Employ Lean Marketing Tactics to Optimize Your Marketing Budget

Lean Marketing is to sales and marketing what continuous improvement is to manufacturing. Agility and responsiveness separate effective marketing from the status quo. Startup mode is the mindset. Using digital marketing channels for customer and prospect engagement is becoming the new norm. Consistent measurement using web analytics tools like Google Analytics is key. The goal is efficiency and efficacy. Let’s unpack some common aspects of Lean Marketing and how it can help your sales growth and why it’s important to understand the power of these marketing and advertising channels.

Social Media Marketing (SMM), more specifically paid advertising through social media channels, is one component of Lean Marketing. Leveraging common social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are not only cost-effective advertising channels (sometimes free) but they also possess uncontested target market reach. Once a company unlocks the paid services of these social media channels, a whole new world of analytics including buyer behavior trends, campaign efficacy (what works and what doesn’t) and prospect and customer engagement are only a few tools to use to your advantage. Social networks understand that providing key data to paid advertisers is not only good for their customers’ business but also helps them to monetize advertising channels.

 PPC (pay-per-click) is another element of Lean Marketing. Companies can pay search engines such as Google (66% of the search market) and Bing/Yahoo (32% of the search market) for each click-through to their website. With proper monthly maintenance, paid search advertising lands a company website in an area at the top of search engine results, gaining visibility to potential customers who are searching for that particular product or service. PPC analytics reveal keyphrases searched where Google Analytics keeps that information encrypted and will not provide it to users. Considering this, maintaining a PPC campaign will provide very useful data about target demographics, prospects and their habits. Using a Lean Marketing strategy, any effort to market your brand digitally should be measurable. SMM and PPC analytics are trackable channels and so are banner ads, online directories and email campaigns. All of these host services provide detailed information about the audience behavior using referring links, open rates, click-throughs and so on. These are also very cost-effective marketing channels.

Taking all the points above into consideration, if you don’t have a marketing manager or digital marketing partner that can interpret all the data from analytics reports and track whether the spend and efforts are effective, you could be creating a black hole of wasted resources. Knowing whether or not paid advertising creates conversions with certainty is of utmost importance. In many cases, companies are spending on the wrong keywords/keyphrases and inadvertently attracting the wrong clientele. The website is receiving clicks and the company is paying for those clicks but aren’t converting those clicks to sales dollars.

Consider how Lean Marketing could make your marketing spend more efficient while growing the company. Remember, if you aren’t measuring, you are guessing.

Consider X-Factor Web Marketing as your Lean Marketing partner to help you navigate the world of digital marketing. We specialize in helping industrial suppliers, machinery sales and service companies, tooling manufactures and more capitalize on sales with a lean marketing strategy using the tactics mentioned above.