Traditional marketing tools were for a long time inefficient. A lot of money was channeled to slow advertising platforms. Marketing teams also had to get their strategies right from the beginning. Growth hacking has revolutionized marketing, especially for small companies.
Growth hackers implement several strategies to help a startup attain massive momentum in a short while. Established companies can also use the concept to kickstart their stagnant sales.
Lean marketing is a broader marketing approach, and it basically translates to effective marketing.
New businesses around the world are established every day. Most of them however fail. Some of them succeed and even change the dynamics of their industries. Startups have been having a successful period of disrupting traditional players. Lack of money and talents can make or break these young businesses.
Lean marketing means that a business is continually learning and implementing these lessons. The concept is based on Eric Ries’ book titled The Lean Start-up. Lean marketing aims to reduce the expenditure on research and development. Companies use the concept also to improve products and innovations.
Lean marketing triggered the concept of lean startups.
Companies which use the lean startup’s methodology aim to shorten development cycles. Techniques such as validated learning and iterative product launches can be used to determine if a company’s business model is viable.
Growth hackers use several lean marketing’s strategies to stimulate explosive growth.
Improve the Product/Innovation
Startups need to have a clear solution for their market. Commonly, entrepreneurs are too invested in their ideas that they do not evaluate opposing data. Ideas should be backed up with reliable data at every stage of development.
This process lets startups discard the ideas that are not workable. The phrase “fail early and fail often” comes to mind here. A startup should take advantage of its relative newness to test as many ideas as possible as fast as possible. If one fails, there is thankfully time to test several more.
A small company generally has limited resources. Investing in one feature of a product means that other attributes cannot be developed. If you are building an app for example and you direct your coding team to create an extra feature, it will be made at the expense of other features.
If it proves to be a wrong move, it will cost your already limited capital. Startups can opt to invest in one unique innovation and make it the best on the market. Instagram is among the companies that used this approach to make itself the best photo-sharing app.
Build, Measure, and learn
More often than not, startups have one shot at success. So how do companies avoid drawn-out development cycles? Growth hackers use a build-measure-learn loop. The hackers do frequent evaluations and iterations on prototypes. Testing a product is essential to learning how users feel and interact with it. Based on this information, a company can redesign their innovation to suit the users’ needs.
The first step of the build-measure-learn loop is creating what is called Minimum Viable Product.
This is the solution to the market gap you have identified. Measuring involves evaluating reactions and data. The learning process begins where companies recognize their mistakes.
The build phase involves the constant improvements companies will direct to their production. Integrate the entire enterprise Startups typically have a level of agility not present in bigger companies. They can align the whole operations of business towards one marketing goal.
Every decision can be designed to fulfill the end objective. Startups should not discard structure however as it offers a solid framework. Lean startups emphasize on accountability and tangible outcomes. The process of measuring success may vary from company to company.
The use of Key Performance Indicators is a prevalent tool used in the marketing sector. These indicators answer pre-emptive questions about your product like “who is the product for?”
The answers should be specific. For a women clothing enterprise for example, the demographics should be clear for effective advertising. A new generation of marketers are changing the way we think about marketing.
By using lean marketing tools, growth hackers are achieving results that were only a fantasy for traditional marketers. Startups thrive on growth and the faster this growth can be obtained the faster they can meet their demand. Growth hacking delivers this exponential growth.
Lean marketing, on the other hand, configures a company’s entire efforts and leads it to sustainability.