How to Apply Lean Six Sigma to Your Marketing Process

Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is becoming more and more established in various industries and sectors, and it’s slowly but steadily taking over the market. It’s clear that it has applications even outside fields like production and development, and there is a particular interest in the use of Lean Six Sigma in marketing recently that’s been growing steadier and steadier. Indeed, it does look like the methodologies found in LSS can be of great use to those trying to develop a successful marketing campaign.

Integrate Data Collection

Having access to enough data to make adequate decisions on can be a huge boost to your productivity, with or without using Lean Six Sigma on top of that. Simply integrating some advanced data collection systems into your practices can make a significant change to the way you’re able to process your input and make decisions in the future, and that alone can result in some of the best increases in productivity you can realize. Keep in mind that your data collection needs to be organized appropriately for this to work though, as you don’t want to simply gather everything indiscriminately that’s a fast way to ensure that you’re going to get buried in irrelevant data sets.

Trim the Waste

On that note, Lean Six Sigma dictates that it’s very important to always ensure that you’re reducing the waste in your operations by whatever means necessary. Marketing can suffer particularly badly from waste piling on too quickly, and if you’re not careful about reducing your data sets appropriately and sanitizing your input, you could find yourself in a lot of trouble.

On the other hand, when used correctly, LSS can be a fantastic way to ensure that your overall project runs without too much waste and that you remain focused on the points that truly matter.

Iterate Over Previous Versions

Don’t stay stuck on the same version of your marketing campaign for too long make sure that you actually iterate on it based on what you’ve learned from previous experiments. LSS can quickly reveal various points about your operations that may not be immediately obvious, but it’s not a magic wand that’s simply going to resolve those issues automatically. It’s up to you to take action and implement what you’ve learned through LSS in order to see long-term success.

This means that you have to be willing to take a closer look at the kinds of mistakes you’ve made in previous projects, and be ready to make the necessary changes to them. Don’t just make those changes randomly though ensure that you’re properly oriented towards improvement, and know what the long-term implications of everything you do are. Adjusting the parameters of your project based on actual knowledge and true facts is the best way to ensure that you’re evolving it in the right direction.

Stay Flexible

This means that you have to develop your project in a flexible manner from the very beginning you can’t simply work with a rigid model and expect it to perform flawlessly over countless iterations and changes. It’s inevitable that you’re going to need to implement some changes in that project eventually even without the use of LSS in the first place but if you don’t have a good, flexible foundation to work with in the first place, that’s not going to happen.

A rigid project can be very difficult to adapt to a more flexible state later on as well, further adding to the difficulty of wrangling a marketing campaign like that and turning it into something useful. Because of this, make sure that you start with something that is open to changes in the first place, and be very careful in how you’re evolving that project at every step to ensure that you don’t compromise its flexibility in the long run.