From a company perspective, marketing is an essential method of achieving business goals. This course will teach you the fundamentals of lean marketing and provide examples to help your brand succeed in this highly competitive environment. Poor marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on delivering value to the customer. It’s not about how much you can spend, but what you’re able to provide. Many examples of lean marketing include content-based businesses like blogs and podcasts. Almost every business owner has made this error. They spend months, if not years, developing a product or feature that they believe will transform the world. Then the day arrives for them to share their work with the rest of the world. What do you think happens? Crickets. People didn’t want a Tinder for cats, and it turns out. Who’d have guessed? Some ideas seem to be fantastic, but they turn out to be complete failures. It’s not only with the blatantly insane ideas that this happens. It may even happen to persons who seem to be reasonable and unavoidable. However, there is a solution to this issue that you can apply if you put it into practice. The lean business model is what it’s called. Take a cue from Toyota: Lean manufacturing, which was evolved from Toyota’s famed production method, gave birth to the whole notion of a “lean” company. However, since neither you nor I run a factory, we cannot directly apply those concepts. However, a brilliant man named Eric Ries discovered that those concepts could be applied extraordinarily successfully to startups with a few minor tweaks. As a result, the Lean Startup concept was established (a great book if you get the time to read it). It’s an excellent resource for company owners. But I’d want to take these lean ideas a step further by incorporating them into your content marketing strategy. I see many similarities between a startup and content marketing as a whole, and choosing a lean marketing strategy might produce various advantages.
Above all, you’ll be able to obtain:
- a higher rate of return on your investment (ROI)
- a higher level of consistency in your marketing
- decreased anxiety and irritability
Numerous ways to apply lean concepts to your marketing:
The lean marketing concepts
The “lean” idea is divided into three segments. They’ve gone by various names, but they all signify the same thing. They are sometimes referred to as “experiment, track, improve,” and other times as “build, measure, learn.”
The names aren’t necessary, but the ideas are. It’s also crucial to remember that iteration is at the heart of lean marketing. The aim is to fail or succeed rapidly in a minor marketing area, then refine the process until it is effective enough to put more effort in.
Let’s take a short glance at the three major stages:
- First, build – You should never finish anything without obtaining feedback, no matter what kind of product you’re working on. So instead, construct just the most critical components.
- Measure — After you’ve produced your first product, you’ll need to obtain feedback. More precisely, you must employ analytics to measure how consumers engage with it.
- Learn – You can see what went well and wrong by examining the data. Then you’ll know how to make the product better.
Don’t worry if you’re not sure how this pertains to your content marketing strategy just now. I’ll go through each of these steps in further depth in the following sections.
Make MVPs for your content.
It’s pretty tough to calculate the return on investment of developing content. To begin with, there is a significant time lag between when you post anything and when someone who reads it becomes a client. Furthermore, a single piece of content seldom results in a sale. On the other hand, customers are more likely to skim through numerous parts of material initially. Even more critically, it is contingent on the effectiveness of your sales channels. It’s not simple to get clearance to develop a thousand-dollar piece of content or to decide to invest in one yourself.
In most cases, you won’t be able to predict the outcome. What if you put all of your money and time into creating a new dazzling piece of content, only to have it generate a few hundred or thousand visitors? It’s a legitimate issue. Eliminate risk using MVPs: The phrase MVP is often utilized when it comes to lean business. The acronym MVP stands for “minimum viable product.” The goal is to ignore all of a product’s frills and “nice to have” features and concentrate only on the essential functions. You create an MVP, a rudimentary product with just the most basic capabilities. The purpose of this is to prevent spending any more time and resources if your users aren’t interested in such features. They won’t care about more features if they don’t appreciate the essential functionality. However, if your testing data are promising, you may use the early input to develop the product. Enter content MVPs: There’s no reason why the MVP idea can’t be applied to content development. Consider why these notions could be valuable in the first place. They’re all well-designed, with information co-written by me and some of the most knowledgeable professionals in their professions.
They go into great detail. The objective was to build the most comprehensive and helpful resource for each subject. Although I wrote most of these years ago, they are still some of the most significant pieces of material on their respective issues. For example, The Advanced Guide to SEO has nine extensive chapters with advanced principles and walk-throughs:
Beautiful layouts, bespoke graphics, and high-quality content are all part of the package. It isn’t inexpensive. If you were to create a comparable guide, it would most likely cost at least a thousand dollars to do it properly. Imagine putting in all that effort and money, only to have it fail miserably. You’d be heartbroken, and rightly so. So, let’s revisit the MVP notion, but this time from the content standpoint. Before you write an “advanced guide to cat toys,” be sure your target audience is interested in the topic. To do so, you may write a shorter, standard-length article that addresses a single aspect of the advanced guide.
What about a piece on the many varieties of cat toys? Don’t get me wrong: high-quality content is still required, but you won’t have to worry about complex design work or writing tens of thousands of words. If your original piece is well-received, you may utilize the comments to enhance it or learn about adjacent subjects your readers might be interested in. After that, you may write another post on a similar topic (that comes within the advanced guide idea), such as cat toy materials. If that goes well, you’re onto something and gain a fair amount of attention and traffic. You’ve confirmed that people are interested in the subject. You may now build your more extensive guide without worrying about it becoming a flop. A shortcut for veteran bloggers: It will take some time to publish those first pieces as content MVPs (likely about a week). You may not need to spend that time at all, although it will take considerably less time than the whole tutorial. If you’ve been blogging for a while, you may just check which of your articles has performed the best. Even if you didn’t realize it at the time, those previous blog pieces were all content MVPs. I did the same thing with my guides. I saw that prior postings, such as those on SEO, had a lot of traffic and comments. They were a hit with my readers:
I knew I could produce an ultimate resource or two for my readers who liked SEO and were anxious to learn how to use it once I knew they loved it. I noticed that postings regarding advanced SEO drew the most significant interest. This is how The Advanced Guide to SEO came to be. Looking over your prior posts for patterns takes just a few minutes. Begin by browsing “Behavior > Site Content > All Pages” in Google Analytics.
The order of your previous entries should be determined by pageviews. Look for similar themes in your top 10-20 most popular articles to indicate that your audience is passionate about a particular subject. These are the themes for which you should develop more sophisticated content since you know they will provide a steady return on investment.
Reduce the amount of stuff you create.
“Move quickly” is one of the essential ideas in lean. You want to achieve and fail quickly. This implies you want to know as soon as possible whether anything works. The MVP is built on this basic premise. Get something out there, get some criticism, and then improve it. However, you should use this notion to prove a big idea in more than simply a content MVP. Instead, keep all of your information flowing “quickly.” The ideal method to plan content is to: It’s a good idea.
It has two key advantages: it reduces the chance of not having anything to post and allows you to see how your material fits together. However, there is a possible disadvantage. You’re not going “quickly” if you have all of your material planned out for a lengthy period, say six months. Imagine if my readers suddenly lost interest in SEO, although I had 40 SEO pieces scheduled for the next six months. While it is possible to update an editorial calendar after it has been created, this negates much of the point of making one in the first place. “My audience could never shift that quickly,” you may think. It’s not probable, but it’s certainly a possibility. The Buffer blog is a beautiful illustration of this since it has consistently pivoted on its subjects.
You’re not improving if you’re not basing your future material on the most current feedback your audience has given you. The critical point is this: You can plan your material ahead of time but keep it to a maximum of 2-4 weeks (depending on publishing frequency). Utilize current post stats and reader comments to generate fresh subject ideas that you can publish shortly.
Instead of broad and shallow, go narrow and deep.
Another essential part of lean marketing is to concentrate on what works. You focus primarily on the critical product elements while using the MVP method. The goal isn’t to make the most refined product possible but to get it out as soon as possible so you can figure out how to spend your time best. The connections between this and content marketing are a little more challenging to see, but they exist. In a moment, I’ll break them down for you. But first, familiarize yourself with the Pareto principle: The 80/20 rule is a popular name for the Pareto direction. It’s a fundamental yet profound remark regarding outcomes in almost every element of life. According to the guideline, around 20% of the work will get 80% of the products.
When you think about it, not all activities are created equal for productivity. It’s a 20/80 split sometimes and a 10/90 split other times. The argument is that if you have a large enough sample size, a tiny number of actions will always provide the majority of the findings. For example, content promotion and the 80/20 rule: How many content promotion strategies do you know? If you have many of them and use them often, you will discover that some are much more successful than others. This is when lean marketing’s “measuring” phase comes in. To use the 80/20 rule, you must first record and evaluate the metrics of both your efforts and outcomes. I’ll give you an example of an entire hypothetical set of results:
The effort was measured in hours spent on each activity, and traffic was the primary outcome statistic. To compare outcomes, they must be placed in the proper perspective, which means the result (traffic) must be split by the effort (hours). We can calculate the proportion of results that each activity is responsible for by dividing each of those traffic per hour figures by the overall traffic per hour (1,466). There’s a good chance you have more than four activities going on. The more you have, the closer you’ll go to that 80/20 ratio in most circumstances. However, we can see that email outreach and contacting subscribers generated most of the outcomes in this case. The good news is that now that we know what works and what doesn’t, we can adjust our marketing strategy. Based on those findings, you may be able to do away with social network advertising and forum posting entirely. This frees up a little more than half of your time for marketing. You may now devote more time to email outreach and sending emails to your subscribers. There’s a limit to how many times you can email your subscribers, but you could use this additional time to figure out how to attract more (like improving your conversion rates). You may also use all of your spare time to undertake email outreach. Your overall traffic will increase by 40% if you have done this. (from 2,500 to 3,500). This also demonstrates that it doesn’t make important whether the 80/20 ratio is exact; all that matters is determining which activities provide the least outcomes. It’s now your time. Take the time to keep track of your upcoming content marketing and the most crucial outcomes (pick 1 or 2 metrics). Then, as I demonstrated, assess the findings. Using the results of your investigation, determine which activities are the most effective, and adapt your marketing plan to include more of them. That isn’t to say you can’t try something different. You certainly can and should. However, you should regularly analyze each tactic’s success and eliminate those that don’t provide results. Marketing channels and the 80/20 rule: The 80/20 rule may also be used to determine which marketing channels you should concentrate your efforts on.
You’ll want to build the same kind of chart as previously, but this time you’ll be looking at the amount of work spent on each channel. You’ll see that specific channels yield very few new members or sales, while others account for almost all of them. For example, you may discover that webinars and blog articles account for virtually all of your revenue. Still, social media accounts for just a tiny percentage (but takes up a large portion of your time). Consequently, you may devote more time to webinars and blog articles to improve your outcomes. I hope you can see how effective the 80/20 rule can be in lean marketing: Begin by assessing your efforts and results. Then, using that information, figure out which 20% of your work yields 80% of your products. Next, cut out the activities that aren’t as productive, and use the extra time to focus on the 20% of most beneficial exercises.
Don’t be frightened to change your mind.
I discussed pivoting previously, but I want to go over it again since it exemplifies a key lean marketing idea. I often emphasize the need to create next-level content. Your material must be seen as extraordinary by your readers. Because this is a relative phrase, your material must be superior to any other comparable content available at the moment. However, excellent material evolves with time. Audience tastes change over time, as do their expectations. Today, a terrific blog post from five years ago would be a relatively standard post (in most cases). However, the standard has been set higher. Therefore, I am returning to pivoting.
Pivoting is the process of altering the direction in which your material is heading. This usually entails one or more of the following:
- topics
- the kind of content
- content’s quality
You could realize that your audience isn’t reacting to certain sorts of pieces you’re writing anymore. Alternatively, you may decide that you want to appeal to a new audience and, as a result, you need to shift the themes you write about. Over the last several years, Buffer (the example I cited previously) has gone through both of these changes:
They’ve also discovered that some sorts of postings perform better than others. Based on this input, they’ve tweaked their approach to creating a more successful blog content mix:
Then the results from one of your content kinds may be no longer enough. If you’ve been reading Quick Sprout for a while, you’re aware that I’ve created several infographics over the years. In the past, they were effective in increasing traffic and attracting connections. However, I’ve found that they’re no longer as beneficial. This is mainly because my audience no longer values them as highly as they once did since infographics are now much more frequent. I saw this and modified my content approach since I constantly monitor outcomes. As you may have noticed, I haven’t made many infographics in the previous several months. Analyzing feedback is crucial to pivoting: The two steps of the original lean paradigm are measurement and learning. Shifting is precisely what it sounds like. After you’ve already decided on a suitable route for your content, it happens. To obtain the results you want, you know where to post and publish. After many early testing, you find out those things (like content MVPs). However, after you’ve settled into a routine and figured out most of the details, it’s critical to maintain measuring. You don’t have to do anything for the most part if you have Google Analytics installed. Every one or two months, set aside a few hours to review the outcomes of the material you’ve created during that time.
Sort the findings into the following categories:
- Type of content — for example, a blog post, an infographic, a video, a slideshow, and so on.
- topic
- Type of post — for example, in-depth techniques, general strategy, opinion pieces, etc.
If you observe that your content’s efficacy in any of those areas is decreasing, you must take note of the findings. Then, reduce the amount of material that isn’t functioning and increase the amount of stuff. It isn’t rocket science, but you must regularly develop the practice of monitoring and evaluating your outcomes and learning and altering your content strategy.
Understand the distinction between actionable and vanity metrics.
“Measure” is one of the three fundamental pillars of lean marketing. Therefore, you must generally use acceptable measurements to measure the outcomes of anything. However, this is more difficult than it seems since it’s all too simple to choose the incorrect sort of statistic—a vanity metric. Vanity metrics track something that has no bearing on anything meaningful.
For example, if you wanted to gauge the performance of your social media marketing on Twitter, you might count the number of people who follow you. That would be a miscalculation. The quantity of follows doesn’t matter. Even if you have a million followers, you won’t sell anything. Those followers might be bots or untargeted, or they could not care enough about you to click on any links you publish. A million followers, on the other hand, would be fantastic. The idea is that it isn’t a reliable measure. Assume you wanted to see how various social media marketing strategies affected your following count. Could you improve as a result of this? No. Why? Because you may conclude that one approach is more successful than another (because it generates more followers), those followers may all be useless and ineffective. You must be able to tell the difference between vanity and actionable data. It’s not always obvious, and it might vary depending on your circumstances. For instance, traffic is a widely used statistic. In certain circumstances, it might be a vanity statistic, while in others, it can be a valuable metric. It’s a vanity statistic when it comes to determining the ROI of your content marketing. Even if you have millions of visits, that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll make any purchases. It is, however, a remarkable statistic to employ if you’re attempting to evaluate your audience’s overall interest in a subject (like we did before with content MVPs). It’s crucial to consider the context. Choosing the right metric to measure is the tricky part. I can’t offer you a list of every measure to use in every case, but I can give you some examples and point you in the right direction to make your own decisions.
Determine which yields a higher return on investment: content marketing or pay-per-click advertising.
- Sales ($) over a reasonable period are an actionable measure.
Determine if your viewers like your material as an example aim.
- Time on page (considering content duration) bounce rate are two actionable metrics.
Example goal: Improve content’s search engine ranks by promoting it.
- Rankings are an actionable statistic that allows you to assess the performance of each technique on its posts.
- Several backlinks are a vanity statistic, but the quality is more essential than a number.
Whatever your objective is, you should choose a metric that as nearly as possible measures that objective. Do you want to increase your sales? Sales should be tracked. Do you want to increase your email subscriber conversion rate? Calculate the number of new memberships every month. If a statistic has the potential to go in a misleadingly favorable manner, it is a vanity meter for that context. Choose the appropriate measurements, or you risk making poor judgments based on inaccurate data.
Feedback is crucial in lean marketing.
The significance of feedback is the third feature of lean marketing that I want to stress. You can’t iterate rapidly without feedback. You won’t discern what’s working and what isn’t. Feedback is heavily reliant on metrics. Ideally, you should choose a measure that depicts your aim and then use that statistic to assess your projects, content, and methods. However, metrics aren’t always the best approach to gather feedback. What if your purpose was to make a difference in your readers’ lives? I’m trying to persuade people to take action due to your blog entries. It will be almost hard to devise a measure that accurately captures this. Quantitative measurement is unattainable since you’re attempting to accomplish a qualitative goal. Instead, you should seek input from various sources. A focus group or a survey could be appropriate for a firm. For a content marketer, this feedback comes in the form of blog or social media comments, as well as emails from readers. It’s critical to write about particular themes in a specific manner to meet those quantitative goals. If you care about your audience, you’ll desire more after you’ve met those goals. After each article, I invite you to leave a remark. That’s because I’m curious to see whether users indeed read a report and get anything useful from it.
The postings that make me the happiest, like the one above, are the ones that get a lot of comments. As a content creator of any type, seeing others benefit from your work is the most rewarding experience you can have. I could have two postings with a 5-minute average time on the page, which would be fantastic. However, one post may have 20 comments, such as the one above, while another may have none. This form of qualitative feedback can only be obtained by examining the input itself. The consequence is either “yes, this is the result I was hoping for” or “no, this is not having the desired effect on my audience.” Then you learn, as is customary in the lean-approach. Finally, you take what you’ve learned and use it to write more on the topics that matter to your audience.
Conclusion
The lean business model is a terrific method to develop a profitable company. It reduces squandering of resources, particularly time and money, and increases your chances of expanding and being successful. On the other hand, the lean paradigm may be used in content marketing. I’ve shown you the similarities between the two, so you may design your own “lean marketing” strategy. I aim to include at least some of these concepts into your content strategy, if not all of them. I’m confident you’ll get a higher return on investment than you would otherwise if you do.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Lean content marketing?
A: Lean content marketing is a type of marketing that takes the time to understand your audience, build trust with them and deliver value. It’s about first understanding what people want from you before providing it authentically.
How do you Lean in marketing?
A: I believe that leaning in marketing is the act of being open-minded to new ideas, approaches, and opportunities. It can also mean learning how to know when your method or theory works so you can continue to lean into it.
Why is Lean marketing essential?
A: Lean marketing is essential because it helps companies grow and prosper.
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