What’s great about marketing is that it’s the aspect of business where the brand can come alive. It allows you to step out of your logo and storefront and put out beautiful designs and graphics that make your brand start to feel tangible. Companies like Coca Cola, Google and Apple are great example of companies who have expertly made their brand into tangible beings. When it comes to marketing your brand, it can be exciting, but overwhelming. This is where the concept of minimum viable product comes into play.
Minimum Viable Product
Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, is a concept popular in the entrepreneurship community. It revolves around the idea that the market is always changing and there just really is no way to know what consumers want, especially when your product or service is new. Thus the best thing to do is create a product that is functional and put it to market. Don’t try to make it look perfect aesthetically or fill it with amazing features. Just get the product to do what it is suppose to do and put it out to market. Consumer adoption and feedback will dictate what improvements the product will need.
Minimum Viable Product in Marketing
Why am I talking about an entrepreneurship topic? Because it relates to marketing so well. What I’ve found running marketing campaigns with clients, peers and even myself is that we dream up big campaigns that never get published. This happens because we keep trying to add new graphics, new features and aspects of the campaign that will make them that much better. What happens though is that with every layer we add, it creates a heavier, more complicated campaign that we have to launch.
My biggest advice to those who want to launch campaigns is to keep in mind Minimum Viable Product. Don’t over think it. Don’t keep adding layers. Layers are like condiments, they can be added later. What’s most important is you get the core of your campaign out.
Take it Step by Step
So if you are constructing a content marketing through your blog, then focus on your blog. Don’t worry about social media, email lists or paid advertising just yet. That can all be added later, what we need to make sure is that your content is getting published on your blog. Once you do that, you can hone your blogging skills, grow an audience and shape your content to that audience over time.
That way you don’t waste time perfecting everything before you even launch. You focus on the minimum viable aspect of your campaign. Then when things get going, you just add from there. This guarantees that your digital marketing keeps moving. As long as you got it started then you will have the option to make it better as you keep going. And if your scared about how your brand might look if you make a mistake, remember that Google didn’t look so pretty on its first iteration, but no one holds it against them today.
