‘25 challenges B2B marketers will face in 2025’. ‘The big problem for B2B marketers’. ‘Why it’s harder than ever to do B2B marketing’.
We’ve all seen headlines like these. But the truth is, B2B marketers don’t need to be told about the problems they’re facing. They need solutions. Sometimes that means looking for answers in unexpected places.
Enter the Japanese concept of Kaizen.
The elephant in the room
Misaligned teams are among the main reasons why B2B marketers struggle to move projects forward.
Sometimes, it can feel like sales, marketing, product, and customer service teams all have different ideas of the ideal customer and their needs. That’s bad news for your revenue, and that could be down to siloes, poor communication, or simply a lack of resources.
So how can you bring teams together, united for the greater good of revenue generation?
Kaizen and ‘continuous improvement’
Taken from Japanese factory floors, Kaizen means conducting a thorough assessment of productivity with the goal of identifying incremental improvements that can increase efficiency and profitability.
Periodically, you’d bring all your teams together, walk through the factory, and find ways to make things work better.
We can apply this thinking to marketing. By bringing different teams together, they can analyze your current marketing practices and processes, sharing their own expertise and working towards better ways of doing things.
It’s about being disciplined — no phones, no distractions. It’s about being 100% focused on the task in short periods of intense focus. This approach can reap huge long-term rewards. For a start, it gets everyone (sales, marketing, product, leadership) on the same page with a united goal. It helps them to gain a deeper understanding of your customers and how to reach them. And it aids information sharing and positive ways of working between teams.
But what does this ‘continuous improvement’ philosophy look like, in action, for marketers? Here are just three ideas for how you could use this approach to take your campaigns to the next level.
1. Use Kaizen to transform how you plan campaigns
Some campaigns — account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns, for example — are notoriously difficult to plan. They demand that you combine the insights and strengths of all your teams to identify and target the right customers in the right way.
That means it’s essential to blend the knowledge of your product experts with the insights of your sales specialists and the creative magic of your marketing team.
By conducting a Kaizen, you do more than just get all those teams in one place. You facilitate a highly intentional approach that involves everyone dropping their other priorities to focus on this one goal. It’s the perfect way to identify the right accounts to target — and the messages that will have the greatest impact.
2. Use Kaizen to adapt your marketing to industry changes
The marketing landscape is seemingly changing faster than ever. What if Kaizen could help you stay one step ahead?
You could, for example, bring together your teams to conduct a Kaizen where you assess how well your marketing practices are suited to the current marketing landscape.
By getting teams to share insights and take stock of recent changes, you can identify potential trends in customers’ and competitors’ behavior — and how you could take advantage.
3. Use Kaizen to incrementally optimize campaigns for bigger returns
‘If you can A/B test it, you should’ is a common marketer’s mantra. But I’m here to make the case for using Kaizen to optimize your campaigns instead.
If you identify set periods throughout your campaign to conduct a Kaizen session, you can conduct a metaphorical ‘factory floor walk’ of the campaign. By working your way through all aspects of the campaign, and putting everything under a microscope, you can find ways to incrementally optimize performance and make your marketing budget go as far as possible.
It’s a great, focused way of making small changes that go a long way — no more starting from scratch every time something isn’t working perfectly.
Add Kaizen to your arsenal
As any successful marketer knows, it’s essential to have a comprehensive toolkit — and know which tool to use for each job. Kaizen is a tool that can help you solve common problems like siloes and make your campaigns more effective. It’s definitely worth adding to your arsenal.
To help you get started, check out Ledger Bennett's blueprint for using Kaizen to develop an ABM strategy in as little as one week.
Source: thedrum.com
Bd-pratidin English/Lutful Hoque
