Insider Guide to Lean Marketing

As markets become increasingly segmented and advertising budgets shrink, massive marketing campaigns are losing their relevance in today’s largely online world. This is where lean marketing steps into the breach, reaching out to smaller audiences with better ROI. Lean marketing optimizes campaigns for customers, pruning away unnecessary items and cutting back on costs.

Lean Marketing Concepts

Striving to do more with less, lean marketing pursues better results with tighter budgets. Relying heavily on data and analytics, campaigns are small and brief, with results that are constantly measured. The key factor here is to break down markets into bite-sized pieces that can be analyzed quickly and fixed even faster, followed by iterations that ensure increasingly personalized outreach for repeat runs appealing to specific consumers.

In general, lean marketing campaigns are underpinned by the following concepts:

• Customer-centric,?lean marketing keeps pace with customer preferences, as increasingly personalized campaigns are constantly tweaked, steered by consumer feedback;
• Data-driven?campaigns are steered by facts and feedback, rather than feelings and hunches, ensuring that marketing communications can be their messages effectively;
• Focused but flexible,?every aspect of a campaign is analyzed for effectiveness, with illustrations, graphs, and bodycopy keeping pace with current affairs and customer interests;
• Experiments, not expectations,?lean marketing campaigns pursue specific goals along many possible paths that are lightly sketched, rather than laid in stone;
• Teamwork with transparency?keeps everyone in the loop, absorbing inputs and insights from everyone involved in the entire production and sales chain;
• Prioritization boosts productivity,?by eliminating wasted time and effort expended on dead ends and unnecessary details.

Working Together Brings Better Results

Once these concepts have been pared down to their essence, it’s time to get creative, crafting memorable campaigns underpinned by customer insights. This is where the lean marketing approach swings into action, underpinned by company-wide teamwork. Brainstorming sessions can – and should – include input from the production side, as well as customer-facing departments. An amazing amount of untapped information is often available in-house, but ignored by traditional communications channels.

Lean marketing activities avoid this data-silo trap by adopting a dragnet approach that actively seeks detailed insights that broaden the appeal of each campaign, at lower costs:

• approval processes should be multi-tiered, triple-checking that a campaign is insight-based and feedback-driven;
• smaller campaigns offer shorter-term and specialized deliverables, unbundled from major corporate goals established over longer terms;
• time, talent, and funding are split among several specific targets that are easily customized, avoiding the risks of expensive across-the-board flops;
• trial runs and complete campaigns are all tightly focused, tweaked as needed, and based on detailed feedback with measurable results;
• data and analytics spotlight strong and weak points in real time, making the best use of tight marketing budgets.

Better Payback with B.E. S.M.A.R.T. Marketing

The first step in any marketing campaign is to establish its immediate goals: 20% more sign-ups, full-house attendance at an event, 15% increase in seasonal sales …. So here’s an easy-to-remember reminder of how to do this: BE SMART. This means boosting?Brand?Engagement through?Specific,?Measurable,?Attainable,?Realistic, and?Time-defined goals.

One looking ahead to the future, smart marketers also learn from the past. Although not all datasets are necessarily valid for fast-changing contexts, they are priceless for indicating long-term trends. Analytics software provides trustworthy business intelligence. In turn, this offers insights into consumer behaviors, with more accurate segmentation and lower marketing costs.

Instant feedback and efficient analytics allow lean marketing campaigns to be fine-tuned on the fly. Flexible and adaptable, they may be repeated at will, responding more sensitively to consumer preferences. The trickle-as-trialed funding required by this test-and-tweak approach contrasts sharply with traditional campaigns. Their massive pre-launch budgets are usually front-loaded into creation and placement, with little wiggle room for post-launch changes.

The effectiveness of lean marketing campaigns is underpinned by three pillars:

• Pillar 1. Focus on the consumer, defined through multiple buyer personas with individual characteristics;
• Pillar 2. Fast implementation, alteration, and iteration, underpinned by solid data and trustworthy analytics;
• Pillar 3. Flexibility is vital, as each iteration of the campaign focuses more accurately on specific market segments.

Takeaway:?Strange as it may seem, fast failure is the core strategy of an effective lean marketing campaign. That’s because the sooner an action fails, the quicker it can be corrected. The lessons learned are then woven back into subsequent iterations, with an increasingly tighter focus on consumer preferences and pain points. And that’s a failsafe recipe for boosting conversions.