Why Lean Startups Are the Best Marketers
Lean Startups use a methodology that aims to help businesses develop and release products more quickly and without excessive costs. It’s a methodology that can also be applied when marketing any business no matter how old or large. If maximising your marketing effectiveness and minimising expense is important to you, then the lean startup methodology is for you.
Speed up the process
Lean marketing is powerful because it encourages short time-frames and adapted to the ever-changing marketing conditions. For example, instead of releasing a new marketing campaign every few months, you could release a new campaign more quickly at a smaller scale and test, measure and tweak it as you progress. This way you are not risking a large investment on one campaign but are working incrementally, making improvements along the way. Ideally you will see some cash-flow sooner that you can reinvest.
Stay focused
Lean marketing is also about maintaining your focus. Marketers and entrepreneurs often have a range of ideas that could be worth pursuing. It’s best to pick the one you believe will be most fruitful and stay focused on it. Starting too many marketing campaigns at once will mean you can’t give any of them the attention they deserve. Of course, if its not working at all you should drop the idea and move onto something else however most campaigns are just a few tweaks away from success. Lean marketing uses the concept of creating a backlog were you prioritise your secondary ideas, while focusing on one main idea.
Prioritise
Prioritisation is also a key concept of lean startups that can be applied to marketing. Every marketing campaign should have a clear goal, a success metric, and an evaluation of effort required to complete it. Based on these factors, identifying which strategies are most important and prioritising them becomes much easier. This approach helps to make your marketing more efficient, and it also enables you to allocate you working hours more effectively, to get the best out of your time. Planning ahead, hold regular meetings with your team members and tackling challenges as soon as they arise are all characteristics of the way Lean Startups prioritise.
3 Tips for Lean Startup Success
Here are three tips for implementing the Lean Startup methodology in your marketing efforts:
- Focus intensively on your top marketing strategy, pushing other strategies to the side while you are getting started.
- Maintain a backlog in which you prioritise your tasks.
- Encourage your team to buy-in to the strategy and support the vision. Lean startups don’t have passengers, everyone contributes!
