Minimum Viable Campaign

The key to successful marketing and sales campaigns is embracing a more agile approach. This means shifting away from the old-school, waterfall-style marketing that maps everything out, builds a detailed multi-step plan (with no real data), and wastes weeks on implementation. Keep it simple, start small, launch fast, and focus on short cycles of learning and iterating.

Don’t take this as a testament against building multi-step, highly segmented and targeted campaigns. The purpose of this approach is to prevent your team from wasting the time and resources on complex assumptions and implementations for new campaigns that don’t yet have actual data to guide more successful outcomes.

When it’s time to create a new ongoing campaign or channel to be a part of your overall marketing and sales strategy, embrace the concept of a Minimum Viable Campaign. Define the minimum that you need for the new campaign and execute over a day or two.

This approach ensures that you maximize learning and identify valuable opportunities. It also help you to invest time and resources based on real data and not assumptions.

Try embracing an approach of creating new campaigns that can be launched in a single sprint, offer insight and lead to learning. Focus on what you can do to improve or enhance the campaign and adjust resources appropriately.

This can be more challenging than it seems, but remember if you’re not a little embarrassed about a new campaign then you’re not launching it soon enough. This doesn’t mean blast something out to your entire email list or launch a massive ad campaign. A Minimum Viable Campaign is about getting the new campaign out to enough people to gather statistically significant insights.

Once you have some data, work to improve the campaign, relaunch it, and look at the results. This approach can deliver better outcomes, and allows you to do more with less time and resources.