Rethinking How You Do Marketing? Think Lean.
COVID-19 and the pandemic’s economic impacts have completely scrambled most tech companies’ marketing plans:
Customers and prospective customers have cut spending, and while customers often view technology as a path to productivity or cost-savings in hard times, even tech companies are feeling those cuts.
Planned awareness- and demand-generation investments – in-person industry events, for example – are off the table, which has forced a re-examination of marketing goals and KPIs.
With program mixes in flux marketing headcounts have taken a hit, leaving teams understaffed and lacking skills.
And inasmuch as marketing accounts for the bulk of most companies’ discretionary spending, uncertainty is driving reductions in overall marketing budgets.
Even in the best of times marketing executives are a perpetually endangered species, but today they face agonizing scrutiny. We talk to lots of execs who feel like the game has changed, who are rethinking their whole approach to getting marketing done.
We’re Lean adherents here at C2B Suite. And while Lean has traditionally been associated with products and product manufacturing, we are not alone in seeing the value of Lean, and the Agile processes that often accompany Lean, to marketing.
Lean is about iteration. It’s about moving fast. It’s about establishing objectives that are grounded in reality and can be executed against in a short timeframe, that produce results that can be measured and that provide direction for subsequent objectives. Agile is a complementary approach to execution that itself is iterative and highly collaborative, is driven by concrete goals and production intervals of limited duration, and uses outcomes as its measure of success.
I thought it might be instructive to look at this topic over the course of the next few weeks. I’d like to help the marketers in our audience understand why Lean and Agile are increasingly on other marketers’ radars. But I also want to share how we incorporate Lean and Agile into our work with clients.
Some people think marketing is too “soft” for Lean and Agile to be useful. I’ll talk about that next time.
Are you already taking a Lean/Agile approach to marketing? Tell us all about it in the comment section below. And as always, you can reach me directly at don.roedner@c2bsuite.com.