What is a minimalist approach to marketing?

As I was browsing Netflix late last night, wondering whether I could somehow make it through the entire catalogue without finding something I wanted to watch (don't lie, you have faced this dilemma before), the 2016 documentary "Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things" caught my eye. Now, as a marketer and someone who has attempted to live parts of my life in a minimalist fashion, I was both nervous and intrigued to watch it as I knew my profession might be blamed for consumerism, however, on the flip side, I might learn some tips to apply to my lifestyle.

Now upon watching it, these emotions were realised; however, the broader message of only focusing on the essential things got me thinking about how this can be applied to the disciplines of marketing and advertising.

Now to keep this short and sweet and to focus only on the essential parts of this concept (see what I did there?), let's explore three ways you could implement this type of approach;

1: Ask yourself if you are even willing to take this leap of faith in the first place

Like the lifestyle itself, it is apparent that it is not for everyone, and as there are champions of this movement, you will inevitably find detractors and those opposed to it. When it comes to its applications towards marketing, this will be no different, which is why you need to ask yourself if you are ready to adopt an approach that rejects the spamming of a database but instead encourages a methodical and calculated approach when communicating with your audience; a method that requires you to be specific with the content you create and the audience you target rather than believing it is for everyone; an approach that will be rejected on face value by any organisation that believes in the former of these two examples.

Similarly to how the documentary set out to prove that the number of our possessions did not correlate to the quality of our lives, a quantity over quality approach for content and communicating with your database may equal more sales purely by the sheer volume of how many people you "spam', however, the negative impact on your reputation and compromising the customer's experience is not worth a few extra thousand dollars.

2: Get rid of what you haven't used in a long time

The amount of shirts, shoes and books I have in my cupboard that I haven't used in months, perhaps years, is pretty high, and I have the feeling we are all guilty of this one way or another in our personal lives. Believe it or not, though, this concept can and should be applied to your marketing

Now, you might be paying for a software tier that gives you access to all of the features; however, what if you are only using 50% of them?

Or, you might be spending 50% of your total digital advertising budget on a channel where you only achieve 5% of your total digital sales.

The point here is to make sure you audit the expenses within your marketing department and make calculated decisions to only use what you need. I am all for paying a bit more if you are projecting growth, but paying for a CRM and marketing automation tool that allows you to send 100,000 emails a month when you only have 1,000 contacts, is a bit extreme for my liking.?

Side note, I really hope no one does this...

3: Anything you introduce or adopt needs to bring value to you and your organisation

This was a core concept of the minimalist lifestyle, but it applies perfectly in the corporate landscape. The idea of buying a car or getting a new product just because it's new or because someone else has it is something we all are guilty of; however, this part of our personal lives should not seep into how we make business decisions.

For example, the idea of adopting or purchasing a new software either because a competitor in your industry is using it or because it is “new” both seem a bit ridiculous, as it completely bypasses any due diligence that should have been taken as to whether you even needed it in the first place!

What I am trying to say here is that every business decision you make regarding improving marketing processes, software implementations & content development needs to answer this question first and foremost...

"Will it bring more value to the marketing function in my organisation?

I wouldn't recommend a client to invest in a paid CRM if they only have 100 contacts, however, I would advise them to invest in paid advertising across LinkedIn if they were generating 15% of their monthly revenue from organic posts on the channel.

To sum everything up, I genuinely believe a less is more approach is how we should all approach marketing efforts. If you are calculated when you communicate with your audience and honest with yourself when reviewing whether you need specific software and processes, then congratulations, you are well on the way towards adopting a minimalist marketing approach and achieving more with less.

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