If you’re a regular recent reader of this blog, you’ll know that I’ve concluded a series of posts on what I term the 15 steps of B2B marketing, a process that can be applied to pretty much any project, plan or period.

Having built up the 15 steps, I now want to break them up a little.

You may feel that your company, project or plan does not warrant such an exhaustive list of steps. You may also feel that it’s possible to get pretty immediate feedback on your tests and that you might even be able to get stuff out there sooner and iterate your offering while you’re already in the market. A sort of ready-fire-aim approach, if you like.

Indeed, lately, many marketers are starting to borrow from software development and start-up methodologies and talk about ‘agile marketing’, or ‘lean marketing’. Taking a lean approach is a bit like taking a slice of your marketing plan and seeing what it tastes like for customers. This early feedback arms you to improve the next few slices in a series of small improvements, rather than one big cascading marketing push at the end of what might be some untested assumptions and homework.

Lean marketing is not a fad, it’s more a response to the reality that the mechanism of the web makes it much easier for you to very quickly get a steer on whether what you’re doing resonates with those whom you want to relieve of some money. For more on this read here.