What if you could get the same turn-on-a-dime dynamism of great entrepreneurship in your latest franchise marketing campaign?
A lean marketing plan lets you do just that. Going lean means you're getting your campaign off the ground - and your business trading on it - as soon as possible.
What is Lean Marketing?
Lean marketing is all about swift, low risk actions. In a lean startup franchise business model, you'll identify your Minimum Viable Product to get trading as swiftly as you can. Similarly, in lean marketing for franchises, you're creating advertising that you can get out there very quickly...
This means that the time you'd normally spend perfecting your exact keyword usage and creating the perfect landing page is spent actually garnering data on how well your website is converting, and how much Google likes it.
Your marketing becomes something of an experiment. But in lean marketing, you're poised to either capitalise on success, or quickly cut away failure - ready to adjust and start again.
Despite this "fast out the door" approach though, several things are going to be key to your success when going lean:
1.Define Your Market Position and Your Audience
You need to clearly define your market position to within a fine degree. You can have an average landing page and moderate keyword optimisation and still have some measure of success. But if your market positioning isn't on the money...
You're going to have problems.
To keep your ethos lean through and through, you might do away with more traditional market research too:
In lean content marketing for example, perhaps you could consult your existing customers using an email survey to discover the sort of content they're actually interested in reading from you. That's before you spend the money and time on hiring a blog writer for a dozen new articles.
Another key point:
Your audience may like channels that you personally don't favour. Don't let your own preferences dictate the direction of your campaign.
2.Master the Fast Take-Up and Quick Drop-Out
This is the essential mentality needed in a lean strategy. In any franchise marketing campaign, proper monitoring systems are key to success. This only gets more important in lean marketing.
Because by monitoring the effectiveness of all of your marketing channels closely you'll be able to decide:
- What's working , and what should be supported.
- What's not working and what should be dropped quickly.
Remember - by dropping a channel or tactic that isn't working, you're not wasting the hours you've already put into it. You're saving yourself from wasting all of the days and funds you would be throwing into a channel that gives you nothing back in the future.
You can then reinvest those resources into the parts of your campaign that are actually working.
3.Don't Skip Out On the Important Parts of Your Marketing Funnel
A lean marketing funnel still consists of more than the acquisition and revenue phases. It's not the business equivalent of those funny internet action plans that go something like:
- Start a business
- ?
- Profit?
You need to monitor how effective your strategy is during every phase of a customer's time with you - Acquisition, Activation, Retention, and Revenue - to make sure that you're retaining as well as converting effectively.
The larger potential revenue that will be generated by even one successfully converted new franchisee also means that you can afford to spend a little more time on individual leads.
When Would I Use a Lean Marketing Plan For My Franchise?
Facing procedures that will take a lot of time and funds to implement? Finding bottlenecks that are slowing you down?
That's when a lean marketing plan will come into its own.
Always monitor, monitor, monitor your progress towards your clearly defined goals. Because if your plan is taking too long to show any kind of results, then it's not really lean marketing.
Who Will Run My Lean Marketing Campaign?
Because lean plans need to be put into action and be modified in very short timeframes, you'll need the equivalent of marketing special forces in order to execute them correctly.
The team you select for this should be willing and able to think on their feet when editing and creating entirely new plans from nothing.
A lean marketing plan for your franchise can sound like a lot of effort to take on if your business isn't set up to operate in this fashion. Give Local Fame a call and get not only some great advice on lean marketing, but also a FREE report on the current effectiveness of your online marketing as a whole.
