In lifecycle marketing, your content strategy should align with where your customer is on their lifecycle journey. A customer may be a great and engaged fit with your brand, but they could be anywhere on the lifecycle journey. By formatting your content to where a customer is on journey with your brand, you can increase their engagement and potentially shorten the sales cycle.
Once you have targeted your ideal customers, you need to map your content to the buyer’s journey. Remember, your content needs to align with what stage your customer is on their journey with your brand.
- Initiate Stage: Your prospect has a need and is looking around, maybe just getting to know your company. Content at this stage may include text or video blog posts, social media, and press releases.
- Advance Stage: Your prospect is researching solutions to their needs and they are engaged in conversation with you. Content at this stage may be industry reports, white papers, ebooks, or webinars.
- Convert Stage: The prospect is looking at their options and comparing your company with others. This is your opportunity to stand out! At this stage, strong case studies, testimonials, and product demos need to be available. They are almost ready to buy from you, help them to make the decision.
- New Customers: Communication is key since this is the beginning of you and your customer doing business together. Now you need clear agreements that outline what you will do for them and what they will supply to you. This will set the tone for your business relationship.
- Current Customers: In this final stage, engagement remains a key focus. Maintaining regular communications with your customers, providing product information, tips and trends, and other resources is crucial. You can’t ask for something (i.e., referral or upsell) if you’re not offering them something already, like these resources along with excellent customer service and/or account management. Remember the 80/20 rule: 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients. You must nurture and build strong relationships with your customers to improve revenue.
When strategizing content, it is critical to take a customer-centric approach. There is no point creating content just for the sake of content. Don’t make the mistake of pushing your company’s message rather than providing information the customer wants and will actually use. Your content should provide help, not hype.
To learn more, check out our whitepaper: Seven Steps to Effective Customer Lifecycle Communications.
