By now, it’s a cliche to cite the first rule of improv: “yes, and.” We’ve heard plenty of pontificating about how the “yes, and” approach can help you blast through your blocks and generate brilliant new ideas.
Now it’s time to talk about my favorite rule of improv: “there are no mistakes, only gifts.”
If “yes, and” can help you hurtle past the fear of the blank page, “no mistakes, only gifts” can help you overcome your perfectionist tendencies when it’s time to publish and promote.
And when you make that leap, you can learn faster, iterate faster, try more stuff, and uncover opportunities you didn’t know you had.
In the world of improv, the rule of “no mistakes, only gifts” means that, when someone “makes a mistake” onstage, no they didn’t. They just added an interesting new wrinkle to the scene and therefore to the world of the show.
So if I say, “Hey, Tim!” to a character who has already been named “Steve,” the person playing him doesn’t say, “Actually, it’s Steve.” Instead, he finds a way to justify my “mistake.”
“Shh,” he might say to me. “I’m undercover.”
Boom. Things just got a lot more interesting.
This is a really important rule in improv because you’re making everything up on the spot. Of course people will make “mistakes.” If we treated those mistakes as we do in the real world, we’d end up with a lot of boring scenes that are just like the boring real world.
And if we wanted that, we could have stayed home and looked out the window.
When we see each “mistake” as a gift, we get more interesting scenarios: Ferris wheels with wait staff, walls you can walk through, people who go undercover to find out where their rivals acquire their flannel shirts.
We get to explore things we might not otherwise get to explore.
So how the heck does that apply to content marketing?
In 2015, I managed content for two websites and was responsible for organic traffic to these sites. One day, without realizing it, I checked a box that de-indexed the homepage of one of the sites.
I didn’t catch my mistake until two weeks later, when I was putting together my (extremely manual) dashboards.
“Oh no,” I said.
The good news was that it was the smaller of the two sites I’d de-indexed. We didn’t get as much traffic to begin with from that site.
We’d lost traffic, but it hadn’t been so bad that sirens had gone off before my regularly scheduled report.
And that, as it turned out, was hugely valuable. The long-term plan was to kill the smaller site and merge its content with the larger, newer site – but we were all hesitant to lose whatever brand equity and traffic and leads that site was still bringing in.
As my inadvertent experiment showed, the loss might not be that painful after all.
Bolstered by the data points I’d accidentally gifted the team, we were able to much more confidently plan the merger and execute it faster than we otherwise would have.
To be clear: I’m not suggesting you go about your content marketing willy-nilly, without a plan or strategy.
In fact, I am very pro both plans and strategies.
These structures are also important in improv. For example, most improvisers go onstage with a clear understanding of what kind of show they’re doing. Some groups perform specific “forms,” meaning they will follow certain “beats” and create a show with a certain shape, regardless of its content.
Similarly, content teams should know whether they’re optimizing for inbound traffic or long-term nurture or newsletter signups or something else.
Where the “no mistakes, only gifts” mindset can help is in banishing the fear of doing something wrong, which often leads to paralysis – to not doing anything. It can help teams blast past their perfectionist tendencies.
For example: you want your CEO to start posting more on LinkedIn. This is where your prospects are, and your CEO has a great network.
Your team agrees that this is a smart idea, but they want to make sure they have a strategy in place.
Three weeks later, you’re still trying to define the CEO’s voice.
Two weeks after that, you’re in round three of revisions of the first set of posts.
When they’re finally “finished” a week later, they’re no longer relevant and you give up the whole venture.
That is the approach of a team that is VERY AFRAID of making mistakes.
If you approached the same tactic with a “no mistakes, only gifts” mindset, it might go something like this:
Now we’re at the same six-week mark and you have six weeks of data on this effort: performance, engagement, resonant topics, etc.
After seeing posts “in the wild,” maybe your CEO gave you additional feedback on how to shape their voice. They’re now super-aligned on the project and excited about some of the comments they’re getting.
They’ve also gained new followers in this time, so as you post more, every post has a bigger impact.
And you probably made some mistakes along the way! Maybe you posted one “joke” that the CEO thought was not even remotely funny and you took it down and you got some very valuable feedback about where the lines of “voice” need to be drawn.
No, that was not a fun workday for you.
But boy, did it give you clarity for how to shape messaging moving forward.
The “No Mistakes, Only Gifts” approach to content marketing tends to work well in the following circumstances:
As for why this approach works, it’s the same principle behind the product innovation approach to developing new software.
Rather than unveiling a final product as a big “ta-da,” the product innovation approach aims to create prototypes of ever-increasing fidelity, share them with end users, and iterate based on their feedback.
It’s not a perfect comparison, of course: in the world of content marketing, the thing you “share” with “end users” is also itself a final product. You can’t share a prototype of a blog post with your audience without publishing it.
But get this: you can unpublish something, update it, and republish it.
You can test the waters on a low-stakes platform (like social media) and lean in when things resonate (by creating longer-form content and promoting it).
You can commit to publication “sprints” where you try something new for a few weeks, then step back to assess.
And (I really can’t emphasize this enough) you can always unpublish>.
In fact, there's even a sophisticated name for that: content pruning. Heck, pruning can be a great SEO strategy! (No mistakes – only gifts!)
In any case – whether something works great or falls flat – you learn something. And not only what you’d expect to learn (like whether a specific tactic works). You might learn that you can get your SMEs fired up about LinkedIn content in a way you never could for the blog.
You might learn that one of your most reluctant thought leaders is actually happy to provide video content.
You might discover the key to getting the sales team’s feedback on marketing strategies.
Basically, when you stop worrying about messing up, you end up trying a lot more stuff. And when you do that, you open the door to a whole universe of things that weren’t possible before.
What the “no mistakes, only gifts” mindset boils down to is rejecting the idea of perfection. Because here’s the thing: your content won't be perfect, no matter how long you spend on it. Neither will your promotion strategy.
When you stop trying to avoid mistakes, you open yourself to discovery. You make it possible to learn faster. Suddenly, you have a whole basket of invaluable knowledge you wouldn’t have if you’d played it safe.
Sure, it’s scary at first. But here’s the good news: even if you’re doing it wrong, you're doing it right.