Some marketers still follow a “one-size fits all” approach, meaning that all individuals within a target audience receive the same message. Others may succeed in delivering varied communication, but struggle to find the appropriate forms of content messaging.
Today, it’s important to recognize how vital personalization and customization are when interacting or communicating with different customers. The problem is, while one person is ready to purchase your product, another may need education regarding your company, or on the extensiveness of your product line.
Other content distribution issues marketers face may include: being too promotional or “salesy,” insufficient content variety types, failure to reach a desired audience, and lack of audience interest in content.
Before you determine the information your customers ultimately desire, you must identify where they reside in their buying process. Enter: Customer Lifecycle Marketing.
With Customer Lifecycle Marketing one can graphically see where a prospect or customer is in their relationship with your brand. This insight allows you to segment your audience to ensure you provide them with maximum relevance. It’s a continuous process of winning new customers while retaining the clients you already have through engaged relationships.
Once you know which buying stage a prospect or customer falls within, you can determine how the contact or company is communicated to, by whom, and how often. This calls for the use of an array of different content formats including emails, infographics, ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, and more. Pairing the appropriate content with a customer’s specific buying stage is known as lifecycle content marketing.
The process begins when a person hears a brand’s name or visits the brand’s website as a result of a search for information, which is when they enter the brand’s marketing lifecycle.
While they are uninformed at first, they are still captured and placed into the first customer lifecycle stage. It’s now up to the brand’s content to maintain and grow the relationship. From that moment forward, the content offered should motivate prospects to learn more about the brand, appreciate the brand, and most importantly, purchase products or services from the brand.
This infographic highlights a typical B2B customer lifecycle stage map as well as the suggested content forms that supplement each stage.
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