When people talk about marketing these days, they aren’t usually referring to traditional marketing channels like television and radio. While these are still essential parts of marketing campaigns, but the real action is in digital marketing.
Digital marketing encompasses a wide range of marketing strategies and tools. Overall, it entails advertising and marketing to customers via digital channels such as web pages, search engines, social networking sites, and emails.
It also includes marketing tailored to the device that people are using, such as laptop computers, smartphones, and tablet devices. It entails a wide range of jobs and skillsets, such as website design, search engine optimization, content generation, and data processing.
It is a competitive industry in which large and small businesses compete for market share. Having a competitive advantage can help businesses succeed and individuals advance in their careers. Learning about process improvement methodologies such as Lean and Six Sigma is one way to gain that competitive advantage.
If you’ve read much of anything about startup culture or business management, you’ve almost certainly come across the words “Lean,” “Six Sigma,” and maybe “Design Thinking.” These are business management ideas that are focused on decreasing both the level of variability and the amount of mistake or waste that occurs within a particular process or set of processes.
- Lean Six Sigma vs. Six Sigma
Some professionals have merged Six Sigma principles with lean management to develop the Lean Six Sigma approach. Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma techniques aim to reduce waste and build the most efficient system possible. Waste, according to Lean practitioners, is caused by “unnecessary stages in the manufacturing process that do not add value to the completed product,” but Six Sigma advocates believe waste is caused by variance within the process.
- Digital Marketing Using Lean and Six Sigma
Even though much of what goes into digital marketing is new, many of the processes developed in digital marketing are still in their early stages. In some cases, there is no practice at all.
According to business marketer Chris Plaaman in an interview with CMSWire, this is what prompted United Rentals to enforce Six Sigma. Analyzing whether to produce an effective marketing process or rework existing ones prompted the company to employ DMAIC, one of the Six Sigma principles.
Here’s what DMAIC stands for and how it can be applied to digital marketing in general:
- Define – What is the marketing problem that needs to be solved, and how will the solution help the industry’s overall goals?
- Measure – Gather data on current digital marketing initiatives to see how effective they are.
- Analyze – Examine your targeted advertising. It might include the number of visits and conversions to a webpage, the most clicked advertising, or the most engaging social media postings.
- Improve — Based on your findings, create strategies that will lead to growth in the areas you’ve chosen. Remove unnecessary actions that aren’t assisting you in reaching your goals.
- Control — As the new procedures begin to function, establish control standards to ensure their long-term sustainability.
DMAIC was used by United Rentals to create a new CRM (customer relations management) system. It often proved out to be vital to the project’s success,” assisting the firm in improving communications and training as part of an overall sales process development.
- Six Sigma Gadgets
Those that use Lean Six Sigma employ a variety of tools, including Six Sigma tools such as control charts, SIPOC, and others.
They are as follows, according to iSixSigma:
- 5 Whys
- Affinity Diagram/KJ Analysis
- Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)
- Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)
- Brainstorming
- Calculators
- Capability Indices/Process Capability
- Cause & Effect
- Control Charts
- Design of Experiments (DOE)
- FMEA
- Graphical Analysis Charts
- Hypothesis Testing
- Kanban
- Kano Analysis
- Measurement Systems Analysis (MSA)/Gage R&R
- Normality
- Pareto
- Poka Yoke
- Process Mapping
- Project Charter
- Pugh Matrix
- QFD/House of Quality
- Regression
- RACI Diagram
- Risk Management
- Sampling/Data
- Simulation
- Software
- SIPOC/COPIS
- Statistical Analysis
- Surveys
- Templates
- Value Stream Mapping
- Variation
- Wizards
Final Thoughts
This was a very quick and large review of lean six sigma methods in the context of digital marketing. If the ideas presented here are of interest to you, there is a lot of further material available across the internet, and I encourage you to delve deeper.
I’m excited to see more of these ideas put into reality, so if you’re a digital marketer that uses lean six sigma in your team management or procedures, please comment below to have a more thoughtful discussion. Cheers!
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