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Get to market faster with an MVC—a minimally viable campaign Timeless marketing essentials for a digital world.
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What you need to do now It has been twenty years since the dot-com bubble. Digital is the economy. That’s why the top marketing teams invest in a robust digital strategy. For good reason. In the first half of 2020, people worldwide spent more time than ever on their digital devices. Organizations everywhere are investing more in digital marketing. However, your marketing department may not be blessed with unlimited talent
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Timeless marketing essentials for a digital world
and money. Perhaps you’re part of a small team with a DIY attitude towards your marketing efforts. You’re much more interested in results than anything else. Fortunately, what we’re going to share is even more important for teams like yours. For you to succeed in a competitive market, you want to find more efficient ways to go to market. The minimally viable campaign (MVC) is one effective solution.
Timeless marketing essentials for a digital world
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Focus on the essentials Reaching your marketing goals starts with knowing what your customers want. It also means addressing these fundamental marketing challenges: • Building (and maintaining) an authentic brand while you test various campaigns across all kinds of channels • Engaging your audience and driving conversions when you only have so much time and so few resources
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In the pages that follow, you’re going to learn about a transformative approach to your go-to-market strategy. So you can see results—fast. Featured content 1.
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The Minimally Viable Campaign (MVC) Three simple steps to running an MVC
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Why MVCs
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Getting started with Issuu
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The most important marketing idea of the year: The Minimally Viable Campaign (MVC) Marketing is about creating demand. Good marketing creates demand by addressing the needs of the people you want to reach quickly and efficiently. On a tight budget? Need results fast? If you answered yes to either of these questions, the most important idea for you to master is the Minimally Viable Campaign (MVC).
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Timeless marketing essentials for a digital world
The three simple steps to developing an MVC While there’s no single method for successfully running an MVC, you can create an MVC initiative at your organization by applying the following three steps:
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Interviewing friends
Getting it out there
Testing before investing
WTH 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.”
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Timeless marketing essentials for a digital world
Step 1: 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.)
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Step 2: Get it out there Your interviews now serve as your research. Leverage what you’ve learned to create content—see the Issuu blogs 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 so you can learn from it. The urgency of this step is meant to push you and your team to get your creative out into the wild.
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Timeless marketing essentials for a digital world
Social ads are a really effective way of testing new messages in the market—and getting results, fast. See how you can turn your PDFs into an Instagram Story. Tips to get campaigns out faster • Only do one round of edits. • Reduce approvals as much as possible. Get one boss to sign off and skip the red tape. • Don’t stress about the little things. • Don’t let perfect stand in the way of the good.
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Step 3: Test before you invest The final step in the MVC 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) are offering. Testing and evaluating results is an integral part of marketing. By executing MVCs, you can get twice the data in half the time. The essence of an MVC isn’t actually about speed. It’s about doing more with less. Timeless marketing essentials for a digital world
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Why MVCs? Multichannel, multisegment marketing campaigns offer tremendous value when backed by informed strategy. 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. 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. Everyone is looking for smarter, more effective and efficient ways to market. The MVC may not just be your most important marketing idea, it might just be your smartest one, too.
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Timeless marketing essentials for a digital world
Bring your content and campaigns to life Getting Started Is Easy Using Issuu is as simple as uploading, enhancing, converting, and publishing your content in minutes. Other helpful collaboration, planning, statistics, digital sales and customization tools come as part of the Issuu cloud-based software platform. Flexible Plans Join millions of businesses, content creators, marketers, educators, publishers and industry professionals who rely on Issuu to create and deliver professional, high-quality content to audiences on every channel and device with speed and ease. Give the free trial a go, or purchase a monthly or annual subscription. Visit www.issuu.com/pricing to find the plan that works for you. The only all-in-one platform for content creation and distribution