As any seasoned marketer knows, there’s much more to marketing and customers than simply acquiring leads and completing a transaction. A full understanding of customer behavior and needs is critical for every kind of marketing effort, and that’s even more true for small businesses. In addition, knowing your customers and engaging with them across a longer span of time is key to maximizing their connection and value to your business.
This is exactly where customer lifecycle marketing comes into play.[1] The lifecycle of a customer may vary depending on the type of product or service you offer, but generally speaking, customer lifecycle marketing considers the full span of time and possible interactions that a person will have with your company. It also seeks a more comprehensive view of–and strategy for–your marketing cycle, making sure to offer positive interactions and influences wherever possible.
In this article we’ll take a deeper look at customer lifecycle marketing, exploring why it should matter to small business owners, what the stages of lifecycle marketing are, how SMBs can apply those stages and certain principles, and what tools can help you leverage customer lifecycle marketing as a powerful boost for your business.
What is customer lifecycle marketing?
Customer lifecycle marketing is, in essence, about building your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. It includes each step of the process, from reach (with your social media posts and ads, for instance), to new customer acquisition, conversion (sales!), customer retention, and customer loyalty programs or efforts.
Lifecycle marketing is the principle and practice of laying out all of the steps in a potential customer journey[2], as well as all the possible touchpoints in that journey, and developing a comprehensive approach to marketing.
As you can imagine, customer lifecycle marketing can be a long and involved process. And it should be! In order to extract the best value from your marketing efforts, to attract and retain customers, and to ensure their satisfaction translates to growth, customer lifecycle marketing has to take a lot of data and factors into consideration.
Starting with a thorough understanding of your business, a useful and effective customer lifecycle marketing strategy will include data about each stage of the life cycle, as well as more in-depth knowledge about customer personas, customer needs, pain points, the effectiveness of industry experts and testimonials, customer engagement practices and opportunities, and much more.
Why should SMBs care about the customer lifecycle?
Customer lifecycle marketing, as you probably guessed, is about much more than just making the sale. Rather than a focus on immediate conversion, lifecycle marketing strategies[3] seek to create loyal customers and optimize existing customers’ experience with the brand in order to maximize the customer lifetime value. And this is why lifecycle marketing should be so important to small businesses.
Simply by definition, small businesses will have a much smaller consumer base than a giant corporation. While Apple or Netflix are gigantic, multinational corporations with tens or hundreds of millions of customers, a small business may be able to count their customers in the dozens. So making the most of each customer interaction and building beneficial customer relationships is remarkably important to maintaining sales.
While all small businesses can benefit from customer lifecycle marketing efforts, they’re also especially helpful in the B2B marketing space for essentially the same reason. Many B2B companies will have a small number of clients, but the B2B customer lifecycle is often much longer than in other industries. As a result, the level of impact that lifecycle marketing campaigns can have is amplified, since keeping existing customers is the key to the business’ continued success.
How can SMBs use customer lifecycle marketing?
The “why” of customer lifecycle marketing might be fairly easy to understand, but one of the places where some small business marketers get caught up is in the “how.” How can we incorporate customer lifecycle marketing to help us maintain our sales volume, identify new clients, enhance the buyer’s journey, and increase customer retention?
The simple answer is that a lot of your current digital marketing efforts are critical to lifecycle marketing. From your CRM and marketing automation processes to content marketing, SEO efforts, webinars, email marketing, and more, you probably already have most of the tools in place to implement a lifecycle marketing strategy. The next steps are simply taking what you have and building a holistic marketing approach that applies customer lifecycle information and principles to your use of these tools and outlets.
One of the great things about lifecycle marketing and your existing marketing efforts is that the majority of customer lifecycle marketing is built on content. Throughout the five stages of lifecycle marketing (which we’ll describe below), you need to incorporate digital marketing content that is strategic, focused, and relevant for both the audience and the outlet.
From your social media ads to your emails to your eCommerce landing page and all points in between, content is the key. And it’s probably something you are already using and working on, which means you’re not starting from scratch; rather, you’re just modifying or refining your current marketing mix, then building on it.
5 stages of the customer lifecycle
Customer lifecycle marketing generally consists of five stages:
- Reach. This is your awareness stage, the top of the sales funnel where the prospective customer base gains some brand awareness because of your marketing efforts. Often target audiences in the “reach” stage are actively looking for a product or service to help them solve a need or problem. They may be using a search engine to shop for a new vacuum cleaner, or looking for software options that can help them complete a task or make a process easier and more streamlined. Whatever their need, this is your chance to show how your product or service offers them a good solution.
- Acquisition. This is the stage where a lead gets nurtured. Whether through a phone call or visit to the website or landing page, the prospective customer has found your product or service and company and reached out to find out more about how you might be able to help (and about pricing, of course). This is an area where they are ready for more content, and your content in this stage needs to be educational and informative in order to help them make a purchase decision.
- Conversion. Here is where a new customer is ready to make a purchase. But your work in marketing is definitely not done. This is the time and opportunity to reinforce that they have made the right choice, that you are providing value with your product or service, and that you will be available for them should they need support and, hopefully, should they want to return for repeat purchases.
- Retention. Keeping your customers coming back is what the retention stage is all about, and it is critical to any business’s success. Finding out about customer satisfaction or problems, addressing them and ensuring that your product or service is meeting their needs, and gently upselling other relevant products and services are all part of the retention stage. Additionally, reinforcing your company’s key differentiators is a big part of this stage as well, so that customers understand how your company is different from (and better than) the competition.
- Loyalty. Signing up for your email list is great, but customer loyalty means much more than another subscription. This is the stage where you have an opportunity to turn satisfied customers into brand advocates. Word-of-mouth marketing from a happy customer can be highly effective, and getting them to share their post-purchase reviews, recommendations, and referrals with others is a terrific indicator that you have provided value and succeeded in growing your customer base.
Cultivate Fans and Repeat Customers with Lifecycle Marketing
Whether you are just getting started with a comprehensive marketing plan or you want to extract more performance from your current efforts, customer lifecycle marketing should be a part of your plan. And while it isn’t easy, the potential rewards are significant. Long-term customers, brand advocates, and business partners are all worth more than their weight in gold to small businesses, and the number one way to nurture those relationships is with a comprehensive approach to the full lifecycle of your customers.
Fortunately, there are also dozens of top-rated digital marketing partners and providers within the UpCity network who can help you get started. From customer personas and data analysis to content planning and customer support, they can make your process easier, more effective, and more rewarding for you and your customers, too.
This article has been updated. It was originally published in August of 2022.
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