What is Lean Marketing?

Lean Marketing

Lean marketing consists of combining different aspects of marketing to promote products and brands in an effective and flexible way to keep costs to a minimum.

It is based on a series of steps:

• Identify a problem that the customer wants to solve.
• Create a minimum viable product (MVP), i.e. the simplest possible solution to validate a hypothesis to solve the problem. Ideally, this solution should have a minimum cost, so that you can test your hypothesis with the lowest possible budget.
• Measure the results of your minimum viable product to establish whether it meets your needs.
• Take note of the lessons learned to be able to implement them in the next versions.
• Repeat until the final solution is reached

Who needs lean marketing?

Lean marketing principles are especially suited to ecommerce website development and optimization projects where the management team seeks results like this:

• You want maximum efficiency and zero wasted time.
• You’re wanting to see ideas move from conception to reality quickly.
• You prefer to see how your customers and prospects react to changes rather than hear about what your design team thinks of changes.

What are the principles of lean marketing?

Principle #1: Fast delivery is the priority 

Delivering value to the customer as fast as possible is the key. Lean marketers break the major long-term deliverables into small ones. That increases the speed of delivery.

The goal is to fail fast so that you can implement your learnings in your digital campaigns. Since the deliverables are small, it doesn’t take much time to collect feedback and implement the necessary changes.

Principle #2: Frequent feedback meetings are necessary

Regular feedback meetings are an integral part of every lean marketing strategy. They help teams look into what’s working and what’s not. Thus, you get to understand the changes needed to improve your campaign.

The entire marketing process is constantly under the lens. So, it’s hard for mistakes to hide.

For instance, if you are using content marketing, you have to constantly evaluate how your marketing blogs and social media posts are performing. Meetings help you do that.

Principle #3: Marketers must limit their focus

Since lean marketing requires smaller deliverables, you can focus on a single task instead of multitasking. That will boost your team’s productivity.

Doing many tasks simultaneously reduces the quality of the final output. But when you limit your focus, you get excellent quality, and your work gets done faster too.

Principle #4: All plans are flexible

Don’t make any absolute plans. Who knows what the situation will be like? Instead, make your plans flexible so that you can bring the necessary adjustments.

For instance, let’s assume you made plans for a grand marketing campaign and invested a considerable amount in it. But what if the market situation changes while implementing the plan?

So, it’s always better to have flexible plans.

What are the benefits of a lean marketing process?

• Get feedback in a hurry. Rather than investing time and resources into a major digital website overhaul or marketing campaign and waiting till launch day to see how it performs, you can run smaller experiments that get observable results in a hurry with lean marketing.
• Make adjustments faster. Learning quickly what does and doesn’t work will help you improve and innovate faster.
• Focus on the customer. In traditional marketing, the final product is planned ahead of time and a team won’t adjust or adapt throughout the process. It can be easier to become disengaged with the customer by not testing regularly and measuring success on a regular basis.
• Know your priorities. Lean marketing provides easier management of changing priorities. You can filter through the noise and make smarter prioritization decisions.