After reading SIPA member Robert Lerose’s excellent interview with Content Marketing Institute founder Joe Pulizzi for the Bank of America Small Business Community site, it’s hard not to be a content marketing convert. (It’s one of the four tracks for SIPA’s Las Vegas Marketing Conference.) Pulizzi wants you to have goals for your project. “OK, we’re successful because…” retention is up, our SEO is better, we have more leads, etc. He said that for him, the success metric was free subscriptions. Lerose asked why?

“We’re trying to get people into the top of the funnel to sign up, so we can start building relationships with them,” Pulizzi said. “Most small businesses start their online attention efforts with blog activity. The blog becomes the magnet for everything a small business does when it comes to content marketing. You can publish easily, the content is easily shareable, and search engines love blogs. From there, you can reimagine that content into other things, like white papers, newsletters, or webinar programs.”

Lerose then asked how that information turns into relevant content?

“Most small businesses go wrong because they’re creating content that’s just okay—and okay content doesn’t cut through the clutter,” Pulizzi said. “What cuts through the clutter? Content that people want to do something with, that they want to make a behavior toward. This is not easy. It’s difficult to tell stories that cut through the clutter.”

So how do you tell better stories? In a recent post on Poynter, Anna Li wrote about one newly popular way called design thinking. It’s “a process that many professionals, including journalists, have discovered and adopted in the last few years to create products focused on users,” wrote Li.

She gives five pillars for design thinking:

1. Empathize. Gain insight by learning more from your customers. This came up in our recent Mobile Essentials webinar. (Members can link to it here.) In trying to understand what mobile’s place should be for EB Medicine’s customers, consultant Astek spoke in-depth with five ER physicians to understand what they needed. The findings were critical in guiding EB Medicine’s next steps and made them think about their content differently. “Use empathy by asking open-ended questions and actively listening to uncover people’s needs and motivations,” Li wrote. “Asking ‘Why?’ often is effective….What would my audience like to know?” Remember that you’re not just interviewing people for a specific story you have in mind.

2. Define. Narrow your focus. What problem are you trying to solve for your customers through this content?

3. Ideate. Brainstorm. One design thinking school uses colorful sticky notes to keep ideas in play. “Share your ideas…for feedback, and ask users for feedback on social-media sites to gauge their interest in a story,” Li wrote. This is where any communities that you’ve built will be useful. The article urges you to put your assumptions and preconceptions aside.

4. Prototype. “The goal here is to fail quickly and frequently because failing often and earlier in the process tends to lead to more success in the long run,” Li wrote. In this month’s National Geographic, Hannah Bloch also wrote of the importance of failing: “Even at their most miserable, failures provide information to help us do things differently next time…To encourage entrepreneurship, the Netherlands-based ABN AMRO Bank started an Institute of Brilliant Failures. Eli Lilly and Company, the pharmaceutical giant, began throwing ‘R&D-focused outcome celebrations’—failure parties—two decades ago to honor data gleaned from trials for drugs that didn’t work. (Some 90 percent of all such trials fail.) Some foundations have even begun requiring grantees to report failures as well as successes.”

5. Test. Sound familiar? Taking our time to make sure everything is just right used to be the standard. Not anymore. “…launch an early release and get users’ comments,” wrote Li. “…Feedback frightens some people. The goal of design thinking isn’t relinquishing your common sense and intuition to the masses or pandering to your readers. It’s a method to increase collaboration and gauge the impact your story will have.” She says that journalists may tend to think they know just what to write. But the good ones listen.

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Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline