How to Use Digital Feedback Loops to Boost Creativity
The world is changing quickly and marketers need to adapt. Luckily, we're all being trained for this every single day.

There is a traditional idea of marketing that says: Decide who your audience is (mass affluent category K-11), come up with a strategy, and assign other people to execute it.
In a digital world with immediate feedback loops, this model no longer makes sense. The world is changing quickly and marketers need to adapt. Luckily, we’re all being trained for this every single day. Each one of us is conditioned to release content, reflect, and iterate hundreds of times a day - through text messages, emails, tweets, facebook and instagram posts. We are all content creators. So how do we allow our company marketing teams to become as reactive and engaging as each of us are as individuals?
There are a few models we can take inspiration from:
- Agile product development
- UX research methodology
- Holocracy
As marketers, we might not use these methodologies in a 1-1 way. But we can use the ideas behind these methodologies. What are the ideas we can take away?
Discover your Audience, Don’t Define It
Traditional marketers would have you spend months looking through Nielsen profiles to define who your audience is. There might be a focus group or two, but the assumptions about the audience won’t be challenged.
Traditional marketers were doing such a terrible job at audience identification in the Internet age that a whole new field, UX (user experience) research, had to spring up to fill in the gap. And we can learn a lot from the people who do this work.
UX researchers look to discover their audience and their product-market fit rather than assume what it is. Sure, there are some assumptions - but those assumptions are tested & validated through interviewing users.
As marketers, and especially as content marketers, we have a wealth of feedback loops we can use to gain new information. If we move from audience definition to audience discovery, and use the lightweight indicators we have to do that discovery, we will be able to shift with the landscape & keep up with the times.
Here are a few ways you can use marketing channels to do early market validation:
- Create Twitter lists of people who are your assumed audience or influence your assumed audience. Begin to engage with them and see how those conversations go.
- Post on Reddit in communities that your audience hangs out in. Gauge their reaction to your messages.
- Do a small AdWords test on searches that identify your audience’s intent. Test different messages and see what response you get.
- Use your newsletter list as a testing ground. Send out a survey.
- Use all these channels to identify some interested people & reach out for a 1-1 interview.
Measure and Iterate
Instead of creating a ton of strategy in a silo and then executing on it, we should constantly be making bets and observing the results.
On my marketing teams, we discussed analytics and performance insights on a weekly basis. We asked questions like:
- Which articles are getting the most views? Where are those views coming from? Are there themes and trends?
- Which articles are getting the most engagement (e.g. claps on Medium)? Are there themes?
- Which social posts have the most engagement? Are there themes?
- Which social posts have the most clicks? Are people staying on page? What kind of content is performing the best on which channels?
- What links are people clicking on from email?
Your whole team should participate in evaluating trends on a regular basis, so that everyone on the team has an understanding of what is performing - or what isn’t.
But that doesn’t mean you find what works and then stay put. As marketers, especially in a creative field, we can’t be afraid to try new things.
Trust Each Other and Fail Fast
User-centric design and measurement are incredible innovations for the marketer, but they can only take us so far.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” - Henry Ford
Research and measurement will allow us to optimize for local maxima, but to find the global maximum, we need to be able to think outside the box and, yes, sometimes fail. To be truly creative, to dream big, to make big bets and survive the failures that will surely come, people need to feel safe. We need to let go of fear.
The only way to do this is to trust each other. It is more important to preserve dignity, to preserve trust, to support someone, than it is to be right or wrong. In a way, the measurement sets us free from this judgement. Why do we need to judge our coworkers if they can plainly see the data in front of them that show them whether or not they’ve performed?
We can let go of the judgemental part of ourselves and focus on support and respect.
I’ve seen these things work in practice. Just like the waterfall method no longer works for product development, it can't work for creative marketing teams who need to "ship" content multiple times a day, every day. But we can make way for creativity through testing, discovery, and trust.
Learn how to adapt Agile methodology for marketing teams.
Cover photo by RhondaK Native Florida Folk Artist on Unsplash