7 minute read
What is a Minimally Viable Campaign (MVC)?
Marketing is 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? In 2020, the most important idea for you to master is the Minimally Viable Campaign (MVC).
WHAT IS AN MVC?
The MVC philosophy is all about getting the most value out of the least amount of time, talent, and resources. 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”.
THREE SIMPLE STEPS TO RUN AN MVC
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:
• Interviewing friends • Getting it out there • Testing before investing
INTERVIEW YOUR FRIENDS
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.)
GET IT OUT THERE
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.
TEST BEFORE YOU INVEST
The final step in the minimally viable campaign 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 inmarket—and then quickly evolve your content to better meet the needs of your prospects.
WHY MINIMALLY VIABLE CAMPAIGNS?
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—even if you loathe everything about marketing—you need to get the word out. You need to connect with your prospects. You’ll need to give them a reason to believe in what you’re offering. And you may need to figure out what those reasons are fast.
Let’s be real. Everyone is looking for smarter, more effective and efficient ways to market. In 2020, the MVC will not only be the most important marketing idea, it might just be the smartest one, too.
START WITH ISSUU
See how Issuu can transform a single PDF into a high-quality campaign that connects on Facebook, Instagram, and across the Web.
We’re social creatures. Despite the galaxy of cultural differences across this great world, everywhere people crave community. To belong. Our most important communities—often our family and our local communities—nourish our lives in priceless, incalculable ways. The Internet has complicated things.
More than half of the world’s approximately eight billion people are online, according to a 2018 United Nations report. And we’re both more connected and seemingly more divided than ever. Today, because of social media, people are finding communitieUNSPs in non-traditional ways. They’re building communities based on shared interests—and those interests can include your brand.
Here are three principles to build a community on social media:
BE ACTIVE
You’re going to display your brand anywhere you can. People will also be showcasing your brand on social media to support you and hope that you notice that they’re spreading the word.
To drive engagement, you’ll need to use hashtags. Obvi. The important thing to remember is to use unique, thought-provoking hashtags. Hashtags are a key component of social media, brand awareness, and community engagement. Social media experts recommend using succinct, specific hashtags.
As a way to drive a consistent connection, you can create a calendar of offerings unique to your social channel. See how Opel, the German car maker, used Instagram Stories to run a contest that generated more than 1,800 entries.
BE A GOOD LISTENER
Your social media channels are an opportunity for customers to engage directly with your business. And your community will be the first to tell you when they love what you’re doing, and when they don’t. When something goes wrong, you’re likely to hear about it first on social media.
Here’s the thing: You must listen to your audience. Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable, according to Adobe’s CMO Magazine.
Starbucks is a great example. Thanks to their “My Starbucks Idea Campaign”, the company invited customers to shape their product strategy—and, to all our benefit, resulted in cake pops and pumpkin-spiced lattes.
BE AUTHENTIC
You’re a leader in your space. Leaders lead by engaging with their community in an authentic way, in a way that shows who you really are. Read more about why authenticity is the key to social media marketing success. Being authentic is the only way to create a connection with your followers that feels familiar. You’ll earn respect for transparency. And, if you’re clear about the purpose that’s driving everything, you’ll make a real impact.
Social Media for Realtors
Today’s Real Estate Industry is heating up. And the competition amongst realtors is at an all-time high. Therefore, whether in person or online, it is crucial for real estate professionals to create a top-notch marketing strategy. Now with the Issuu Story Cloud they can. The Issuu Story Cloud is a suite of digital publishing products. Available for businesses, brands and creators of all types, they can create Issuu Stories, magazines, marketing collateral and more. With Issuu’s streamlined tools, realtors will find themselves promoting properties, closing more deals and reaching real estate clients faster in no time.
Promote Properties with Ease
Whether it be a brochure, magazine, market report or newsletter, Issuu has become the Real Estate marketing tool of choice. Most importantly with Issuu’s latest tools, Real Estate professionals can expand their reach and marketing capacity. Keep reading for an in-depth look at the Issuu tools Real Estate professionals are using to reach real estate clients faster.
The Issuu Embed Shareable Full-Screen Reader allows realtors to showcase their listings in a sleek and interactive format. Now prospective buyers can get an in-depth look at properties from the comfort of their home. High-quality imagery, full-screen spreads, and mobile-optimized formats will take any realtors marketing game to the next level.
Embedded Video
With the embedded video feature, now realtors can add personality to their promotional materials. Whether it be a welcome message from the realtor, for instance, or a full-length video of the property, a simple embed will add an engaging touch to your content.
Social Story Sharing
Create once, share everywhere with the Issuu Story Cloud’s social sharing abilities. Now with Issuu, the process to convert static stories is streamlined into a mobile and visual story sharing experience. Above all, Issuu Stories makes it simple to convert your content into new formats for sharing on your website, or as mobile Stories on social.
With Visual Stories realtors can now create unique and immersive Visual Stories to share to their social networks. With the Free Instagram Story Templates, Inspire or Voice Template, audiences will be able to view social content that combines slick imagery, focused text and even video. To make things even easier, Issuu has introduced the Adobe InDesign plug-in. A free-to-use extension that takes story sharing to new heights.
Add Web Links
With the Issuu Story Cloud web links feature, potential clients can easily be directed from the digital brochures on Issuu to web listings. Therefore making it quick and simple to connect agents and clients for viewings and to receive real estate offers.
Issuu Analytics
The secret to reaching a specific audience, both within real estate and in general, is utilizing in-depth analytics. With the Issuu Analytics feature, powerful page-level statistics are provided. Most importantly, realtors can easily see when their audience is most engaged, which pages perform best, and how their ads are driving performance. In real-time, real estate agents can see what listing is being looked at most, and which their listing strategies are the best performing.
