You can create lifecycle stages to help you organize information for each stage of a buyer’s journey, and guide them toward the next step. These stages and their transitions can be used to help you spot gaps in your sales funnel and inform your decisions about how to grow your business.
What is Lifecycle Marketing?
Lifecycle marketing is a strategy that helps buyers move through all stages of the buying process. This includes initial awareness, education, consideration, and purchase. This involves creating content that is relatable to prospects at every stage of their journey and helping them get closer to making a purchase.
Difference Between Lifecycle Marketing and Demand Generation?
Both aim to increase leads and convert more customers, but lifecycle marketing is more focused. It is focused on each stage of the funnel, and the transitions between them. Demand generation, however, takes a more holistic approach.
You might also have demand-generation managers who manage a company’s demand-generation efforts. However, they are not usually called “lifecycle marketers”. Instead, these people focus on transition points within the funnel. For example, the person responsible for optimizing visitor-to-lead conversions is probably not the one responsible for customer-to-evangelist conversions.
Lifecycle Marketing is better suited for companies with long sales cycles than companies that have a simple funnel. Your company can benefit from product-driven growth. These posts will help you understand the impact of a freemium content strategy on lead-qualified leads.
Also read: 15 Best Growth Marketing Tools for Growth
7 Stages of Lifecycle Marketing Strategy
Companies can use lifecycle management strategies to create strategies that meet their customers’ needs at every stage of their journey. This allows for a more personalized and engaging user experience which leads to increased conversion rates and ROI. Companies can nurture leads to customers by monitoring their progress through each stage of the buyer lifecycle and responding with targeted content.
These are the seven stages a lifecycle marketing strategy should be focused on.
Visitor
Visitors are anyone who visits your website and hasn’t given any personal information.
To convert visitors into leads, you must collect their information through a form or conversational market chat. This stage is where a marketer hopes to bring visitors to their site.
This can be achieved by arranging your navigation so that visitors are directed to conversion points. You can also include CTAs for relevant gated offers within your content and provide visitors with opportunities to convert right from your content. You can convert visitors right from their location using popup forms, or conversely, conversational marketing is a more engaging and user-driven method.
Most visitors will not convert. However, those who have shown interest in the product could be customers down the road. You’ll also be able to contact them and continue the conversation with them once they have converted.
Lead
Leads are people that have given you some information about them so that you can get to know more about them and their contact information.
To convert leads into MQLs you must increase their interest in your company and determine if they would be a good customer.
Once someone has an idea of who you are, you further stimulate their interest with contextually relevant educational content. Visitors should experience a more personal experience every time they visit your website. Smart content can ensure that they don’t see promotions for offers they have already downloaded. Use conversational Marketing to greet them or suggest content based on what they have expressed an interest in.
You can engage leads through email marketing since you have their contact information. Email outreach should be both contextual and scalable. This can be made possible by automation. To send emails tailored to specific industries, people, or interests, you can use workflows and lists. You don’t have to spend time creating individual emails.
You will need to know how close they are to your ideal customer profile in order to determine a lead’s suitability. This will help you determine if the lead is a good fit for your company’s offerings based on factors such as industry, company size, and revenue.
If you don’t have all the information you need, you can guide them to fill out additional forms or use enrichment software to get it.
Also read: Top 10 Ways to Generate Sales Leads for Your Business
MQL
MQLs refer to leads that have attracted more interest and are suitable for your company.
Once you have nurtured a lead to become an MQL, your goal is to get them to take an action. They are ready to have a conversation with sales by booking a meeting or asking for a demo.
This stage of marketing is about middle- to bottom-of-the-funnel offers that link the higher-level concepts that you have been teaching to your customer’s specific needs. This is not only about your company, but also your offerings and how you can help customers. This can be achieved by using checklists, templates, webinars, and checklists. Followed up with communications suggesting a meeting or demo.
SQL
Prospects become SQL once they book (or, for some companies, attend) a meeting. Prospects must show they are willing to take the buying process forward to become an opportunity.
This lifecycle stage is where sales take over responsibility for the lead’s development and are transferred from marketing to sales. The sales-to-marketing handoff takes place and marketing’s role shifts from guiding prospects to enabling them to make informed decisions.
But, just because a lead has been transferred to sales does not mean that they have stopped engaging in content marketing. You should make sure the content that you are serving them is relevant to the offer they are considering buying.
Once a meeting has taken place, sales must determine whether the prospect’s interest, fit, and pain points were accurate, and then estimate the potential deal size.
Opportunity
A prospect and sales representative can agree to create an opportunity. The prospect sees the offer as a solution to their problem.
Sales will conduct hyper-personalized outreach to prospects and market needs in order to facilitate sales with proof that your company’s offering can accomplish everything you have said it could. These testimonials and case studies are especially useful because they allow prospects to hear from someone other than your company how great you are.
You can also use marketing-created sales support materials such as one-sheeters or FAQs at this stage. product, service, and client success teams may also be involved in the selling process to help prospects understand, What their partnership will look like after a deal has been closed.
When someone closes, they become customers. Transforming a customer into an evangelist is all about setting the right expectations the start exceeds those expectations and continues to go above and beyond in order to create a great experience and strong relationship.
Customer Marketing is about helping people get more out of the products or services that you’re delivering to them. If it’s software, It’s all about helping people use the product.
However, Keep in mind, not all customers can become an evangelist by being close to someone just not every lead will be an MQL. Although you should drive success to all of your customers, it is important that you focus your evangelism efforts on the customers who are most aligned with ICP.
Evangelist
Customers who have had a positive experience with your business that they are willing to help you grow your business are called evangelists. They will help you at every stage of your funnel, bringing in new customers and providing material for case studies or testimonials that can be used towards the end.
Companies want to encourage referrals at this stage and to maintain positive relationships.
Last Line
After you have identified the lifecycle stages, it is time to make sure that the entire funnel functions properly. You can do this by taking a step back and not focusing on each stage of your lifecycle marketing. Instead, focus on a demand generation mindset.
