The power of minimal viable marketing and how playbooks can help

In today's fast-paced technology marketing world, teams with limited resources are always seeking new ways to be agile and efficient in their marketing efforts.

According to a recent survey by Ascend2, 61% of technology marketers feel pressure to increase the number of marketing campaigns they launch.

What we see all the time is tech marketers trying to build immense launch plans with several rounds of marketing strategies and tactics that span across a quarter or longer. While this approach is great if you can get it all done quickly, we find that sometimes, stretched tech marketing teams either are frozen by the amount of work to be done or will create programs in haste without a solid core strategy and therefore get a mediocre result.

One approach that has gained popularity in recent years is Minimal Viable Marketing (MVM). MVM is a strategy that focuses on launching marketing campaigns with the bare minimum necessary to test their effectiveness and collect data. By doing so, businesses can quickly determine what works and what doesn't without wasting time and resources. In this blog post, we'll explore the concept of MVM and explain how our use of playbooks, plays, and snaps has revolutionized how we help businesses use some of the spirit of MVM principles to more easily get high-performance programs in market fast and then build on them over time in ways that are actually fun vs. stressful.

What is minimal viable marketing?

Minimal Viable Marketing is a strategy that's based on the principles of Minimal Viable Product (MVP), which is a product development strategy that focuses on creating the bare minimum necessary to test the product's viability in the market. MVM takes the same approach but applies it to marketing campaigns. The goal is to launch campaigns with the minimum amount of resources required to test their effectiveness and collect data. By doing so, businesses can quickly identify what works and what doesn't and adjust their strategy accordingly.

While we like this approach, we also think that MVM encourages putting the focus on designing, implementing and launching a solid core strategy in weeks vs. months, allowing marketers to get more done faster, test their assumptions on the overall concept and messaging in market and begin to build upon the themes as they learn more.

The challenges of implementing MVM

While Minimal Viable Marketing (MVM) is a powerful strategy that can help tech marketers streamline their marketing efforts, it's not without its challenges. One of the biggest challenges is that many businesses lack the resources needed to effectively implement MVM. This can include not having the right staff, budget, or processes to execute on MVM campaigns. It's surprising to me that even in tech companies, where the concepts of Minimally Viable Product (MVP) are well established, that the tech marketing teams have a hard time adopting and building processes around MVM.

Another challenge tech marketers face is that their marketing objectives can be unclear or too broad. Without clear objectives, it can be difficult to create a focused MVM campaign that achieves specific outcomes. This is common in many marketing organizations but can be actually much easier when you break down a marketing objective to a smaller, more manageable and focused effort at the outset using MVM. This is where the power of playbooks, plays, and our creative snaps can help...

How playbooks, plays, and snaps can help you implement MVM

As discussed in this blog post, playbooks are collections of best practices, processes, and strategies for specific marketing activities. Plays are specific actions within a playbook that businesses can use to execute particular marketing activities, and our unique creative snaps are add-on assets and content that can be "snapped-on" to an existing play once it gets up and running.

The concept of using playbooks initially is to get a core strategy locked and then launch a corresponding play with core segmentation, messaging, and the minimum number of assets and offers in the market to test assumptions quickly and make decisions on what to do next. Once a solid and strategic play is up and running, we use what we call "creative snaps" to extend the play once the assumptions around the play are tested. Snaps are assets or content that can be easily deployed to execute a specific play or tactic.

For example, if a business wants to test additional nurture emails to optimize conversion rates, they might use a creative snap that uses the core concept in the market to quickly add more emails. We've seen that by using playbooks, plays, and snaps, our customers can streamline their marketing efforts, get a marketing motion started faster, and increase the ROMI for their initial play efforts.

Using a playbook approach to implement MVM principles

At Mighty & True, we've developed a suite of playbooks, plays, and snaps that businesses can use to implement MVM. Our tools are focused on high-performance, hassle-free marketing using a playbook-style and systems-driven approach for the most popular tech marketing playbooks. Core to our approach are a few key tools and processes we have in place that help with this approach that include:

• A team trained in the use of playbooks and our core plays and snaps
• An action planning process that we use at the beginning of every play that sets our the segments, messaging, journey and core inventory that we'll use in the initial play
• An automated "order form" that we use for customers to instantly begin the action planning and play creation process
• Processes and templates to launch additional "creative snaps" quickly and easily once a project is in market.

Using our tools, we can help tech marketers launch effective marketing campaigns quickly and easily without wasting time and resources, or getting into market with marketing that just won't work in the long run.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, Minimal Viable Marketing is a powerful strategy that can help tech marketers with limited resources to launch effective marketing campaigns. Though we didn't set out to address the concept of MVM in our product, by using playbooks, plays, and snaps, our customers can efficiently and effectively implement MVM principles and get to the market faster. And that's what it's all about for us. We're on a mission to help our customers build high-performance and hassle-free technology marketing like never before. Join us! 

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