This blog post will explain how to apply lean methodologies to your current marketing process and how the incentergy platform is already applying these principles automatically.
I am currently reading the book “The Lean Start Up” by Eric Ries the former CTO of IMVU. He started a new methodology with a lot of methods to embrace innovative product development in uncertainty. We already discussed why you should establish a culture of uncertainty. Now lets see how you can use the methods in marketing.
Measure
The incentergy platform measures every customer interaction. Viewing a product, clicking on an ad, purchasing products, receiving emails and many more. These interactions are all fed into the optimization engine and sophisticated algorithms are crunching these numbers to create optimal value for you.
Validated Learning
This is the basis of our approach. If the incentergy platform is uncertain about a certain marketing campaign it will only spend a minimal amount of money to figure out if this campaign will be successful. This is even more sophisticated then described in the lean startup because the incentergy platform will not only perform validated learning, meaning that you are testing your hypothesis, it will do optimal learning meaning during testing you hypothesis it will need a minimal amount of money.
All the tuning and testing is done automatically. Incentergy is using different types of tuned multi-armed-bandit algorithms and non-linear optimizer to do the best bidding and get the highest profit constrained by you current budget.
Value Hypothesis
If a new campaign is created it is not sure yet if the customers will like it or not. Even more important if this campaign will change their behavior to buy your product or not. Our own empirical studies show that marketing is a long tail process. You will have to try a lot of hypothesis and run a lot of campaigns to find best performing ones.
Growth Hypothesis
The amount of clicks and therefore the amount of sales that you can get with a campaign is limited. We call this limitation decreasing marginal utility. The interesting point is now to find the optimal sweet spot between customer acquisition costs and in which campaign to put this money.
In the reality you will have to spread you money across many channels and campaigns. Further it turns out that customer need many interaction points with your brand until they get trust and they are going to buy in your store.
Genchi gembutsu
Genchi gembutsu means go out and try for yourself. In marketing I would rephrase this to:
You are not your customer
This basically means that it might be the case that you as a marketing manager love rough and direct marketing spots which directly come to the point but if your target group are married women it might be the case that they prefer emotional spots with no clear message that makes them think. The important thing is that you have to listener to your customer in a quantitative way. You have to learn what problems they have and how they can use your product to solve these. Try to go out and look for yourself how your customers are using your product.
Even more important if your product creates more value or feels more valuable you can charge higher prices compared to your competitors.
If you want to apply lean marketing principles to your business come and talk to us.