Quick Navigation:
- What Is a Lean Marketing Agency
- What Is Lean Marketing
- Lean Principles Already Implemented
- ActiveCampaign Partners
- Cloud Collaboration With Clients for Transparency (Establish Pull)
- Project Management System (Create Flow)
- Standard Process Checklists (Create Flow)
- Customer Journey Improvements (Map Value Stream)
- Ideas Car Parks (Continuous Improvement)
- What We Still Need To Become a Fully Lean Marketing Agency (Our 2022 Plans)
- Sales Funnels Are Lean So We Have To Become a Lean Agency
- Why You Should Be Excited About Working With a Lean Marketing Agency
- Better Service for You, Better Processes for Us
- Higher Impact, Lower Costs
- Maximising Your ROI (And Ours)
- Lean Marketing Agency vs. Traditional UK Agencies
- Our 2022 Plans for Revamping Customer Journey
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It was before the pandemic when I was freelancing and learned about Lean Organisational management practices while proofreading some white papers. A few years down the line, I took a course in Lean and again, after launching LMNts Marketing I decided that I will eventually build a Lean marketing agency. Now, we are at the end of 2021, loads of things happened, including lockdown, home working, and we are ready. Learn more about our plans for improving customer experience in 2022 and beyond here, at LMNts Marketing, a full service sales funnel agency.
What Is a Lean Marketing Agency
It’s all about efficiency and productivity, but you should not think that a lean agency resembles a production line. Yes, there are processes, but they are not there to train robots, but to make people’s jobs easier and to communicate with customers in a more effective way.
A lean marketing agency has its core assets in the middle: customers and people. It provides a transparent system for both customers and employees, so everyone is on the same page. They don’t waste hours on team meetings and strategy calls; they streamline every marketing process. This involves creating systems for clients and building a digital marketing agency funnel that optimises customer journeys and listens to the audience.
A lean digital marketing agency is built on knowledge sharing, collaboration, and result focus. It is relevant to what customers’ main goals are and uses SOPs for solving problems, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel every single time.
Of course, there’s more to lean marketing than streamlining processes and communication; here are a few lean marketing principles that benefit clients and team members long term.
What Is Lean Marketing
Lean marketing is based on managing projects in a way that the best resources are allocated to each project, and collaboration enhances results every time. Let’s say that our all SEO agency creates a campaign. We know what the main KPI for the client is: traffic. So that’s what we measure and report on. However, the process doesn’t stop here. If the client is getting a lot of traffic but there are no conversions, we start thinking further, and identify the bottlenecks that need to be eliminated for the website to be profitable. We make recommendations and allow the client to make an informed decision and choose a solution based on our transparent report.
Lean Principles Already Implemented
The main Lean principles we are working towards are listed below:
- Identify Value
- Map the Value Stream
- Create Flow
- Establish Pull
- Continuous Improvement
We realised that the most important assets of LMNts are the talent we hand-picked, trained, and nurtured, the clients who are more like raving fans, and our reputation. Implementing some of the Lean principles has helped us not only survive the pandemic and lockdown, but also improve our internal and external communication. By not having to touch a task twice, and having an internal quality assurance system, we can take care of customer experience as well as quality control.
As a lean marketing agency we are proud of our automation systems that are personal but efficient at the same time. We have a very simple booking system that allows us to filter inbound enquiries to direct them to the right person with the most relevant experience and knowledge. We also implemented a great client enrollment system and made sure customers always know what’s next and how they can get in touch with the right person.
ActiveCampaign Partners
One of our main achievements was to become ActiveCampaign partners. We teamed up with the company as we saw that many clients were struggling with setting up profitable email marketing campaigns and getting past technological hurdles. As a partner, we can build marketing automations that will boost client’s conversions and allow them to measure results real time.
Cloud Collaboration With Clients for Transparency (Establish Pull)
We reduced our email use by up to 80 percent in 2021, when it comes to client work and progress reports. We implemented cloud collaboration to become a lean digital marketing agency. This means that every client has a folder on our Google Workspace, where we place all the reports, notes, and important documents. They can also use the shared folder to upload information such as brand guidelines, images, etc. This has benefited our team, saved us time, and allowed clients to get a real time snapshot of their projects.
We have also implemented business intelligence sharing into our social media marketing packages. Instead of having to ask for information, our clients have their own login link to monitor the performance of the campaigns and see which posts are doing the best. Transparency is the best long term strategy.
Project Management System (Create Flow)
While LMNts already had Trello implemented when the Pandemic hit and many people had to work from home in 2020, we strived for more. While Trello served us well and allowed us to survive and thrive managing remote teams, we wanted more features as the business grew. We moved to a new project management system that allows time tracking, proposal sending, and – most importantly – client access to some of the projects, so they always know what’s going on instead of waking up in the middle of the night wondering how their full service marketing team is doing.
Standard Process Checklists (Create Flow)
We have also implemented a few process checklists to ensure that everything is done on time, in the right order, based on our governing principles, and as efficiently as possible. We have a way of identifying the main bottlenecks, as we can see where projects are most likely to get stuck. This means that for example if the web design team is waiting for the content to be done for weeks, we know that we need to take on and train a new content specialist who will be able to reduce lead times and help us optimise every process, reducing the risk of delays.
Customer Journey Improvements (Map Value Stream)
In order to serve each client the best we can, we had to create a system that allows us to get to know them. We mapped our value stream and streamlined all the services. This means that we start with an ideal client profile or marketing SWOT analysis before we enroll a client, so we have already done the hard work, delivered value, gained client trust, and built a common ground. This resulted in an over 90 percent conversion on our sales funnel packages after ordering a marketing SWOT.
Ideas Car Park (Continuous Improvement)
Of course, we cannot sit on our laurels knowing that we’ve come a long way. We will need to think of new ways of wowing clients to become a fully lean marketing agency. That’s why we implemented an “ideas car park” into our project management platform, so we can brainstorm on new ways of delivering better value at a lower cost and faster. (Btw, the nickname of the Ideas Car Park is “brain dump”).
What We Still Need To Become a Fully Lean Marketing Agency (Our 2022 Plans)
While some of our client enrollment and qualification is already automated, we have a few things to do in 2022. We are aiming to team up with Typeform in the new year to improve customers’ experience visiting our site and make answers to their most important questions readily available without having to send an enquiry form or calling us. Apart from simple quizzes and qualifying funnels, we will also implement VideoAsk for our own site, as well as our clients’ funnels.
We will also work hard on eliminating email and making communication flow even better than before. We will implement client logins to our project management systems so they get a real-time snapshot of what’s going on.
We are also going to work on additional marketing automation methods that will improve the efficiency of clients’ businesses, not only their marketing processes. This will include booking and payment automation, automatic review collection, and reputation management.
Of course, we are striving for continuous improvement according to Lean principles, so this list is likely to grow in 2022.
Sales Funnels Are Lean So We Have To Become a Lean Agency
The main purpose of a sales funnel is to make your lead generation as efficient as possible. Therefore, it makes sense for us to turn into a Lean marketing agency and implement the same strategies. In other words, take a leaf out of our own book. In 2020-21, we realised how much time, money, and hassle building a sales funnel saved our clients, so finally – after growing our team – we are able to implement the same systems into the LMNts Marketing brand.
A lean sales funnel is designed in a way that it eliminates the waste of time, resources, and money. Qualifying your leads is something most sales funnel experts neglect, and that is why they are unable to optimise conversion rates. We always start the funnel building process with the end result in mind, as Stephen Cowey advises. So we can streamline the processes and optimise client enrollment and customer experiences.
Why You Should Be Excited About Working With a Lean Marketing Agency
There are many reasons why a Lean agency can deliver better results than a traditional one. First of all, they have a great communication system that suits their clients’ needs. Second, they use collaboration in everything they do. In fact, we are planning on involving our clients in the decision making process even more in 2022, making them a co-creator of their marketing campaigns. As we always say; we might be amazing at marketing, but the client knows their target audience even more.
If you have been let down by poor communication from marketing professionals, have no clear vision, or don’t know where your advertising budget is going, things are about to change when you choose to work with a lean marketing team.
Better Service for You, Better Processes for Us
Using Lean principles is a win-win situation. Everyone benefits.
Our clients get better communication, more control, and regular updates. They are able to compare results with the benchmarking data we set up in the beginning.
Our staff will benefit as they will never have to touch the same job again, as there are clear instructions shared with the team, the client, and the project manager. This means no more frustrations and endless revisions from clients. We simply don’t start working until every box is ticked and everyone is on the same page.
Higher Impact, Lower Costs
The greatest benefit of working with a lean agency, however, is better campaigns. No matter if you work with us on a SEO project, a social media marketing and branding campaign, or funnel development, we will always strive to deliver more value.
We will also recommend the right advertising channels for your brand, which means that you don’t have to waste money on campaigns that will not deliver results. We will work with you to determine the right angle for maximum impact.
Maximising Your ROI (And Ours)
If you are currently considering working with a digital marketing agency, your first priority should be your return on investment. There’s no point spending money on ads that get you ckicks but no sales. Likewise, you want to make sure that you are not wasting money on a funnel if you don’t have a strong enough offer and a competitive advantage. As a part of our holistic approach to marketing, we’ll help you get all your ducks in a row to avoid wasting resources. After all, your success is our success.
Lean Marketing Agency vs. Traditional UK Agencies
The main difference between average (disclosure: not all) UK agencies and a lean marketing company is their customer focus. At LMNts we understand that people don’t like being sold, but they love buying things that will solve their problems. We provide expert recommendations and collaborate with clients to find the right solution. Most agencies will simply “fill capacity” without thinking whether it is a good fit for their clients.
We also understand that keeping clients happy is a much better investment into our brand than taking on every job we can. It has to be the right fit, we have to believe that we can help the client, and we need to share the basic values of doing business. We don’t work with anyone or everyone; the closer the fit the better results we can deliver and the faster we can grow our brand reputation.
Our 2022 Plans for Revamping Customer Journey
Since 2020, we started partnering up with clients instead of enrolling them and “signing them up” like other agencies do. We will continue this trend, and make our services look and feel as if you had an in-house marketing team. Here are some of the things we are looking to do in 2022:
Customer Reports Delivered Automatically
We are planning on implementing a system where we will have all the reports scheduled to be delivered to clients and follow up meetings booked.
Real Time Campaign Recommendations Delivered
We will also take collaboration to the next level, so when things change and campaigns need to be adjusted, we will let clients know.
Eliminating Emails Further
Emails are evil and can kill efficiency. We will aim to use cloud computing instead of emails whenever we enroll new clients.
ROI Guarantees
Over time, we are looking to introduce a pricing structure that will include a guarantee for a minimum return on investment. This will help us take the guesswork out of campaign allocation.
Customer Communication Platform Development
We will be working on a customer communication platform where we will share our best practices, deliver training, updates, and reports.
Would you like to find out more about what it feels like to work with us? Head over to Clutch and see what our clients have to say about us. If you feel like we are the right fit, please let us know. Would love to learn more about your plans for 2022!
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