How to Increase Demand, Revenues & Business Value with Lean Marketing

Agile Marketing Sprints + Kaizen = Results

Especially in business-to-business (B2B) markets, many business owners complain about the effectiveness of their marketing. Why is effective B2B marketing so rare?

Some business owners see a competitor’s fancy new web design, snappy taglines, or flurry of LinkedIn posts and start to think they’re in need of a blingy makeover. Just because a business invests their time in the noisy currency of social media or a digital color scheme doesn’t mean such efforts are driving business their way.

It’s what we call “Shiny Object Syndrome,” and it’s usually just a distraction, especially when the bells and whistles are not accompanied by messaging that clearly articulates the business value in a way that resonates with the right audience.

The Perils of a Design-First Approach

Sometimes it’s the result of being taken in by marketers with a design-first approach who don’t make the effort to understand the value a business offers to its customers. Many don’t take the time to learn about your industry, products and services – they don’t have the time to since their chasing their next project and they just want to focus on design, not your business.

Other business owners turn to fractional CMOs and marketing consultants who may do a better job of understanding your business, but don’t have the experience implementing an effective marketing program so they pull in a design-first marketing agency.

Innovaxis takes a strategy-first approach and we apply lean methodology to implementation. This “lean marketing” approach maximizes your return on investment (ROI), drives double-digit revenue growth, and increases the value of your business. Design-first marketing is an expense while strategy-first marketing with lean marketing execution is an investment, which is the Innovaxis focus and why we generate a 300% ROI on average within the first 18 months.

Lean Methodology

Lean methodology is an approach that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: continuous improvement (Kaizen) and respect for people. Initially developed by Toyota, it has been adopted by many other manufacturers and technology startups. Learn more about lean methodology.

A handful of marketing agencies around the world that primarily work with Fortune 500 clients have integrated a form of lean methodology into their practice. In 2015, Innovaxis adopted a lean marketing approach and offer it to small and mid-sized businesses as well as nonprofits.

What Is Lean Marketing?

Lean marketing is about making effective, data-driven decisions to maximize ROI and drive double-digit revenue growth that increases the value of your business – as part of a custom marketing programs that gain far more traction than marketing projects conducted with a design-first approach.

Often, it’s getting better marketing results, faster, with less budget by cutting out opportunism, an over-focus on design and isolated projects, inefficiency and wasteful spending.

Lean marketing focuses on streamlining the creation process and making changes on the fly. The goal is to minimize excess, reduce waste, and lower costs. Above all, lean marketing prioritizes efficiency throughout all marketing activities.

There are two primary weaknesses of lean methodology and early lean marketing attempts:

• A lack of a holistic and comprehensive strategy: this stems from a fear that it will take too long and be too expensive – it doesn’t have to if it’s part of an agile sprint
• De-prioritization of customer feedback along the way: if one of Lean’s core tenets is all about providing value to the customer, then why isn’t their feedback a key part of the process?

Lean marketing today incorporates agile methodology so that your custom marketing program is more strategic, customer-centric and conducted in a series of agile sprints – with marketing kaizen applied to continuously improve.

Because the marketing audit and macro strategy adhere to agile principles, they are sprints of a few weeks each so that you get to launch and results faster. By taking a primary market research approach, customer feedback is acquired efficiently and incorporated throughout the process.

How to Get Started

There’s no better or faster way to understand where you are, what is holding you back, and how to get where you want to go than with a marketing audit, which we first developed in 2012. In less than a month as part of a marketing audit sprint, all of your digital and traditional marketing will be evaluated, with deep dives into where your marketing investment is concentrated, including your website, pay-per-click, overall content, advertising, and more. You will get a comprehensive report with recommendations that, once prioritized, become your marketing plan for at least the next 12 months.