Minimum Viable Marketing: The 80/20 Rule for Generating Consistent B2B Leads

New Way Growth • 9 January 2026

The "Random Acts of Marketing" Trap: How to Build a System That Actually Scales

Does your marketing ever feel like you’re just… throwing things at a wall?

You’ve got a company LinkedIn page you post on when you remember. You might have tried running some Google Ads, but you’re not entirely sure if they worked. Someone told you that you absolutely had to be on TikTok, so you made a video, it got 112 views, and you never touched it again. You write a blog post every few months, send out a newsletter when you have big news, and you’re constantly juggling a dozen different ideas, none of which seem to be delivering a predictable stream of leads.

If that sounds even remotely familiar, you’re not alone. I see it all the time with smart, driven business owners. You’re drowning in tactics but starving for results. You’re busy, for sure, but that busyness isn't translating into a healthy sales pipeline. It’s what I call "Random Acts of Marketing," and it’s exhausting.

But what if there was a better way? What if you could find the 20% of your marketing effort that’s actually generating 80% of your qualified leads? And what if you could turn that small set of activities into a simple, repeatable system that feels manageable, even with a small team?

That’s exactly what we’re going to do. This is the process for finding your Minimum Viable Marketing, or MVM. It’s about doing less, but doing it better, so you can finally get off the marketing hamster wheel and start building real momentum.

The Big Idea: What is Minimum Viable Marketing, Anyway?

You’ve probably heard of the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule. It’s that strangely universal law that says, roughly, 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. It shows up everywhere. 20% of your customers likely generate 80% of your revenue. 20% of the bugs in a piece of software cause 80% of the crashes. And I guarantee, 20% of your marketing activities are driving 80% of your actual, valuable leads.

The other 80% of what you're doing? It's mostly noise. It’s complexity. It's the stuff that makes you feel productive but doesn't actually move the needle.

Minimum Viable Marketing is the practical application of this principle. It’s a bit like a Minimum Viable Product in software development. It’s not about building the fanciest, most feature rich marketing machine on day one. It’s about identifying the smallest set of channels, messages, and activities that reliably generates a steady flow of qualified leads.

Think of it as your marketing engine stripped down to its essential, most powerful components. It’s the antidote to the "we should be everywhere" mindset. It’s a conscious choice to say no to a dozen platforms so you can say a powerful, consistent yes to one or two.

So many small and medium sized businesses fall into the trap of spreading themselves too thin. You see a competitor launch a podcast, so you think, "we need a podcast." You read an article about the power of Instagram Reels for B2B, and you spend a week trying to figure it out. The result is a marketing plan that’s a mile wide and an inch deep. Your message is diluted, your execution is inconsistent, and your team, which might just be you and one other person, is on the fast track to burnout.

The hidden cost of this approach is immense. It’s not just the wasted time and money. It's the opportunity cost. Every hour you spend creating a mediocre piece of content for a channel that doesn’t matter is an hour you didn’t spend doubling down on the one channel that actually works. MVM is about reclaiming that focus and energy.

Finding Your Gold: The Audit and Discovery Process

Alright, theory is nice, but let's get practical. How do you find your golden 20%? You have to become a bit of a detective. You need to look at what has actually happened in your business, not what you think has happened. Your gut feeling is useful, but data is undeniable.

This isn’t as scary as it sounds. You don’t need a complex analytics dashboard, though it can help. A simple spreadsheet will do just fine.

Step 1: List Your Channels

First, open that spreadsheet and list every single marketing touchpoint you’ve used in the last six to twelve months. Don’t judge, just list. It might look something like this:

Company Website (specifically, which pages or blog posts)
SEO / Organic Search
Google Ads (which campaigns?)
LinkedIn (company page posts, personal profiles, ads)
Email Newsletter
Automated Email Sequences
Referrals (from clients, partners, etc.)
Networking Events / Trade Shows
Twitter / X
Facebook Page

Be as granular as you can. Don't just write "social media." Write "LinkedIn posts from my personal profile" and "Company LinkedIn page."

Step 2: Trace the Leads

Now for the important part. For each of those channels, you need to find out how many qualified leads it generated. And by "qualified lead," I mean someone who is a genuine potential customer, someone your sales team (or you) was happy to talk to. We are ignoring vanity metrics here. Likes, followers, and impressions do not pay the mortgage.

How do you find this information?

Your CRM: This is the best place to start. If you have your lead sources set up properly, the data is right there. Run a report on all leads from the last year and group them by source.
Website Forms: Look at your contact form or demo request form submissions. Most form software captures the referral source, showing you where the visitor came from just before they converted.
Google Analytics: Look at your Goal Completions and filter by source or medium. You can see which channels are driving people to fill out your forms.
The Old-Fashioned Question: Do you ask, "How did you hear about us?" on your forms or on sales calls? If not, start now. If you do, go back through your notes. You’ll be amazed at what you find. People will often tell you exactly what worked: "I saw your founder's post on LinkedIn," or "I was searching for a solution to X and your article came up."

As you fill in your spreadsheet, a picture will start to emerge. And I’m willing to bet it will be a lopsided one. You’ll likely find that despite your efforts across ten different channels, two or three of them are delivering the vast majority of your best leads.

Maybe it's organic search traffic to two specific blog posts that perfectly answer a customer's burning question. Perhaps it's the consistent, helpful, non salesy posts you make from your personal LinkedIn profile. Or it could be the steady stream of introductions you get from a key referral partner.

This is your 20%. These are your winners. This is the gold you’ve been looking for.

Building Your Lean Machine: Designing the MVM Stack and Cadence

Once you’ve identified your high performing activities, the next step is to build a simple, repeatable system around them. This is your Minimum Viable Marketing stack. It’s not about software tools, necessarily; it’s about a combination of core marketing functions.

A great MVM stack for a B2B business usually has three components:

Demand Creation: How do you get in front of people who don't yet know they need you? This is your primary visibility channel.
Demand Capture: How do you make it easy for people who do know they need a solution to find you?
Nurture & Conversion: How do you build trust and stay top of mind with leads who aren't ready to buy today?

Let’s look at a classic B2B example based on what you might have discovered in your audit.

Let's say your audit revealed that your best leads come from your personal LinkedIn activity and people searching Google for very specific problems you solve.

Your MVM stack could look like this:

Primary Visibility Channel (Demand Creation): LinkedIn. You commit to using your personal profile to share valuable insights, engage with potential clients, and build your reputation as an expert. This is where you create awareness.
Demand Capture Engine: SEO. You commit to writing one high quality article per month, optimised for the exact search terms your audit showed are already bringing you leads. This is how you capture existing intent.
Nurture Engine: Email. You create a simple monthly newsletter sharing your best insights and create a basic automated email sequence to follow up with anyone who downloads a resource or fills out your contact form. This is how you build the relationship over time.

That’s it. That’s the entire system. LinkedIn, SEO focused content, and Email.

Notice what’s missing? There's no mention of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or a podcast. Not because they are bad channels, but because they aren't your proven channels. They are part of the 80% of effort that wasn't delivering results for you.

The next piece of the puzzle is setting your "minimum viable cadence." This is the smallest amount of consistent effort that will still create momentum. The key word here is consistent. Consistency beats sporadic intensity every single time.

A minimum viable cadence for the stack above might be:

LinkedIn: 3 to 5 thoughtful posts per week from your personal profile, plus 15 minutes of daily engagement in the comments of your ideal prospects' posts.
SEO: One high intent, 1500-word article per month, focused on the topics that your audit proved already attract leads.
Email: One monthly newsletter to your list, plus a review of your automated lead follow up sequence once per quarter.

Does that feel manageable? For most small businesses, it does. It's focused. It's clear. There’s no ambiguity about what you need to do each week. This is a system you can actually stick to.

Now, you allocate your resources accordingly. Roughly 80% of your marketing time, energy, and budget should go directly into executing and optimising this MVM stack. The other 20%? That’s your budget for experiments. Maybe you want to test a new ad campaign or try a different type of content. That’s healthy, but its ring fenced, preventing it from derailing your core, proven system.

Staying Focused: The Art of Saying No

You've done the audit. You've designed your stack. You're executing your cadence. The final, and perhaps most difficult, step is maintaining the discipline to stick with it. This means you have to get really, really good at saying no.

This is where you need to be a little ruthless. At least once a quarter, you should review all your marketing activities and decide what to do with the things that fall outside your MVM. You have three options:

Kill It: If an activity is consuming time and delivering zero qualified leads (like that company Instagram account you post on once a month), just stop doing it. It feels scary, like you’re giving something up. But what you’re really giving up is a distraction. You’re freeing up focus for what works.
Park It: Maybe there’s an activity that has potential, but you just don’t have the capacity for it right now. Don’t delete the account or throw away the strategy. Just put it on hold. You can always come back to it later when you have more resources.
Automate It: Some low-level tasks can be automated. Can you use a scheduling tool to cross post a few essential updates? Can you set up a simple automated workflow to handle a basic process? If a machine can do it, let it.

Let's paint a picture of what this transformation looks like.

Before MVM: Imagine a small consulting firm. They were trying to manage five social media channels. They posted irregular blog articles about random topics. They ran scattered ads on both Google and LinkedIn with no clear attribution. Their email list got a newsletter maybe twice a year. They were constantly busy, but their lead flow was unpredictable and stressful.

After MVM: They did the audit. They discovered that nearly all their best clients came from two sources: organic search for the term "supply chain optimisation for manufacturers" and referrals from the founder’s activity in a specific LinkedIn group.

So, they built their MVM stack. They killed their Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages. They now focus 80% of their effort on just three things:

Writing one deep dive article per month on "supply chain optimisation for manufacturers."
The founder spends 30 minutes every day providing genuine value in that one key LinkedIn group.
Every new lead gets a helpful, automated 3-part email sequence, followed by a personal monthly newsletter.

The result? They spend about half the time on marketing they used to, but their qualified demo requests have more than doubled. The leads are better, the sales conversations are easier, and for the first time, their marketing feels calm, focused, and effective.

That’s the power of finding your Minimum Viable Marketing. It's about trading frantic, unfocused activity for calm, deliberate consistency. It's about having the courage to do less, so you can achieve more.

Your Next Step This Week

This process of auditing, focusing, and building a lean system is transformative. It can take your marketing from a source of stress to your business’s most reliable growth engine.

If this approach resonates with you, but the idea of carving out the time to do the audit and build the plan feels daunting, we can help you fast track it.

We run a workshop called the Pathfinder SPRINT, designed specifically for busy B2B business owners like you. In a single, focused session, we'll guide you through this exact process. We’ll help you dig into your data, identify the 3 to 5 core activities that will form your Minimum Viable Marketing stack, and map out your execution plan for the next 90 days. It's the fastest way to go from overwhelm to clarity.

Additional Resources:

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