Customer churn is inevitable. It’s simply not realistic to believe that you can keep all your customers throughout the life of your business. But when you’re looking at a median churn of anywhere from 11% to 56%, something has to change — and this change has nothing to do with your business model, product selection, or even marketing. Instead, a change of mindset is often necessary to improve customer retention rates. Only then can you move the needle in any direction that would be advantageous to your business.
What would be the most advantageous mental state for any operation? The answer: growth.
No matter the size, businesses with growth mindsets are often more successful. Just look at the new trend of growth hacking and using lean methodologies to “de-risk” investments in Silicon Valley. It’s a groundbreaking mindset and methodology we have fully embraced at Ezzey. With it, we are able to operate outside the black box often found in most digital marketing strategy frameworks and move toward lean canvas marketing instead.
What Is Lean Canvas Marketing?
Lean canvas marketing is essentially a one-page plan with a clear overview of your business. It will serve as the basis for your marketing strategy development, as you need to understand the core aspects of your business before you can push the gas on your marketing efforts. Think of it as creating a formula for growth hacking, where you minimize the amount of time and money spent to validate your assumptions and gather the data necessary to tailor your messaging.
Here’s a foundation to get you started:
1. Create a road map.
By failing to plan, you’re preparing to fail — or at least that’s how the saying goes. Like any marketing initiative, lean canvas marketing starts with a plan that will serve as a road map for you and your team going forward. The process will help you organize ideas and focus your team on those initiatives with the greatest likelihood of driving sales. Unlike other marketing or business plans, however, this form of marketing strategy development entails just a single page to stay lean and avoid waste.
Gather your team members to brainstorm possible marketing strategies, making sure to capture all of their input on paper. Going through this exercise allows you to exercise greater control over the main points of your strategy and discover potential gaps within your team. You’ll focus on customer pain points, the unique value proposition of your product or service, and the potential solutions your brand provides.
You’ll also discuss customer segments, channels for reaching your ideal customer, and the key metrics to track and monitor the performance of your digital marketing strategy framework. The ultimate goal is to get your ideas onto paper, collectively build a solution, and validate your marketing efforts.
2. Build out personas.
During your brainstorming sessions, you and your team will touch on customer segments — “touch on” being the operative words here. Although lean canvas marketing is all about staying lean and avoiding waste, it’s important to delve deeper into your ideal customer to better understand what makes them tick. That’s where personas come in handy, as they will inform your content creation, messaging development, and nearly all interactions between you and the customer.
There’s a lot of information out there that can help you focus your marketing strategy development in this arena. We’re partial to Russell Brunson, as he has a way of making the process entertaining. But to give you an idea of what these personas entail, each one will start with basic demographic information before you fill in a mixture of attributes and activities (e.g., shopping habits, challenges, communication preferences, and so on). They will also include actions taken (e.g., visiting the website, subscribing to a newsletter, downloading something, and so on).
To round out these personas, you’ll also want to go directly to the source: existing customers. Gather feedback from people on various topics, like why they made a purchase, what helped them decide on the purchase, and so on. This information is more qualitative in nature but can uncover trends that are important for connecting with your target audience.
3. Experiment consistently.
Experimentation is one of the most effective ways to truly understand how consumers interact with your marketing content and gather the data you need to improve sales. It’s also important for building out your digital marketing strategy framework in the future. How you go about doing this is up to you, but we recommend using the lean startup methodology. You can read more about it in “The Lean Startup,” a book by Eric Ries. With the Lean Startup methodology, your goal is to use the scientific method in marketing to make more accurate predictions about what could work. We have all the data now to mesh the “creative” and the “logical” minds into one.
If you’re not willing to invest in the data to increase the likelihood of success, then you’re stuck repeating the same pattern over and over again. You need to do something different, especially when it comes to your marketing. Work toward a shift in mindset, and start exploring what lean canvas marketing can do for your messaging. The investment is minimal and worth the effort.
To learn more about lean canvas marketing and what Ezzey can do for your business, contact our team today. We’d be more than happy to discuss your options and find a solution perfectly suited to your needs.