Lifecycle Marketing Made Easy: The Key to a Successful Business
Deborah Oster Pannell2021-09-22T09:49:36-04:00Welcome to “Lifecycle Marketing Made Easy,” a conversation with Clate Mask, CEO and co-founder of KEAP. In this new series, Ramon and Clate will dive deeply into the topic of Lifecycle Marketing for small businesses. Lifecycle Marketing is a system that was created to take the stress out of building and growing a business designed with your ideal customers in mind.
In a recent podcast, Ramon and Clate jump-started the conversation with an introduction to KEAP, a sales and marketing automation platform that combines CRM, marketing, sales, and eCommerce to help entrepreneurs grow their business. With nearly 20 years of experience, they’ve built a systematic way of thinking about sales and marketing that’s at the heart of their software, and it’s called Lifecycle Marketing.
It's just amazing how effective it is
In his interview with Ramon, Clate explained why business owners needed to get a clear picture in their minds of their sales and marketing. “What we found over and over and over, was that the business owner and the team, they really didn’t have a systematic way of thinking about how their sales and marketing worked…They had all kinds of activities that they did, but there was no cohesive system of how they managed all of it.”
They discovered that small businesses were wasting so much effort!
“And so, what begins to occur in virtually every case is, leads begin slipping through the cracks. Customers start to feel forgotten about or neglected. Opportunities are lost where there’s upsell, because there isn’t a systematic, cohesive way of thinking about the whole process.”
In order to help their customers work more efficiently with their software and get them thinking about their system, about 12 years ago, they began to layout this process, called LifeCycle Marketing. It’s helped business owners get a clear picture in their minds and get all of it organized.
Calm down the chaos
As Clate explained, “When you get right down to it, every business has a process for how customers come into that business and flow through that business. And sometimes you hear it referred to as a journey, sometimes you’ll hear it referred to as a process, or a lifecycle. But we want to think about the experience that the customer goes through in your business in that systematic way. Because if we do that, and we lay it out, then we can actually create an amazing experience for the customer that we can also automate, and it saves a ton of time for the business owner and their team. It takes a lot of the stress and anxiety out. And most of all, it actually helps you grow your business, increase sales, and be more profitable.”
And that’s what we’ll be looking at over the course of this series.
Lifecycle Marketing is broken up into three segments: collecting leads, converting clients and creating fans. Within the collecting of leads, you have three parts: targeting, attracting and capturing leads. It’s important to target the right people, so you can have customers that will most benefit from what you have to offer.
This cycle of targeting, attracting and capturing leads can be automated, according to the specific people you’ve targeted. Once you’ve gotten the right leads, then you can move on to the process of engaging them. It’s a thoughtful, step by step process that should unfold naturally. As Clate said,
“Don’t make the offer right at the beginning, that’s like proposing to somebody on the first date.”
Once you’ve given value to your client, engaged with them, you can begin making offers. That’s when you get to create fans by delivering on your promises. The secret growing your business is effective follow-up.
Exceed expectations
When you meet your clients’ expectations and then go beyond them, that’s when you really begin to build fans.
And that, in a nutshell, is LIfecycle Marketing, from beginning to end.
The trick is when you have hundreds or (hopefully) thousands of customers, all at different stages of the cycle. That’s where KEAP comes in. Their platform helps people execute their Lifecycle Marketing in an automated way, so that their sales and marketing activities are always happening in the background.
Visit their website and do an assessment of Lifecycle Marketing. They have free sessions where they help people through the whole process.
As Clate says,
“Our passion is to liberate and empower entrepreneurs.”
Hear more about Lifecycle Marketing by listening to Ramon Ray’s podcast of the first episode of “Lifecycle Marketing Made Easy,” a conversation with Clate Mask, CEO and co-founder of KEAP.