Lean marketing, similar to agile marketing, is a process that builds in time for frequent evaluations and iterations, so you can adapt and tweak your marketing strategy as you get feedback, as the market changes, and as your competitors unleash their strategies. Work smarter, learn lean marketing.

Lean marketing, also known as Agile Marketing, is a process that lets CMOs tweak their marketing strategies often to analyze what’s working and what isn’t. Agile methodologies make it easier to modify plans, unlike traditional marketing where you put all your energy perfecting the final launch in a “waterfall plan,” only to find out it’s too late to make changes.

Perhaps you heard of lean marketing as a startup term, or maybe you’re familiar with Agile Marketing. This type of marketing takes cues from agile processes used by software developers and offers valuable lessons for CMOs. Learn how to utilize lean marketing techniques to inspire your teams, enhance productivity, and improve speed-to-market.

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Defining Lean Marketing

Lean marketers focus on results of small, trial campaigns, learn from the results, and evolve the elements of the campaign.

The basis behind these methods is this: Change is inevitable. Rather than investing significant time and resources into a product, website, or marketing campaign — and waiting until publication time to see how it performs — run experiment trials during the process. Fail early and fail often and you’ll save a lot of time and money learning from best practices.

What are the benefits of Lean Marketing or Agile Marketing?

In The CMO’s Agenda research, 67 percent of the CMOs using A4M™ report it increases profits and revenues. It does this primarily by:

• Keeping the organization customer-focused
• Improving speed-to-market
• Making teams more productive
• Enhancing prioritization
• Delivering better, more relevant end-products
• Increasing throughput/velocity of work delivered

What makes lean marketing different from traditional marketing?

Instead of the traditional waterfall method, where the final product is determined up front and teams don’t adjust and adapt in the creation process, Agile for Marketing (A4M), or lean marketing:

• Focuses on reality-based prioritization to create marketing initiatives that meet customer requirements
• Breaks big, long-term deliverables into mini-projects, delivers small wins every few weeks and iterates toward an optimal solution
• Based on weeks between concept and delivery vs. months
• Frequent status meetings focus on what’s working, what’s done and what’s keeping your team from doing more, making it harder for problems to hide
• If things change or people go off course, it’s a quick correction, not a complete overhaul

How do I get started with Lean Marketing?

CMOs no longer have months to develop and execute brand launches and re-launches. Today, marketing groups need to produce faster than ever. At CMG, we specialize in helping companies develop agile strategies and unleash their potential.

To read more from our experts, see the content we have published to give you the tools to make smart marketing decisions.