Worried you made a webinar blunder? 🚫 Discover the fixes to 10 common mistakes on April 16. Register Now 

Back to Blog Home

Trimming the Fat: Lean Marketing Tips

January 8th, 2016 Shanna Cook

Did you spend a little too much during the holiday season? Want to cut down on your caloric intake of programmatic spending? While I have been bombarded with messages lately on ways to trim the fat, be healthier, and move more, I can’t help but think about how much we as marketers are often called to practice lean approaches in the start of a new year. How are you supposed to do more (run more miles faster or create more shareable content) with less (calories, money, time, team members)? Fear not, marketing friends, I have compiled a list of tips to help you have your most successful lean marketing year yet! Use these three marketing tips to jumpstart your marketing diet today:

Compound Content

Why do four different exercises for four different body parts, when you can do one that works all four? A compound exercise is a workout that works multiple muscle groups and body parts at the same time. It effectively helps you get in and out of the gym faster, making you more efficient with your time. Likewise, when you approach content creation this year, consider different ways that you can make or do more with the one program that you have.

For example, at ON24, we always host one webinar a month. Instead of creating extra unrelated content, we create an entire content ecosystem out of that one webinar’s topic, giving our audience a theme that is easy to follow along with and also easily understandable by the end of our monthly push. Out of the one webinar, we create a promotional blog post, a post-event blog post, and a slew of other potential creative content formats such as white papers, supporting infographics, multiple social media posts, SlideShare upload, etc. This enables our small but mighty marketing team to create content that has a ripple effect. We are also able to learn what resonated best with our audience during the webinar itself via interactive tools (Q&A, polls, and social chatter) which help inform the post-event content that we create.

Friends in The Right Places

Kickstart your weight loss goals by working out with a friend! Working out with friends provides accountability, encouragement, and enables you to pull your resources together to find exciting and innovative ways to achieve success together. Likewise, working with partner companies to co-sponsor events (both online and in-person) enables you to do more with less. Who needs one set of social profiles and databases to promote a co-sponsored event when you can combine your clout and reach more people together. By doing this, you can get more leads, share them, and cut down any potential costs associated with your event. Sharing is caring!

Proving Your Success

Just like a scale and how well you fit into your jeans are ways to judge the success of your weight loss program, setting up strong program metrics ahead of time provides a way for you to be more accountable with your marketing campaigns. Success doesn’t come to those who say that they generically want to lose weight “sometime” over the course of the next 366 (leap year!) days. You need mini-goals to keep you motivated along the way, solid numbers to track, and (your own) sentiment analysis.

Likewise, when practicing lean marketing, you need to set up strong KPIs before executing a program. Doing so will help you determine ahead of time if you have created the right content to help you get there (i.e., maybe you really like hosting local networking sessions, but the KPIs for your program would better be achieved by attracting a more global audience via an on-demand webinar that you already have in your arsenal). Setting up these metrics will help you save money and be more nimble along the way.