Kaizen Philosophy for Continuously Improving Your Website

>12 years ago when I started my career, it was in the manufacturing space. I was a mechanical maintenance engineer for a steel manufacturing unit. I was very, very young, and I had just started my career. And I used to hear about Kaizen in our organization. We were required to do a few Kaizen activities every month or every quarter. Back then when I was so young, I didn’t understand the importance or the impact that Kaizen can have in our profession and professional lives.

But now 12 years later, as I’ve grown up a little bit, and I think I have a little bit of an understanding or ability to understand and comprehend philosophies or ideologies. I understood what Kaizen was. And I was fortunate to have a quick conversation with Lee last year about, how he’s using VWO. And he spoke about Kaizen in that conversation. I was waiting for an opportunity to have him on board so that he could share how he uses and applies the principles of Kaizen in his day-to-day job and in everything marketing that he does. With that, I would invite, Lee to speak about Kaizen and share the knowledge he has about the subject so that folks on this call can use those principles and incrementally improve their digital properties, marketing, or any other operational element in general.

With that Lee, the stage is all yours.

 

Lee Bradshaw:

Thank you for joining me here today. Thank you, Siddharth, for the introduction and the VWO team as well. As mentioned, my name is Lee, and I head up the organic and optimization activity here at Zuru Media. We’re a Bristol-based performance, market engagement agency and we’re across the UK. I’ve been in digital marketing for around 15 years now, specializing in digital, digital commissary, and demand generation.

Over the last 7 years, I’ve focused very heavily on building high-converting websites with strong organic footprints, across B2B, membership, not-for-profit, B2C, and e-commerce. Well, for me, Kaizen has always been one of those words that has been used for as long as I can remember. It’s something that’s always made sense philosophically but has never really clicked until I started practicing it at home. Eventually applied it to work and in particular, website optimization, for both search and conversion. So over the next 40 minutes or so, I’m gonna talk about Kaizen and how it can be applied to marketing, especially optimization, but most importantly, explain how constant small improvements and progress can very quickly add up to big step changes.

So, the first problem is where do we start? And this is not just with this presentation, but with any aspect of marketing, any aspect of work, or life in general. Listen, we’ve all been there where we want to over-deliver, blow the socks package. We often have things we want to achieve, but often find it difficult to get going. And then once we do get going, how do we make it sustainable and scalable? Let’s be honest, how many of us have started a gym membership hit day 1 with 110%, and then before we know it, there are more excuses for not being able to go to the gym than times you’ve been?

Well, the same thing happens every single day at work, even more so in marketing where we’re often pulled between other departments. Between sales, product, tech, and creative. It is very easy to get distracted or hold in another direction at the cost of maintaining momentum on what it is that we want to achieve. And the key phrase here really is maintaining momentum. It’s a pain point that I’m sure most of us can relate to. How many times have you had to rush a job or cut corners to deliver?

How many times have you ever said to yourself? You know, well, that’s close enough, or, well, you know, I tried. And drawing a line under that task. How many times have you ever hit a brick wall and struggled to find the motivation, keep going, you know, all of these things. For me, Kaizen has been the solution to overcome, not just to have it, but the mindset as well, mentally, physically, and professionally.

So over the next half hour, as I mentioned, I’m gonna cover the following areas. We’re gonna look at what is Kaizen. How does Kaizen fit with marketing? We’re gonna look at the 5S model for implementing Kaizen. I’ll also share some tips for using Kaizen in your day to day.

I want to share some examples of how I’ve used Kaizen to increase the cadence of testing and ultimately drive higher conversions across multiple client sites and domains. There’ll also be time at the end for Q and A. However, if you do have any questions throughout, please just add them to the chat, and we’ll pick them up as we go. So what is Kaizen? Well, Kai means change and Zen means good.

Change that’s good. It can also be interpreted as change for the better or permanent change. Kaizen is based on the belief that everything can be improved. Or to me, more succinctly, it’s a mindset, a continuous improvement, which, you know, I’m sure is something we’re all trying to do every day, whether in our work or our personal life. So Kaizen was practiced in Japan following the end of World War II.

It was developed as a way to improve manufacturing processes, and it’s one of the core elements that has led to the success of Japanese manufacturing over the last 75 years or so. Toyota is a flagship example of how Kaizen has led to improved quality and costs when it comes to production. Their unique take on the philosophy is often referred to as the Toyota wave. There are a lot of cases in the examples out there, and I would heavily encourage you to take a look at some of them. Kaizen is ultimately a philosophy that supports continuous incremental changes that support a high level of efficiency. Used well, Kaizen can reveal what big impacts small changes can have over time.

Much of the focus of Kaizen is reducing waste similar to the goal of lean. I’m sure some of you have come across lean management. These may sound like obvious areas of waste, but again, I’m sure we’ve all been subject to at least a handful of them. Some are more avoidable than others. But once you become aware and you’re able to keep them in mind, you can work on reducing waste and be more productive and effective.

Some of the items, most of the areas of waste identified here, could be in the movement of materials, conversations, or goals, that mental movement as well procrastination and distractions. How many times have you ever been halfway through a task only for it to be distracted and for it to drop? You know, in the words of Ron Swanson, never have to ask 2 things when you can hold the last one. And by this, I mean, how much time have you spent trying to juggle 2 or 3 tasks simultaneously instead of just tackling one after another? The human brain has a built-in limit on the number of thoughts it can entertain at any one time. That limit for most individuals is between 2 and 4.

Time is another area of waste. That’s time spent waiting or time where no value is being added to your tasks. Over a single day, how much time do you spend simply waiting? You know, that’s waiting for meetings to start or even waiting further to input or to complete tasks that block us. On average, office workers are interrupted every 11 minutes, and it can take up to 25 minutes to get back on track. This is something that again, I’m sure, we’re all experiencing in a day-to-day. 

Defects are another area of waste. These are problems which are caused further down the line. This is, you know, redoing work due to poor or rushed finishings, briefs that are misunderstood, or key decisions that are yet to be made.

Overprocessing can be another easy area of waste and that’s doing more than is necessary to complete a task. That could be spending too much time in overdelivering whilst having a hypothesis is important for your conversion rate optimization, it doesn’t always have to be an essay. Similarly, when it comes to reporting and analyzing tests, a single sentence should surmise your findings before allowing you to move on to the next task. There’s a term that you’ll come across, and I’m sure you’ve heard before, analysis paralysis, It is real, and it can very quickly become overwhelming and often kills creativity.

Variations are the final area of waste that’s been identified, and this is creating multiple, often bespoke solutions where one off-the-shelf solution will work just as well, producing any report for one group of stakeholders when an existing report could be added to serve the same purpose, creating new documents when you could set up a user standardized template will create a multi-variate test when an A/B will do. Trying to squeeze too many changes into a single test. Sometimes less is more. Minimum viable testing can be more effective than attempting large changes. So what does any of this mean for marketing and optimization?

Well, aside from the handful of examples I’ve just mentioned, once you’re aware of potential areas of waste, you can start to be more effective in how you manage your time and tasks. In turn, improving your optimization efforts, whether that’s in search or conversion. There are a few different applications of Kaizen in the workplace. The details may change, but the overall theme is always the same, and that is one of continuous improvement. The easiest way to apply Kaiser to any aspect of work or life is to first understand the 5S model.

So 5S is a problem-solving framework. It calls for a specific mindset and discipline. It involves observing, analyzing, collaborating, and searching for waste. It involves the practice of removing that waste to create efficiencies and value. 5S stands for the 5 steps of the methodology – sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain. These steps involve going through everything in a space, and deciding what’s necessary and what isn’t.

But things in order, cleaning, setting up procedures, and performing these tasks regularly when there’s a plan for making 5S an ongoing effort not just a one-time event, it becomes even easier to sustain over time. 

Sort is the first step and that is removing distractions. The easiest way to look at this is when in doubt, move it out. Set in order, the second step. And this is where we think about what we want to achieve. We set realistic goals and we prioritize around them. The Shine stage is when we clean everything inside and out. If something is broken, we fix it. Standardize is the 4th step, and this is coming down to building a habit. Is there anything we need to change in the processes to ensure it is sustainable, which ultimately then leads to step 5, which is Sustain.

And this is a never-ending process This is following the previous four steps daily. By following these 5 steps every day, no matter how small the changes, You will have plenty of opportunities to reflect and celebrate your successes regularly. For Kaizen to work, you need to buy into it and be willing to learn, participate, and continually try new things. It can be very easy to fall into well. Well, this is how we’ve always done it – mindset and culture.

And the biggest threat to Kaizen is complacency. It’s easy to become complacent and distracted. So sort, this is the first step. And as I mentioned, this is where we come to remove distractions. When it comes to sorting it, it can be difficult to determine what is worth keeping, and what should be discarded.

Everybody is different when it comes to distractions. What is annoying for one person could be motivating to another. Always have this in mind and think about some of the distractions you may come across, not just as a marketer, but as a user of websites too. What do I mean by sort? Well, if you’ve got an untidy desk, then tidy it.

If you’re in a noisy working environment, find a quiet space or invest in a set of headphones. Sort can mean different things to different people, and you should always sort based on your actual requirements not what you think you should sort. Just because something has value, such as a tool or a skill set, it doesn’t necessarily make it valuable to the task at hand. If you have web pages with no valuable traffic, archive and redirect them, or dust them off and update the content with relevant or fresh content.

All products or past event pages, archive and redirect them. If you have pixels or tracking code for old campaigns, again, remove them, and improve your load times and user experience. These are all examples of waste. By having a clean plate so to speak, it makes it easier to spot areas for optimization, as well as develop hypotheses for tests or actions to improve your website. The same process can be applied to your user journeys too.

Removing distractions and opportunities for users to deviate can often improve conversion rates. The same applies to messaging and communicating your USPs. Go back to marketing 101 through our audience and what we’re trying to tell them. Users are prone to information overload and switch off quickly instead of engaging. Stick to your key message and avoid deviations.

I’ve got some marketing metrics shown here. I find many of them a distraction. How do we know what’s going on, whether what we’re doing is working? Increased quantity doesn’t always mean an increase in quality, especially when it comes to lead generation. So by removing the distraction of vanity measures, as in as, output on metrics of success, you can often find it easier to focus on and deliver value from our optimization efforts.

I’d encourage you to take a look at your KPIs and determine which if any of them are distractions, which are preventing you from really accelerating your website performance. When it comes to setting an order this is the first step where we go in. Set in order. Means having the right tools to hand. And without the right tools, how can you complete a task properly? In the Toyota way, the example I used earlier and in particular, manufacturing tools are most likely physical and should always be a hand to the operator.

Marketers’ tools could be skills, or other resources, such as applications like VWO, Google Analytics, SEMrush, or SEO. Avoiding your movement and time wastage is key here, having everything on hand also stops distractions. So are you able to set up, execute, and report all from a single tool? All-in-one platforms like VWO, HubSpot, or Ahrefs, can be incredibly effective in preventing distractions and jumping between tools. Alternatively, it could be as simple as ensuring all of your reports are room from the same platform at the same time every day, week, or month, creating a single source of truth to ensure you’re always using comparable data when making decisions. Have enough time budgeted for the activity too.

Remove time as a pressure where possible, and this leaves you open to defects and even more wastage. You show a document, create a standard operating procedure, and label everything where possible. This will be useful later, but don’t overprocess this. It’s a very fine balance, and the scales will tip differently depending on what activity you’re documenting. With setting an order, it can be easy to get caught up in preparing to set an order. So this step I’ll have to refer to as set in motion.

Just get going and fail fast if required. When it comes to shine, this is where we, again start to clean everything inside and out. If something is broken, we fix it. So what do I mean by shine?

Will you do the best job you can? You’d be proactive and you keep to a schedule where you can. This could be a weekly site health order, monthly testing plans, or quarterly content updates. Hold yourself to account on the standard of shine too. This is where movement and defect wastage can impact performance.

Are your tests reaching statistical significance before being called, for example? Similarly, are you doing enough key-term research before writing new or updating existing content? You should also remember to hold your colleagues to account for the standard of their showing too. I remember it doesn’t have to be perfect, but an improvement on the last time. The example I’m showing here is that of the Ahrefs tool that I have set up to run the same audit every week on the same day.

This ensures I have a consistent view of the errors and warnings my sites may be encountering. My dev team also knows to expect tasks to come in at the same time every week, and in turn, they’re able to schedule fixes accordingly This maintains a very high standard, not just on-site, but with internal deliverables too. Regular and consistent maintenance prevents lapses and identifies issues before they become problems. It keeps momentum moving forward. If you’re able to be proactive and fix an issue on-site as soon as it’s discovered, it may be the difference between a user converting or not or even more ambiently a positive user experience given that user reason to return later on.

How many times have you ever been frustrated with the website and simply gave up going back to Google and clicking the next link down? If you’ve done it yourself, you can be sure your visitors and potential customers have done the same too. Standardization is the next step. And by standardization, what I really mean is best practice, you need to have a standard and consistent approach to the previous steps. The methodology for sorting needs to be standardized. The approach to set an order, standardize, and shine, especially needs to be standardized.

Standardization ensures consistency, which makes habits easier to form. But I’m not attempting to standardize. It can lead right back to wastage and your output becoming sloppy over time, losing momentum, and efficiency. And, of course, as I said, that key driver, of continual improvement. The easiest way to standardize is to document and create SOPs. Remember that from the ‘set in order’ stage?

Well, keeping documentation is probably the easiest way to learn what does or doesn’t work. It also makes it easier for others to pick up if you are not available or for onboarding new colleagues. They’re not forming bad habits from the start. By standardizing your processes and routines, you can also identify areas for improvement, whether that’s in your testing methodology, design, or execution the right way across to the way you communicate, collaborate, and work with others in your team, department, or organization.

Just like if you were to drop a pebble into a pool of water, standardization is a best practice that can have a ripple effect across your entire organization. Once we reach the sustained stage, this is where Kaizen comes into its own. So when we’re required to do something new, it’s not always an automatic habit. It takes time to form these long-standing habits. I’m sure you’ve heard the anecdotes about a new habit and that it takes usually on average about 2 months to be fully formed.

A quick Google search will tell you 66 days to be exact. And a routine can take as much as 254 days until it becomes second nature. The ultimate goal here is to develop practices that are effective, and sustainable. So we take all of the previous steps of the 5S model, and we transform them into ongoing habits to ensure continuous improvement. And then we start the whole process all over again from step 1.

This is Kaizen. Once something is a habit, it becomes easier and more effective, not just to us as marketers, but for your wider organization, for your home and personal life too. The 5S’s can be applied to anything from website optimization right the way through to personal goals and ambitions. So I’m sure some of you are asking, how do we start being more Kaizen? Well, so let’s go to 5 sort of top tips here, and this is certainly the way that I like to look at it.

The first one, keep an ideas journal. So I was saying that there’s always this thing stuck with me greatly in the line we have to tell ourselves that I don’t need to write that down. I’ll remember it. Yeah. You know the one.

Keep a logger, and a notepad to hand for drawing ideas down throughout your day. This could be a list of things that seem inefficient or that you’d like to improve. Good examples or ideas from other websites or tools you’d like to try. It’s often easier to spot and record these in the heat of the moment than it is trying to remember them later in the day or even later that week. Review regularly.

So once a month or a quarter, at least regularly, spend some time identifying areas where you have waste in the way that you or your team members work. Use your ideas as long as input and think about the wider picture and your overall way of working. Go through each of the types of waste I talked about at the beginning of this session and use them as a checklist. Always be asking yourself, how could each form of waste be eliminated from your current processes? 

The third is to stick to a plan. Plan out when you’re going to make changes. You’ll always need to strike a balance between getting on with the job and making the improvements and avoiding a change overload. This could be as simple as having a minimum viable testing model or itemizing the elements of a test and running them sequentially. The fourth one here is having others in mind, and it’s important to take into account any difficulties or confusion that your changes could cause for others. Especially where processes are being changed or new tools are being introduced.

Not everybody will like change nor will they even agree with the changes you propose to make. Which will only cause more problems and inefficiencies further down the line resulting in even more waste. The 5th piece here is communication. It seems silly, but whenever a common change is a factor, be sure to consult them about the new arrangements and listen to their comments or concerns. They may have their ideas or thoughts on areas of waste or worse yet by optimizing your work you’re reducing inefficiencies to theirs. Always keep these things in the open conversation and keep key stakeholders up to date with what you are doing.

Now I want to share one of the biggest changes that I’ve made to the way we do CRO here at Zuru Media, and that is by introducing an agile approach to our conversion rate optimization. Agile is a development model, predominantly used with software and web development teams, and it aligns really well with Kaizen. Both focus on iterative changes and constant forward momentum. I identified wastage in the way that we were running tests. They were sporadic and often paused and restarted when new testing ideas were prioritized or deemed more important.

This approach has allowed me to develop a robust backlog of ideas, which are then fed into a testing planner launched in sprints. These are essentially 2 week periods where multiple tasks are hypothesized, designed, bills launched, and evaluated simultaneously across multiple domains. You may be able to adapt to a similar model to work on a single domain where you’re running more pull tests across different landing pages or user journeys. Using this model, I’ve been able to scale our testing output from a single test up to 18 simultaneous tests a month, as well as reduce the turnaround time from our design and development teams have also been able to increase the cadence of testing and ultimately accelerate our conversion rate optimization across client sites. And here as well, Kaizen, when it comes to SEO, as I previously mentioned, it can take several iterations working with development teams, and design teams to improve order-taking and reporting processes So the sharp uplift, you can see here in organic traffic on the orange line, was around January of this year, and it was as a direct result of implementing Kaizen and removing waste from our SEO efforts.

The domain was dormant for a very long time with thin content it has no domain or page authority. And for this client, technical SEO was the priority. Insurance site maps, RACURA, and getting Google search console setup. We then address site speed and mobile user experience. Peter and research and on-page SEO are next.

There are quite a few quick wins in updating matters and page titles. Again, all of these were tested and iterations. Optimizing schema was the real game changer for this site, which is where you can see the traffic jump. So if you ever feel your optimization isn’t getting the results you want, just keep at it. As I stated right back at the beginning, Kaizen is about continuous incremental change, and I’m gonna repeat that.

It is continuous incremental change. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just has to be an improvement on the last version. So I really would encourage you to give it a go yourself, and you may be surprised by the impact small changes can make. Cool. So thank you for sitting in with me.

I’d now like to open up the floor to any questions or comments you may have. Just drop them in the chat. We’ll be able to pick them up.

 

S:

It was really insightful. So one question that’s there on the chat is, what are the challenges to implementing, Kaizen?

 

LB:

Oh, wow. Great question. I think it’s twofold. I think one of the biggest challenges is discipline and, you know, that’s not falling into old habits or losing sight of the essence of Kaizen.

You know, I’d sort of repeat it earlier. It’s that constant continual relative improvement. Don’t be disheartened and certainly don’t give up just because you’re not seeing the results straight away. This is a long process, and it is very much a mindset. And it’s a way of forming a habit of continuous improvement.

I think the second area where you have to be very conscious is that of, fear of failure. I think there’s a huge risk in that. Sometimes you’ll win. Sometimes you won’t, as I mentioned, Kaizen is all about iterative changes. So just having that momentum and being able to maintain that momentum is key to anything that could jeopardize that really would be the main you know, one of the main implementation issues.

 

S:

Alright. Thank you so much, Lee. I think there’s I’m expecting one more question to come in, but in the meantime, I would like to ask you, is there any book that you’re currently reading or something that you’d recommend for folks to, get started with guys, or anything marketing in general?

 

LB:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No. Great question again. An old one by Robert Maurer.

He has 2 books on Kaizen. They’re both contemporary as in they’re both written with lifestyle and work in mind. I’d also recommend Stephen Covey, 7 successful habits. Again, that talks about Kaizen from a very much more leadership perspective. But, again, there are lots of little tips some tricks in there that you can very easily cascade over into any area of your personal or professional life, be that marketing operations or just sort of just be a better version for yourself.

 

S:

Alright. Thank you so much. It would be great if you could, put these, names in the chat also for reference of the people.

 

LB:

Absolutely. Yeah. Of course. So the first one I’ve added in there is the author, Robert Maurer’s The Spirit of Kaizen and One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way.

And then the second one was Stephen Covey. And that is 7 successful habits. And again, as I mentioned there, Covey’s book is written from a leadership perspective and development of leadership traits, so a lot more on and around personal development. But, again, the essence is the same – all about continuous iterative improvement.

 

S:

Alright. Thank you so much, Lee. I don’t see any further questions here. From the audience at this point, but, thank you so much. This was a great session.

And, in case folks have any further questions, you can always reach out to aside VWO, and we’ll be more than happy to pass them along to me, and we’ll even connect you guys. Thank you so much to all those who joined once again. And I hope to see you again. I’m gonna go to the next VWO webinars. We conduct them very often, a few every month where you can collect information from various fields of marketing and try to invite them to your marketing, activities to keep getting better, with continuous improvements.

Thank you so much.

 

LB: 

Thank you.