The Lean Startup Way to Develop a Marketing Campaign

David Frühauf
Nov 6 · 3 min read

Let’s face it: when marketing agencies and companies work together to develop a marketing campaign, the only thing that matters is the personal taste of the stakeholders. Depending on the size of the company the Head of Marketing or the CEO decides which campaign will be rolled out. But this way may be dangerously misleading, especially for start-ups and companies with limited budgets.

Don’t Listen to Your Gut

WeAre is also a start-up with its Virtual Reality Conferencing System and we don’t want to throw money out of the window. So we went with “the lean way of marketing”. Before we rolled out the marketing campaign, we tested it with a small budget. The conventional way to test a marketing campaign would be a focus group. But there is a problem: in focus groups, you speak about attitudes which says nothing about the true behavior. The smarter way is to test your campaign with a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) or rather a “Minimum Checkable Ad”. And this is how it works:

Step 1 — Strategy and Briefing

As a company that hires a marketing agency you should be at least aware of your target groups, product benefits and the reason why. Even better is a clear picture of your complete marketing strategy that tells the agency how to best reach potential customers. Most small and medium-sized agencies don’t have any strategic competence in their teams and they don’t know how your business works. You have to tell them — personally and in writing!

Step 2 — Channels and KPIs

In order to test the marketing campaign, you need to choose a channel to reach your specific audience. Online channels like Google, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn are a good choice for this purpose. You can target your audience for a reasonable price and you will be able to track defined KPIs. In addition to the audience, you have to determine a suitable ad format.

Step 3 — Creation Process

After a comprehensive briefing considering a suitable channel and ad format, the agency should be able to develop the 3 or 4 different approaches. Sometimes correction loops are necessary but in general, there is no need to micromanage your agency. You are the expert of your product, the agency is the expert of the design. In this phase, an 80% solution would be good enough, as long as it looks like a realistic marketing ad.

Step 4 — Testing (!)

The time of truth has come: start your campaign with a sufficient budget and observe at the KPIs. After a while, you may recognize a pattern. If you are not sure, give it some more time. A few weeks should be enough to collect the figures. Which ad led to more clicks? Which provided the best leads? And what are the real costs per view / click / lead?

How we tested our marketing campaign

Since we address a B2B target group, we run the test on LinkedIn. Our marketing agency delivered 3 different approaches in the form of online ads, which we tested with a focus on lead generation. After a while, the campaign with the best performance was crystallized. To be sure, we ran a second test with the winning campaign and different headlines.

It is important to emphasize that the winning draft was not the favorite of our Managers or other people we asked. But it was the best performing ad of a real online campaign and that’s what matters!

The final steps

After the test, it’s time to finalize the creatives and expand your campaign to different channels. We decided to photoshoot our visuals. So we were able to specify all details, and even more importantly, no other companies can use it which is often the case with stock photos.

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