What is Lean Marketing?

The Lean process represents a fundamental shift in how companies build websites, software, products, and manage marketing. Lean is about validating hypotheses and iterating to shrink the size of failures and increase the chances of success.

The lean marketing process is highly iterative. Iteration, testing, and measurement are foundational elements of any Lean philosophy, which we’ll explain better throughout this article.

Where does the term Lean Marketing come from?

You may recognize the expression lean marketing from Eric Ries’s book Lean Startup — the founder of “Catalyst Recruiting” and “There Inc.” (a major Silicon Valley success). This entrepreneur recommended building a business model around a 9-point framework to always keep the essentials in mind and in view.

In this sense, lean marketing comes down to always staying a startup at heart, staying as close as possible to present realities; for a person, it means making the most of each day to keep a young spirit. Every day should have its share of innovations.

As the dates show, in just a few years lean marketing has gone around the world and carved out a place in the worlds of web marketing and inbound marketing. It’s a strategy that works, undeniably grounded in “organized empiricism” applied to business.

What is Lean Marketing?

Lean marketing is about using a feedback loop, data, iteration, and validation to achieve success quickly with marketing efforts. Lean marketing specialists study the results of small test campaigns, learn from the results, and develop the campaign elements further.

Likewise, Lean marketing is above all a method. And this method is based on the principle of continuous innovation and permanent adaptation. However, it’s not about drifting aimlessly: different rational phases or stages must be respected (starting with the triptych build → measure → learn).

We’re currently right in the middle of the innovation challenges that any company wanting to grow — or even survive — must face.

Through its flexibility and philosophy of relentless questioning, lean marketing also comes with a concern for optimization. You’ll always have something to improve, whether on your own or with the support of marketing professionals, which is why lean marketing is called on to constantly support your business’s growth. Each new cycle should correspond to a new strategy.

This flexibility refers to a permanent improvement of your offering and your brand image, even your business structures, in line with the market (particularly the competition) and your target audience.

In lean marketing, every action is simplified. It’s carried out with a specific purpose and at a cost estimated beforehand. It’s an experience whose fruits are also, besides acquiring customers, savings at every level.

Lean marketing runs on a ternary rhythm based on three poles that feed into each other: build, measure, learn. We’re constantly testing new solutions to find the ideal fit, with daily tracking.

Phases of Lean Marketing

1. Identify the problem. We identify a problem worth solving for the potential customer. At this point we only identify and define it. From here we’ll live through a process of constant learning.
2. Build a prototype. We build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP): an experiment or test that lets us validate the hypotheses we’ve raised. This prototype should aim for maximum impact with a low investment of time and money.
3. Measure. If it’s not measured, it’s not done. We must measure all the results of the experiment. Once we achieve that minimum viable product, we can study and measure all the results to declare the experiment successful and move to the next phase. Taking the voice of the customer into account is key at this point.
4. Learn. Understand what went well and what went wrong, to keep implementing improvements in the next experiments.
5. Repeat. We’ll repeat all the previous points over and over until we achieve final versions.

Why is Lean Marketing important, and what are its benefits?

Most successful companies change their business model along the way. Change is inevitable. Rather than investing a significant amount of resources in a product, website, or marketing campaign and hoping for the best, Lean provides a better way and reduces the risk of failure: it recognizes failure within the process, accepts it, and makes quick, informed decisions to evolve the plan along the way. Among its main benefits are:

• Keeping the organization customer-focused.
• Improving speed to market.
• Making teams more productive.
• Improving prioritization.
• Delivering better, more relevant final products.
• Increasing the throughput and speed of delivered work.

How does Lean Marketing differ from traditional marketing?

Instead of the traditional waterfall method — where the final product is determined in advance and teams don’t adjust or adapt during creation — lean marketing has the following characteristics:

• It focuses on reality-based prioritization to create marketing initiatives that meet customer requirements.
• It breaks large, long-term deliverables into mini-projects, delivers small wins every few weeks, and iterates toward an optimal solution.
• It relies on weeks between concept and delivery, versus months.
• Frequent status meetings focus on what’s working, what’s been done, and what’s keeping the team from doing more, making it harder for problems to hide.
• If things change or people drift, it’s a quick correction, not a full overhaul.