Lean marketing for small business is a novel marketing strategy developed by Steve Blank. The creator of the lean movement is Eric Ries, who first introduced the idea in his book, The Lean Startup. The core principle of the movement is understanding the concept that as startups and organisations mature and grow bigger, they acquire things that enable them to compete with bigger companies. However, these things – more resources, better talent, and more sophisticated processing abilities are the very things that slow them down. Therefore, the theory advertises the need for continuous improvement to maintain competitive advantage and remain future relevant. Steve Blank dedicatedly developed the theory by implementing it on his Silicon Valley startup. But, what does lean mean? Startups, especially the good ones, move fast from whiteboard to map solutions that develop better minimum viable products and improve the market stance. Lean marketing for startups is targeted at maintaining such accountability and innovation even at higher corporate levels.

How Can Big Businesses Apply Lean Marketing?

The pandemic has pushed digitisation to its limit. Everything is digitally available and accounted for. Digital marketing and media have revolutionised data analysis. All the creation and launch performance insights are readily available for one glance observations. Such data availability has terraformed the marketing landscape. It is no longer possible to keep the executives happy for the entire six months campaign. So, it is recommended to keep the everyday marketing and selling stuff lean and accountable. By lean, the intention is to keep the campaigns short and constantly evaluate their results. The employees delegated with the task to gauge marketing performance should have the right tools to assess growth. Also, these individuals should have the authority and autonomy to rapidly test the campaigns at a smaller scale and provide incessant feedback. However, the only major impediment for big corporations is the inability of the higher-ups to give up their power and be cut off from the smaller loops.

How Can Small Businesses Apply Lean Marketing?

Small businesses are invariably applying lean marketing subconsciously. Most businesses don’t realise it, but they are very lean in their marketing ways in their early days. Most businesses start with finding out who will buy an idea and how much will they pay. The next step is to find how many times can the exercise be repeated? However, as the administrative staff gets diversified and deepens, the business’s marketing strategy’s leanness is lost. The main culprit is the increase in opinions and perspectives. Not all opinions are relevant and required.

Small businesses are implored to retain this sort of marketing where new ideas and limits are pushed constantly. A close sibling of lean marketing is agile marketing. It is also comprehensively discussed in recent market trends and has proven itself highly reliable.

Best of Both Worlds

When slowed down due to the paradox of choice, bigger corporations turn to an outside, third-party organisation that specialises in aiding the shift of perspective to a faster-moving creative outlook. Due to the larger administrative panel and more executives who have a say in marketing matters, marketing strategies are slowed down. The organisations that these giants turn to are typically smaller firms that specialise in marketing. Small businesses should not lose sight of their agility and power to move faster than most ad hoc. Executives at the bigger firms are implored not to prescribe the kind of marketing they want. Instead, they should understand the market demand and distribute power whenever necessary to marketers that are better suited to test marketing strategies quickly and generate results. Power accumulation at the bigger firms is the major impediment to growing leanly.

The marketing campaigns should be reduced to a minimum viable product. Campaigns should also be reduced to a lower time frame. Six to eight months of running highly ineffective marketing campaigns will only stagnate and plateauing the business. Proper power distribution can lead to faster testing of experimental campaigns and gauge market success in a fraction of that time. When identified, executives can reach potential customers faster with great offers and secure sales.

Most marketing campaigns will not work, and that is the maxim of the business world. However, efficient testing and experimenting methodologies such as lean or agile marketing can trim the fat and save money. In addition, these strategies will allow bigger firms to identify the right campaign quickly and efficiently without squandering many resources.