5 Steps to Lifecycle Marketing Success

I spent a few days at the Denver Digital Summit in July 2018. This and some future blog posts are a debrief of some of the sessions I attended during the conference:

This session was led by Menaka Shroff of Google who led the audience through the importance of tailoring your marketing strategy around each consumer’s lifecycle stage in order to improve your success rate.

The lifecycle marketing model takes advantage of multiple communication channels to place your product or service in front of the consumer while tailoring the messaging to the stage your consumer is in: Reach, Act, Convert or Engage.

The graphic below shows the interactions recommended at each stage and the progression of the consumer from a window shopper through becoming a loyal customer.

Menaka broke down the following steps to help a company succeed with lifecycle marketing:

Create an omnichannel marketing strategy

Omnichannel refers to an integrated shopping experience that seamlessly transitions between online (desktop/mobile), phone and brick and mortar. It delivers a holistic experience and ensures a positive outcome of all brand touchpoints. The key to success with omnichannel marketing is consistency. Consistency builds trust and familiarity in the audience’s relationship with the brand. Marketing teams should work with data to create and foster an effortless buying experience by deeply personalizing the customer experience in the channels that allow for personalization.

Value multi-touch marketing attribution

Marketing attribution is determining the touch points a customer interacts with before making a purchase. Implementing attribution offers a clear view of the buying process and determines ROI per channel. Accurate revenue attribution allows companies to make accurate decisions per each channel and helps solve problems companies or customers might be facing. When a company understands the customer, and which channel has the highest engagement, it helps inform the personas and fine tune the audience targeting of campaigns; at the same time, understanding the influence of each touchpoint in the purchase decision allows to determine campaign spend allocation around acquisition and retention programs.

Menaka mentioned the value of establishing 3+ touchpoints extending into the engage stage of the lifecycle.

Cross-promote marketing content with your customers and industry thought leaders

It is important to create content for all stages of the lifecycle, without forgetting about clients in the post-sale stage, where they will be in contact with customer service and can serve as satisfied brand ambassadors. The cross-promotion can work as positioning your product/service as a subject matter expert for consumer reporting but, similarly, companies can introduce external thought leaders into the branded content strategy by having them produce and promote content for your brand.

Engage in real-time personalization at scale

Menaka talked about implementing AI platforms (like Blueshift) that have the capability to update segments in real-time based on user behavior. By segmenting based on behavior, demographics, lifecycle, triggers and offers on real-time you can help provide that ultra-personalized experience through touchpoints as customers progress through the lifecycle. By analyzing the collected data, your team should be able to start predicting which segments offer high-value prospects in order to fine-tune your marketing attribution even further.

Identify your marketing stack

This is something we’re actively working on at Growth Guild. Menaka pointed out the average marketing team is using 15 different platforms within their strategic toolbox to find the right equilibrium and power all the different marketing initiatives, which honestly made me feel vindicated as our own internal stack is very close to that number (here are 9 tools we love).

Bonus Point: Marketing and Customer Service are now fused into Experience

So long VP of Marketing. Farewell Director of Customer Service. Nice to meet you, Chief Experience Officer. Since most companies are now using data to personalize the lifecycle for each potential client, each company should be thinking of providing a true end-to-end experience from the moment they first see a display ad to the moment they purchase the product and further into supporting the experience of owning said product. The customer service department and the marketing department are on their way to becoming part of a unified department: the experience department.

*If you liked this, stay tuned for the rest of my Digital Summit series! And reach out with questions anytime. You can find me at astrid@growthguild.co.