The Japanese Concept of Kaizen Applies to Inbound Marketing and Lead Generation

How does Kaizen Apply to Your Inbound Marketing?

Note the question is not “does it”, but rather “how does it”. There is no question about that fact that the Japanese concept of Kaizen does apply to your Inbound Marketing or Business Blogging (which are two different names for the same thing).

Kaizen is the Japanese concept of continuous improvement and is known to be a significant factor in Japan becoming a manufacturing powerhouse after World War 2.

There is an excellent article on the Kuno Creative blog titled “Becoming a Lean Inbound Marketing Agency”, a link to which appears in the first paragraph of this post. The concepts of Kaizen apply equally to an in house Inbound Marketing efforts, no matter how large or how small.

I suggest there are two aspects to the Kaizen principal that applies to Inbound Marketing, one of which is described in the Kuno Creative blog post.

The one described in the blog post is the iterative process of:

• Plan
• Do
• Test
• Adjust

And those are important.

However….. Equally important is “just getting started”.

Where I wish to focus is on where do you draw the line between “Plan” and “Do”?

I’ve seen businesses get stuck in the “it has to be perfect before we start publishing” trap, and I’ve also seen businesses just start publishing and publish stuff that is really bad.

Publishing consistency is important to your business blogging efforts, but you want to avoid each of those extremes.

So how do you do this? How do you find the right balance between the two?

You find someone whom you trust to assess your efforts well AND provide you with honest feedback. Someone who will be willing to call you up and say “Take it down. It’s bad because of A, B, and C”.

And once you’ve got that person in place, remove your ego from the process and just start. Publish blog posts, publish videos, and ask them for honest feedback.

If they say they’re ugly, they’re ugly. Take them down.

While this paragraph is not directly related to Kaizen, below is a link to an interesting list of examples of TYPES of posts that people like. It may give you a few ideas: 13 Crazy Good Inbound Marketing Examples To Boost Web Traffic Leads And Convert To Sales

You’ll then be surprised how few iterations you’ll need to start publishing stuff that is both visually appealing and interesting.

It’s a given that the first several blog posts and the first several videos you publish will be bad. It happens to everybody. You’ll improve over time. We all do.

But having the ally who will give you harsh feedback helps you iterate and improve much faster.