Introduction

Marketing lifecycle stages are guides to how to approach potential customers at each stage of their buying journey. Each company, product or customer is slightly different - making it important for marketing teams to map out journeys that apply to their business. Based on the journey that your customers take you can define a robust marketing strategy that takes into account what your customer is looking for and where you can step in to influence their decision.

We’re going to walk-through a fictional hospitality scenario for Serafina Hotel and Resort. Serafina is a large resort in the middle of Las Vegas, competing with The Cosmopolitan and The Aria for their trendy, upscale clientele. Before we dive into our hospitality scenario, here’s a little more detail about why defining lifecycle stages is important.

‍

Why do we care about lifecycle stages?

Marketing Channel Alignment

Your marketing team is probably spread across multiple areas of expertise including digital, email, events, OOH advertising and more. While everyone is an expert in their domain, there needs to be some coordination across efforts to ensure your team is speaking to customers and prospects in a cohesive fashion. By identifying and segmenting users into the right lifecycle stages you can operationalize this process.

Relevant Messaging

Each stage of the journey requires unique messaging if we want to maximize conversions. If someone is at the very beginning of their journey we need to educate them on the vacation highlights we have to offer - beautiful weather, a relaxing pool, the best authentic Italian restaurant in the city. If they’re way past that stage and ready to checkout we don’t want to waste time with the high level details. At that stage you’ll want to quickly promote the incentive that will lead to conversion.

Reporting and Analysis

By defining our stages and the entry criteria that makes sense for our business, we’ll be able to operationalize and report on the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Keep in mind that this is an iterative process - you may not get your stages, entry criteria or marketing strategy 100% right the first time around. Through setting up this foundation, you can identify where you can improve your strategy to maximize on your goals.

A few questions this data can help us answer:

1. In which stage of the lifecycle is marketing most effective?
2. Are there weaknesses or drops in conversion rates from stage-to-stage that our team can focus on improving?
3. Are there specific campaigns or strategies that highly impact certain stages? If so, where should we invest more?
4. What does the length of the lifecycle look like and how can I best use that information to forecast and set goals within the greater organization?