Marketing Archives - 6sigma

Marketing Professionals Adopt Lean Agile Techniques

OpEx Learning Team — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:16:10 +0000

Marketing professionals are starting to take their cues from the manufacturing industry and adopt lean agile principles to improve performance and value. A common tool in lean agile practices used in manufacturing are sprints. The two practices are complementary, and achieve significant results when applied appropriately.

Recently, a marketing director with a Fortune 100 organization observed the lean agile process of sprints in their engineering team. They would use month long bursts (sprints) to create and test the potential value of projects. At the end of each sprint, the engineering team would examine what worked and what didn’t. If it was deemed a success, the process was adopted. If it didn’t, then the process was eliminated from consideration. The marketing director found inspiration in the process and success of the engineers, and imagined the same success in the marketing department. Research shows that 77% of marketing departments had adopted lean agile practices in the past five years. Of those respondents, 67% of those organizations increased revenue and profits. This clearly shows the potential of lean agile practice performance in the marketing profession.

Marketing Lean Agile Sprints Work

In this specific marketing department, the director adopted the lean agile process of their engineers and started on a new journey of excellence. The director prioritized a list of their most important projects and delayed lesser ideas until later months. They went to work and ran sprints on their top priorities. When they made their marketing process more customer centric, they also found they started sharing a common language with others in the organization. The overall team started working together and better understanding individual roles. The marketing department developed the process to where they would run a large project and two smaller ones each month. They were able to focus the efforts of marketing to better fit into what the rest of the organization really need form the team. They developed a year-long plan for their sprints, which significantly improved the overall effectiveness of the marketing team. The marketing department was better able to say no, not right now to requests and really focus on what made a difference for the entire organization. The entire team was able to become more comfortable with both failure and honesty. It was like new life came into the department. A mindset developed within marketing that they could experiment with campaigns to reduce workload and effort when putting a new product into the marketplace.

The post Marketing Professionals Adopt Lean Agile Techniques appeared first on 6sigma.

[VIDEO] Lean Agile Sprints for Marketing

OpEx Learning Team — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:16:10 +0000

In taking a cue from manufacturing, marketing departments are embracing the principles of lean agile practices. Research shows that over the past five years, 77% of marketing departments have embraced lean agile principles, and 67% of those have shown increases in both revenue and profits. Needless to say, lean agile principles are making an impact in the marketing community.

Please take some time and watch this informative video on the topic!

https://youtu.be/j-r5W_Eq4G4

The post [VIDEO] Lean Agile Sprints for Marketing appeared first on 6sigma.

[VIDEO] Lean Principles – Apply the Practice to Sales

OpEx Learning Team — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:14:11 +0000

To achieve increased productivity, competitive advantage, and profitability, high value-creating businesses around the world have consistently turned to lean thinking principles for solutions. Manufacturing processes have widely adopted lean principles to gain improved operational effectiveness and lower costs. Most recently, lean principles have been advanced to better identify and understand the expectations of consumers and the sales process.

Check out this informative video on applying lean principles to the process of sales and marketing.

The post [VIDEO] Lean Principles – Apply the Practice to Sales appeared first on 6sigma.

Six Sigma and KPIs: Relative Market Share

admin — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 21:16:36 +0000

Ever wondered how well you’re developing your market share compared to your competitors? It’s an important question to ask, and one we take very seriously. There’s a heated debate among Six Sigma practitioners at the moment. That is, how best can we apply Six Sigma to the marketing industry? Opinions tend to fall on either of two sides.

The first suggests a direct application is best, without any additional work to adapt Six Sigma ideas to satisfy specific needs. Theirs is a one size fits all philosophy. On the other hand, however, we have those who believe in tailoring Six Sigma to suit the business. We find that the first approach can drive cost-reduction, while the second is best for improving marketing efficiency and effectiveness. But how do they work? Today, you can learn how you can improve your relative market share with Six Sigma.

Direct Six Sigma Implementation

Many practitioners believe we should implement Six Sigma methodology on a project by project basis. This can be highly beneficial for marketing activities like sales, promotion, and distribution. Furthermore, by promoting cost-reduction, you can make your marketing activities more efficient. Marketing is full of undefined creative actions offer huge potential for cost savings. The best way to achieve this is by applying a rigorous improvement approach to make these actions more structured and disciplined. Tools like DMAIC and traditional improvement projects work wonders here. The more work you put in, the more effective and value-enhancing these activities become. Similarly, using this Six Sigma approach will radically improve top-line revenues as well as relative market share.

Tailoring Six Sigma to Improve Market Share

Some believe a custom-tailored DMAIC approach to Six Sigma implementation is best. The object of this is to increase relative market share. This approach is fact-oriented and targets specific areas with superior value. Firstly, you must identify the specific product or market opportunities best for your organization’s growth. Six Sigma practitioners evaluate these areas with metrics for current market share and market growth rate. You can also utilize competitive intensity to assess your organization’s key market opportunities better. The Define stage of DMAIC is of particular importance here as it diverges from Six Sigma’s typical project-based approaches.

Benefits of Six Sigma Marketing and DMAIC: Measure and Control

Six Sigma Marketing is a comprehensive strategy to increase your market share. Using DMAIC, it eschews a project-by-project approach. Instead of simply reducing costs of marketing activities, it aims to make your marketing’s more effective and more efficient. Creating a value model for each targeted product or market can help you understand the voice of the market (VoM).

Similarly, all your operational and strategic enterprises should take a VoM approach. By replacing your activity plans, intuitions and predictions, VoM will provide a sense of direction to improve relative market share. Value is the most significant indicator for top-line revenue growth, and SSM uses superior value creation/delivery to drive growth for your target markets or products.

Moreover, by implementing effective monitoring systems, you can ensure your competitive value propositions satisfy expectations. This control effort is an important practice as it focuses on strategic value proposition as well as monitoring specific transactions like sales. Similarly, it allows you to identify potential areas where process issues require improvement.

The post Six Sigma and KPIs: Relative Market Share appeared first on 6sigma.

The Seven Wastes of Paid Search Marketing

admin — Wed, 26 May 2010 11:24:52 +0000

Pete’s Note: I’m pleased to bring you this guest post from Matt LeVeque, who will share with us his thoughts on the seven wastes of lean marketing, as applied specifically to paid search marketing (pay per click advertising). This post on the Seven Waste of Paid Search Marketing shows Matt’s approach to paid search marketing and how his approach is heavily influenced by quality principles. More about Matt after the post [1. Matt LeVeque has over 10 years of website management and online marketing experience. He is currently working as the Sr. Manager, Search Marketing & Quality Services with ClickEquations, the industry leader in software-based search marketing that improves paid search campaign performance through intelligent automation. Matt Leveque is a Google AdWords Qualified Individual, a Microsoft adExcellence Member and a thought leader in quality search engine marketing topics.

His view of search engine marketing is heavily influenced by quality principles, systems thinking and sustainable practices.

Prior to his position at ClickEquations Matt was the Sales & Online Marketing Manager for Rath & Strong Management Consultants, the leading global provider of Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma and Organizational Development consulting & training. He is currently an active Senior Member of the American Society for Quality(ASQ), the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia and theInformation Architecture Institute. Matt’s extended professional profile can be found at LinkedIn. Matt publishes a search engine marketing blog.].

[contentblock id=31]

I’VE BEEN WORKING in the Search Engine Marketing industry for a while in various capacities and have spent the last 3 years working in an agency setting managing multiple Paid Search accounts. During this time I have come to learn that there is a significant amount of waste that goes into managing these accounts. Waste in Paid Search comes in many forms such as reorganizing campaigns and ad groups, waiting for 3rd party analytics software to work (and work properly), fixing of broken URLs and the list goes on.

Waste in this industry, and any industry for that matter, is considered non-value added work that your company or your client is not willing to pay for. At Toyota Taiichi Ohno, one of the founding fathers of the Toyota Way, lean management system and the Toyota Production System, described the 7 Wastes of Production as all activity that adds cost but not value.

For all intents and purposes, even though Search Engine Marketing may be perceived as a service, the reality is that what goes on behind the scenes is more like a manufacturing operation. We build Paid Search marketing campaigns, some times from scratch, that consist of various components just like manufacturing a product. Search marketers design and build these campaigns in order to serve ads when the end user requires them very similar to the pull system used in lean manufacturing and at Toyota.

This comparison might seem way off base for anyone not familiar with lean or new to Paid Search so let’s get to the subject of this article and talk about the 7 Wastes of Production and how they relate to the life of Paid Search Marketer.

Overproduction

Producing more than the customer needs right now.

This can be related to things like duplicate keywords across multiple ad groups, too many ad creatives that make testing irrelevant or bidding on the same keyword with multiple match types at the same bid.

Waiting

Idle time created when material, information, people, or equipment is not ready.

This one is my favorite because to me it’s the biggest contributor to waste. In this case idle time spent while waiting for 3rd party analytics tools to load or refresh and do so properly is #1 on my list. Other contributors to waiting are things like waiting for days until your agency rep calls you back, waiting for your client to make decisions and waiting for colleagues to review client deliverables. Recently Google AdWords has taken notice of the waste of waiting and will now dock you Quailty Score points for destination landing page load time.

Inventory

More materials, parts, or products on hand than the customer needs right now.

This is similar the too much too soon’ or big bang effect’ of building out a new Paid Search account with more campaigns and stuffing the ad groups with 1,000’s of keywords much more than necessary. Work in progress is related to the waste of inventory as well. Another form of inventory related waste as it relates to fair competition is the double and triple serving of ads that some companies and agencies get away with.

Motion

Movement of people that does not add value.

Okay so we are not moving people, but in ‘service’ related industries, the waste of motion includes things like searching your desktop or file folders for that excel file you used two months ago. Using multiple tabs in a web browser or having to take multiple steps in UI to make one small change is waste of motion. Throwing nerf-darts at your co-works is a HUGE waste of motion, but a hell of a lot of fun.

Defects

Work that contains errors, rework, mistakes or lacks something necessary.

This is another big one. Inheriting a Paid Search account from another agency or in-house operation always requires rework. Reorganization of campaigns in a way that is logical so that is both cost efficient and effective toward growth can take months depending on the size of the account. Other Paid Search defects include broken destination URLs, landing page offers that do not match the ad creative, ad creatives that do not match search queries and keywords that are simply too broad to be effectively targeted.

Overprocessing

Effort that adds no value from the customer’s viewpoint.

Overprocessing can almost always be attributed to extra steps added to manual work. Building Paid Search campaigns with multiple ad groups and keywords is a very manual process and so is most reporting on the success of these efforts. There are automated (see Pay-Per-Click Autonomation) ways to improve the waste of over processing.

Another example of over processing in Paid Search or any similar marketing channel is not fully understanding client/user requirements or expectations. For example if a 3rd party analytics tool can have all the bells and whistles and even tell you the color shirt a user was wearing when a purchase was made but cannot make the simple export function work properly, the analytics development team produced more than was required by the Paid Search Marketer.

Transportation

Movement of product that does not add value.

This one is a little tricky for Paid Search. One example would be trying to build out a Yahoo Search Marketing account from scratch by trying to import the existing Google AdWords account. Because of editorial differences between the two platforms there can be a significant amount of waste in moving one campaign structure to another.

Hopefully this clarifies the similarities of shop-floor production to cube-wall production and sheds some light on the types of waste to be aware of when taking on the responsibilities of a Paid Search Marketer.

The post The Seven Wastes of Paid Search Marketing appeared first on 6sigma.