Lean Marketing is one of the newest concepts of running promotional activities in the company. It turned up quite recently, when the book ‘The Lean Start-up’ by Eric Ries was published. The author became particularly popular within start-up community. This is because of the character of their work – the urgency of immediate rollout with the product. What are the main ideas of Lean Marketing and where it can be applied?
Start-ups, as germs of future enterprise, don’t usually have well-developed IT base, specialized departments or strong marketing support. From their perspective, it’s essential to introduce a new product or service to the market as soon as possible in order to be able to promptly verify quality and usefulness of the offered solutions. They would like to develop their services really efficiently and at a lowest possible cost.
‘Lean’ marketing
Marketing activities are pursued here in a similar way – we get to potential clients and persons that are likely to be interested in our solutions. Usually it is handled with new media – mainly in the Internet and with little financial investment. In this case, lean marketing simply means low-budget marketing. However, here it doesn’t mean anything unfavorable but quite the contrary. Though, it’s really challenging to get where we want to and where our receivers are at the lowest possible cost.
Lean Marketing major assumptions
- rapid development, methodology based on cycles, sprints
- focus on target
- prioritization of activities – precise schedule set-up
- maximum efficiency with minimal time and money investment
- gathering feedback from testers and users
- modernity and full transparency of actions
- constant product beta version testing till its final form
Essential feedback
At first, such approach to marketing may seem a bit bizarre or even unprofessional. But that is not the case as it allows to collect return information, necessary when planning product development and further activities. Collecting opinions and feedback from testers or real product users is invaluable.
What particular actions allow to collect feedback?
- launching beta version product on the market and for testing
- launching system for opinion gathering / error reporting / recommendations
- advertising in contextual network
- (start-up) industry web portal – AdWords advertising
- industry, geeks or enthusiasts meet-ups
- Quora and other Internet forum activities
Only for start-ups option? Nope!
Original objective of Lean Marketing is to be a solution which allows to avoid bearing massive costs related to advertising in the situation, when the final version of the service or product is not ready, yet. However, it’s clear that without advertising or promotional activities, it’s hard to hope for success. Each campaign should be treated as a way to enhance product performance itself, its development and newest functionalities, as well. Surely, such attitude is not reserved exclusively for start-ups and can successfully be implemented by smaller businesses or those which don’t have strictly business attitude.
—————
If you’d like to investigate that subject, see the short video, in which Dave Brock, CEO & the President of Partners in EXCELLENCE talks about what Lean Marketing is to him and how to comply with its directives.
Follow
