Putting thin slicing into practice
What it actually looks like in marketing
When you're building big, far-reaching marketing campaigns, it's easy to get lost in the weeds and spend such a long time bringing everything together that you end up launching late – and losing value.
In this scenario, your thin slice could be a specific sub-segment of your target audience where you see great opportunity, or it could be a single persona, channel, or region.
By carving that slice off your campaign and delivering a highly-focused single stream of content for a limited audience, you can:
Reduce the inputs and approvals needed to get to market with your new messages and materials.
Gauge real customer responses to your campaign before launching it to a wider audience.
Launch to your most valuable or engaged audience first to seize time-sensitive opportunities before they disappear.
Account-based marketing can be hugely valuable. But it also demands a lot of investment – investment that isn’t always easy to secure.
Whether you’re looking to step into the world of ABM for the first time, or expand your ABM efforts, thin slicing can help you solve that challenge.
By treating a single prospect – ideally one that’s progressed pretty far in their buying journey already – as a thin slice, and creating a narrow stream of content just for them, you can prove the value of ABM and deliver results fast.
This approach can help you:
Reach the right prospects at the right time and focus on delivering content when it’s needed most, rather than creating programmes for batches of contacts at the same time.
Show budget-holders that timely ABM efforts can directly contribute to conversions to secure support for future efforts.
Liaise with fewer salespeople and focus on supporting the needs of a much smaller number at once – accelerating approvals.
Learn valuable lessons about what customers really respond to before creating content for a large number of them.
Long content creation times
Lengthy approval processes
An unclear view of what prospects really want from you
With marketing budgets shrinking, many teams are looking for ways to narrow their focus and get the most value possible from the resources they have available.
Thin slicing can help you decide exactly where you should focus and become highly value-oriented in your decision-making.
It does that by forcing you to answer some basic (but extremely important) questions every time you plan out a campaign. Questions like:
Who will this campaign most clearly resonate with?
Which sub-segments of our target audience are most likely to buy, and does this campaign meet their needs?
Which aspects of this campaign and its messaging do we have the most faith in?
The beauty of thin slicing is that, while it's designed to help you demonstrate ROI fast, learn valuable lessons, and iteratively expand to bring the full scope of your project to life, you don't actually have to expand out from it.
Zooming in on a very specific audience with high value and creating a narrow program of content to unlock that value can help you trim the fat around the edges of your campaigns.
Instead of expanding, you can just restart the process in an adjacent area, building leaner, more focused campaigns. So, instead of expanding outwards from a thin slice to create the whole cake, you can assemble a cake made up of numerous slices that all deliver exceptional ROI.
