improvements. Not only that, around 2/3 of the comments are negative, meaning that quite a number of people are unhappy with it.

Normally, it would be bad to discover this type of sentiment about a feature in the product. However, this is a golden opportunity for both the marketing team and the agile development team. Clearly if the development team or Product Owner takes a little time to understand what users do not like about the search feature, they can use a future development iteration implementing improvements to it.

Similarly, the marketing team can use this opportunity to generate content that discusses how to effectively use the search tool, and inform users that improvements are on the way. Both groups are delivering value on the same feature. This one-two / development-marketing punch on a highly valued feature can go a long way to retaining the existing customer base, and attracting new users to use the product.

Other sources of value are also present. Marketing can use the positive Customer Service feature as a great area to develop content. Reaching out to positive reviewers, the marketing team may be able to procure testimonials, or generate content around successful customer support stories. Similarly, the agile development team can reach out to people who are having problems with the Payment feature, and formulate a game-plan to help those users overcome any problems they might be encountering.

Working in Harmony

The example above helps to demonstrate that lean development and content marketing can use the same feedback mechanisms to help deliver value to the customer. In fact, when strategically used on the same features, they can be quite powerful in answering the needs of the user.

With that said, challenge your teams to work together. Take a step back from your gut feeling of what is valuable and find evidence of it within your customer community. Bring your marketing and development teams together, and formulate a strategy to address a high-value feature that is under-performing.