2020 was unique in many ways. But the fundamentals of marketing remain the same. It’s still about creating demand. Good marketing creates demand by addressing the needs of the people you want to reach.
On a tight budget? Need results fast? Master this powerful idea: the Minimally Viable Campaign (MVC).
The MVC philosophy is all about getting the most value out of the least amount of time, talent, and resources.
Interviewing friends
Getting it out there
Testing before investing
This approach emphasizes experimentation, the importance of user feedback, and an iterative design process. It borrows from the popular Minimally Viable Product (MVP) model and Eric Ries’ “Lean Startup”.
While there’s no single method for successfully running an MVC, you can create an MVC initiative at your organization by following these three steps we affectionately call:
An MVC is all about learning fast. And talking to people you already have a relationship with— current stakeholders, partners, customers, even your friends—can jump start the ideas that will fuel your campaign thinking.
You don’t need a multi-million dollar research budget to understand the market and your customers. Ask the people who know your business why they love what you offer instead of the competition. (Success is discovering at least one thing you didn’t know.)
Your interviews now serve as your research. Leverage what you’ve learned to create content—see our blog on catalogs and lookbooks. But do it quickly. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Remember: You want to create something that’s simply good enough to be viable.
The urgency of this step is meant to push you and your team to get your creative out into the wild. Social ads are a really effective way of testing new messages in the market—and getting results, fast.
> See how you can turn your PDFs into an Instagram Stories.
The final step in the MVC process isn’t really final. It’s meant to be a flywheel where the value of testing feeds back into another visit to your friends and the minimally viable effort it takes to get the next creative to market.
Fortunately, the engine for generating testable marketing ideas start with our first MVC step: talking to people who have experience with what you (or your competition) is offering.
Advanced tip: To get even more value out of MVC efforts, you’ll want clarity on the current profitability of the channels you’re using. If you’re just starting out, don’t worry. You’ll want to baseline your estimates and projections by researching the marketing channels relevant to your business.
The key thing to remember in the MVC process is understanding when you’ve gathered enough information by testing your creative in the market—on Facebook or with Google Ads—to understand its effectiveness.
The goal here is to quickly get an understanding of your campaign in-market—and then quickly evolve your content to better meet the needs of your prospects.
Multichannel, multisegment marketing campaigns offer tremendous value when backed by smart strategy and steady management. But many small-to-midsize businesses and their marketers—maybe someone like you—need to prove their messaging in the market before they’re ready to commit serious marketing dollars.
The bottom line is if you’re looking for more effective, more efficient ways to go to market, the MVC is not only your most important idea, it might just be your smartest one, too.Connecting content to people, the Issuu Blog seeks to cover the topics of interest to our community—from tips to trends to best practices. See how Issuu can transform a single PDF into a high-quality campaign that connects on Facebook, Instagram, and across the Web.
Connecting content to people, the Issuu Blog seeks to cover the topics of interest to our community — from tips to trends to best practices. See how Issuu can transform a single PDF into a high-quality campaign that connects on Facebook, Instagram, and across the Web.