Your marketing should be an investment, not a gamble. Discover how to make it pay off in this episode of the Lean Marketing Podcast. Host Allan Dib dives deep into the nine core principles of Lean Marketing.
Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, these principles provide a foundational methodology for creating marketing that generates goodwill, attracts customers, and maximizes ROI.
Allan explains each principle with practical examples and actionable advice, illustrating how to shift from intrusive "marketing pollution" to a value-driven approach that pulls customers in. He emphasizes the importance of integration, market focus, leveraging tools and technology, building assets, and continuous improvement.
Tune in to discover how to make your marketing work for you, not against you.
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9 Principles of Lean Marketing
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Allan Dib: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Lean Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Allan Dib. In this episode, I'm going to be recapping the nine principles of Lean Marketing. These are the nine principles that make up the core of this foundational methodology of marketing. Now, Lean Marketing principle number one is all about values.
Allan Dib: So we want to create value for your target market with your marketing. So much of marketing has just become pollution. It's interruption fueled, it's spam, it's cold calling. It's annoying. Now, That's not the kind of marketing that we want in our business. We want to create a lot of goodwill in our business.
Allan Dib: And so what we want your marketing to do is we want it to inspire, we want it to entertain, we want it to inform. And then a small portion of your target market will eventually buy from you. But everybody who comes in contact with it will get value from it. It'll create a massive goodwill in your business.
Allan Dib: Make your marketing so valuable. that someone would potentially even pay for it. Again, even though you may never charge for it. So we want to create a lot of goodwill in the marketplace with our [00:01:00] marketing. Lean marketing principle number two is all about integration. It's about embedding marketing throughout the entire product lifecycle and customer journey.
Allan Dib: A lot of times, There's no product to market fit. You're going to have a very, very difficult time selling it. It's going to be like an uphill battle. So imagine that you're pushing a boulder uphill. That's often what it feels like selling a product or service that has no product to market fit. So I want you to think about marketing as an accelerant.
Allan Dib: It's not something that's going to. fix all of your problems. So we've got to have strong product to market fit and we've got to integrate marketing throughout our whole entire product life cycle. Now lean marketing principle three, it's all about your market. Your market comes before your product. So who are the people that you are going to serve?
Allan Dib: Now there's two kinds of markets that really come to mind. And the first one, I really like this kind of market. It's your former self. So if you've solved a massive problem for [00:02:00] yourself throughout your life, that can create a very powerful target market because you've been in those shoes. You understand what it's like to be that person.
Allan Dib: So for example, I think about my former self when I used to be an IT guy, struggling to get leads in the door, struggling to get new customers, struggling to make revenue. And I remember what that felt like. And so I can tap into those emotions because I'm not just kind of inventing things off the top of my head.
Allan Dib: I've actually been there. And so I understand how people feel. And so now I'm able to help someone. I can speak to them in my marketing, but more importantly, in my messaging, I can say, look, you know what? I've been there. I've solved that problem for myself and for many others in your shoes. And that's a much more powerful place to be.
Allan Dib: Now, sometimes you're selling a product where maybe you haven't used that product and you see a market opportunity and that is totally fine. So that's where you're going to need to really understand the market very well. What are the things that they want? What are the things that they [00:03:00] fear? What are the things that they desire?
Allan Dib: So really getting to understand them at a very deep level. So you're going to need to spend quite a bit of time doing deep market research to understand that. Lean marketing principle number four is all about tools and technology. What we want to do is we want to use tools and technology to do the heavy lifting and reduce friction.
Allan Dib: We want to reduce friction at every point in your whole customer life cycle. So Convenience is the ultimate force in marketing, in product development, in product delivery, in product to market fit. Think about like Uber, right? Why do we use Uber? Because it's convenient. I can press a button, car arrives to my destination.
Allan Dib: Another example is Amazon. Why? Because it's just so convenient. Same day shipping or next day shipping and the thing just arrives, easy returns. So convenience. It even trumps our preferences in most cases. So tools enable us to really do a lot of the heavy lifting. Now think about the tools [00:04:00] that we get to use from a marketing perspective, particularly lately, there are very, very powerful AI tools, their tools that enable us to do a lot of heavy lifting things that would have required much, much more labor, much more time, much more cost.
Allan Dib: And so large part of your job as a marketer is to understand what tools are out there It's the heavy lifting so that you can do more with less. And doing more with less is a core part of what lean marketing is all about. We want to get bigger results by doing less stuff. Lean marketing principle number five is about assets.
Allan Dib: Assets help you increase your yield on marketing activities. Now think about, There are other types of assets in the financial space. So for example, think about real estate or think about stocks. Real estate, I can rent that out and I can generate income. So assets create income. In a very similar way, we can create marketing assets.
Allan Dib: Marketing assets help you generate new leads, new customers, new [00:05:00] revenue. My book is a really, really powerful marketing asset in my business. So both of my books, I've got my book, The One Page Marketing Plan and my book Lean Marketing. Every single day as a result of having these assets in the marketplace, I get invited as a guest to speak somewhere, I get invited on a podcast.
Allan Dib: Now, this is a marketing asset that keeps generating leads, it keeps generating clients, it keeps generating revenue. So, think about an asset that can create a lot of value for your target market, that creates enormous value for them. Lead marketing principle number six is all about branding. It's the personality of your business.
Allan Dib: So, just like A person has a personality, a business has a personality as well, and so that is really the core of your brand. Now, Lean Marketing Principle 6 says that selling is the best way to build a brand. So think about this, if someone was to get to know you and your personality well. What would be the best way for them to do that?
Allan Dib: Well, it would be for them to [00:06:00] interact with you, for them to spend time with you. And so, in a similar way, from a marketing perspective, the best way for someone to get to know you and think about you as a brand is for them to buy from you. Because once they buy from you, they get to experience your marketing.
Allan Dib: They get to experience your customer service. They get to experience your delivery. They get to interact with your team. And so they're going to get a pretty good sense for your personality. Now, a lot of times people think of big brands like Apple or Coca Cola or Nike, and they look at the big flashy things that they do, Super Bowl ads and billboards and all of those sorts of things.
Allan Dib: And they associate those with. Having a strong brand. And of course, it is associated with having a strong brand, but I would put to you that those are the things that are the result of building a brand. They're not the things that made the big brand. What made those big brands was selling a lot of product.
Allan Dib: to a lot of people. Brand and your story and your [00:07:00] personality as a business are the things that are really going to differentiate you more than anything else. Let's move on to lean marketing principle number seven. This is all about processes and this is our third force multiplier. Lean marketing principle number seven says that marketing is a process, not an event.
Allan Dib: So a lot of people treat marketing like an event. Hey, we did a big rebrand or we launched a website or we launched a marketing campaign. And there's nothing wrong with any of those things, but those are events. Those are not processes. A lot of times we'll work with clients and sometimes they get disappointed or frustrated if their early marketing efforts haven't been a smash hit of a success.
Allan Dib: But the best marketers in the world They're the ones who do consistent daily, weekly, monthly processes. That's why a lot of People are surprised to find that the best marketers are often process driven people. They're not people who are necessarily super creative or come up with some amazing brand idea [00:08:00] or something like that.
Allan Dib: They're people who are just showing up on a daily, weekly, monthly basis and just really cashing in on that compound interest. The compound interest that generates new clients, new lead flow, new revenue and over time. It is such a superpower. If you can implement the power of marketing processes in your business, you will be unstoppable.
Allan Dib: Lean marketing principle number eight. We use content to create a pulling force. So again, so much of marketing has become about pushing. Pushing our product onto somebody, whether they like it or not, pushing our content, pushing our ads, interrupting them, spamming them, cold calling them, all of those sorts of things.
Allan Dib: But a much more powerful way to think about content, whether it's an ad, whether it's anything else is to create a pulling force, something that creates so much value in the marketplace that people just come to you. Wouldn't that. [00:09:00] Be so powerful. If you could open your email inbox every single day and someone says, Hey.
Allan Dib: I saw that piece of content that you created or I heard it or I read it and it really resonated with me. It's something that I want to hear more. So that's something that I experience every single day from my content. That's what a lot of our clients in our accelerator program also experience because good content creates that pulling force.
Allan Dib: It creates that community of people who are like minded who share the same values and who want what you've got. And a lot of times A really powerful content will help people come to you and they'll really resonate with what you've got to offer. Finally, we'll end on lean marketing principle number nine.
Allan Dib: Lean marketing principle number nine is all about continuous improvement. It's so important to test, measure, and continuously improve each step in your marketing campaigns. So it's that [00:10:00] principle in Japanese called Kaizen, where we just make small improvements on a regular basis. We continually test.
Allan Dib: Lean marketing principle number nine is all about identifying at what step did something break down. So let's break it down. It's like if someone had said to you, you know, we tried manufacturing, but it just didn't work. Was it in the packaging? Was it in the delivery? Was it in the pricing that didn't work?
Allan Dib: Like what specifically didn't work? So in a similar way, we think about. Uh, marketing in steps. So what step of the marketing process? Um, maybe needs a bit of improvement, so we need to be continually testing, measuring and improving each step in our marketing campaigns. And you know, small little improvements can have massive effects on your bottom line, on your revenue, on your lead flow.
Allan Dib: Now there's any number of metrics that we can be tracking and obsessing over and they're great. [00:11:00] They're what I call micrometrics and that can really help you troubleshoot those steps that I just talked about. But really the two metrics that I want you to be obsessing over and they are cost of customer acquisition and lifetime value.
Allan Dib: They're the two most important metrics that you can have in your business and in your marketing and understanding those well. So cost of customer acquisition is how much does it cost us to acquire a customer. So you want to be very aware of that. What are the. What are the total costs of your marketing?
Allan Dib: What are the total costs of your sales process? And then dividing that by the number of clients that you're getting in that time period. And then lifetime value is how much is a client worth to us over the entire 10 year with us? So how long does a client stay with us? And again, can we improve that? So these will all be functions of lean marketing principle number nine, which is all about testing, measuring, and continually improving each step in your marketing campaigns.
Allan Dib: So. [00:12:00] They're the nine principles of lean marketing. So implement these in your business and in your marketing and it will absolutely revolutionize your results. So these are the core of this book, Lean Marketing, again, which I go into in a lot more detail in the book. And I highly recommend that you spend a lot of time thinking about these nine core principles, but more than thinking is implementing them in your business.
Allan Dib: If you need some help with that, just hit us up. We've got a marketing accelerator that really will help you power through all of these and help you implement these at a very high level. So thank you for joining me for this episode. I'm Allan Dib, your host, and I look forward to talking with you again real soon.
Allan Dib: Bye for now.
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