2018 | ariel lim consulting

What Is Lifecycle Marketing

December 31, 2019December 11, 2018 by Ariel Lim

Lifecycle marketing is a type of marketing that uses the customer lifecycle to determine what and how you communicate with your prospects and customers.

Depending on where your audience is at any given moment, the communication they receive from you will be different. It’s one of the most effective approach to digital marketing because the message is highly dependent on where the customer is right now.

Have you ever called a fast food restaurant to have something delivered?

What’s the first thing they ask you?

Most of the time, they ask you for your phone number or your name.

They use this to search their database to determine if you have existing purchases from them (i.e. a customer) or if this is the first time you’re ordering. This will determine what they will say next.

So, if you’re a customer already, they just verify your name/address, then proceed with the order. But if you’re calling for the first time, they’d ask for your complete address and other relevant information before proceeding with getting your order.

Now, imagine if they don’t screen at the beginning of the call.

Each time you call, you’d have to repeat the same information over and over. Ordering will take a lot of time and will only end up with you frustrated.

The way these fast food restaurants process orders is a form of lifecycle marketing. The message they communicate differs whether you’re at the first stage or the middle stage or the last stage.

But, lifecycle marketing is more complex than that.

For B2B organizations, the buying cycle usually takes weeks and months. It’s not a simple 2-minute phone call where you can get to say what you want then get it 30 minutes later. B2C organizations also have complex buying cycles.

Usually, the higher monetary value is, the longer and more complex the process is.

5 Steps to Effective Lifecycle Marketing

So, how do you implement an effective lifecycle marketing?

1. Determine your own lifecycle stages

In a previous post, I wrote about the standard lifecycle stages. If your organization has this already setup, then that’s great. If not, read that article first.

If you already have different sales stages, you can use that as a starting point.

2. Define the criteria/action/behavior for each stage

The most important part of this exercise is to make sure you define exactly what action or criteria you need for each stage.

Here’s an example of how this works and why it’s important:

A subscriber is anyone who joins your email list.
A lead is someone who downloaded a marketing offer.
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is someone who downloaded your software, requested a demo, or downloaded any one of your case studies.
and so on.

Define each stage properly so you avoid confusion.

But the most important part here is that you communicate the established definitions to everyone who has any interaction with customers. Usually, these are the marketing, sales, and customer service teams.

Using this example, a proper lifecycle marketing strategy will not send communications about your products and discounts to your subscribers. They are not in a stage that is ready to receive those types of communication. And if they did, it will only turn them off.

On the other hand, a standard promotional campaign for 30% off should not be sent nor seen by your customers as well — especially if they bought your product at full price.

3. Create content/marketing offers for each lifecycle stage

For each stage in the customer lifecycle, create content or marketing offers that, after completing/availing it, will move them to the next stage of the lifecycle.

Let’s say you sell coffee equipment like drip machines, Aeropress, and water kettles.

You have a blog where people can find everything they need to know about brewing the perfect cup of coffee.

Naturally, you write about coffee and where it comes from. This includes how different altitudes affect the taste of coffee, what coffee cherries are, the different types of processing, how long it takes to grow coffee, etc.

You also have content about brewing your own coffee at home using Aeropress / V60 / French Press / Regular Drip machine. You share about grinding your own beans at home, the “right” size for each brewing method, water temperature and how it affects your coffee, and many more.

Continuing from the previous section, you can imagine why a blog subscriber might not be interested in your products as they might only be interested in your content and learning more about great coffee.

Again, you can only write about how great your products are, but that won’t be as effective as capturing a bigger audience.

This concept is explained in detail in my post about the 5 stages of awareness.

Writing about your products only without talking about coffee doesn’t flow together. It would only make your products seem irrelevant. It’s always better to write about something that matters to your customers, not just you.

4. Automate your marketing

The main goal of lifecycle marketing is to give your prospects and customers the experience they want, need, and expect.

And the only way to scale your business is to automate your marketing. This is done through lead nurturing.

For example, you setup a lead nurturing campaign that sends marketing offer downloads every 2 weeks. This is sent to your subscribers so that after downloading an eBook, they become a lead.

Once they become a lead, two things happen: (1) they are removed from the subscriber-to-lead nurturing automation and (2) they are enrolled in the lead-to-MQL nurturing campaign.

What that means is they will no longer receive marketing offer downloads every two weeks. Instead, what they will receive are communications designed to move them to the next stage — offer to download a software/case study/demo request.

5. Improve and update every quarter

If you are applying a content pillar approach, every marketing offer you create will have its own email series. You can use these to update your existing nurturing sequences or create a new one if it’s for a different stage.

For example, you published a new case study. You can then update your lead-to-MQL sequence to include an invite to download this case study.

So, what are you going to do next

Applying lifecycle marketing is one of the most effective shift you can do to your digital marketing. I shared how you can do this via email in this post, but lifecycle marketing doesn’t end there.

The trend nowadays is to use an omni-channel approach where you use different channels to engage with your prospects and customers while still applying lifecycle marketing. I’ll share more about this in future posts.

Are you using lifecycle marketing right now? What results have you seen since you implemented it? If you see the value of lifecycle marketing but having trouble getting started, feel free to reach out in the comments section below.

What Is Lead Generation

February 12, 2021December 10, 2018 by Ariel Lim

Lead generation is the process of gathering contact information of potential customers. In digital marketing, this is usually done through form submissions.

It is the first pillar of email marketing. Meaning, without an effective lead generation strategy, your email marketing will not succeed.

Lead generation is also one of the most overlooked strategy in digital marketing. Most organizations have poor lead generation execution.

This is especially true for most ecommerce sites. They don’t think it’s important. That’s why the only way for them to generate leads on their website is a newsletter subscription.

And we all know where that leads to right? Spammy and unsolicited messages. So why continue using it?

Other marketers also refer to lead generation as list building because most of the time, an email address is collected. This is called an email list and is the primary data inside your email marketing software.

Want to grow your email list by 225% with just 4 hours of work? Get your copy of my proven 5-step process here.

Lead Generation Analogy

You can think of lead generation as buying anything — food, water, a new iPhone or gadget.

You won’t hand over your money for something so overpriced. You will, however, do it if you feel that there is an equivalent exchange in value — whether real or perceived.

Imagine buying a Mocha Frappucino at Starbucks. If it’s priced at 550 per cup, will you buy one?

Most probably not.

You’d think that the value of a single cup of coffee mixed in with chocolate, syrup and cream doesn’t cost that much.

It’s the same for lead generation.

When you ask for contact information (like email, address, phone number) from your prospects, they will associate that personal information with some value.

If what they are getting is not equal or better than what you are asking for, they will not hand it over.

Using the same Starbucks analogy, they won’t pay for your overpriced Frappe.

Why Your Website Doesn’t Give You Leads

This brings us to the biggest problem most websites have — one newsletter signup form asking for a person’s email address.

For most organizations, this is the single, biggest lead generation form they have on the website.

The form asks for an email address in exchange for promo updates.

Is that an equivalent exchange?

Will you willingly give up your private information to someone who will just send you emails you will not even read?

And i’m not even mentioning that promos and discounts aren’t newsletters.

If you want to generate more leads, stop doing what everyone is doing. Don’t ask for email subscriptions to newsletters that contain promos and discounts.

Newsletter subscriptions are for blog updates. Content. Articles. Nothing else.

Here’s How You Generate Leads

If you want to generate more leads, offer something of value to your prospects and customers.

Create an eBook that solves for their problem.
Design a simple checklist about a process they encounter daily.
Publish an email or video series exclusively for people who opted in.
Give them special behind-the-scenes access to your latest project.

These are just samples of what you can do to generate more leads.

All these take effort and time.

But if you’re willing to do the hard work, you’ll definitely see the payoff in your efforts.

You can read more about how to generate more leads in 7 easy steps!

What Is Paid Traffic

January 20, 2020December 7, 2018 by Ariel Lim

Paid traffic is traffic coming from paid advertisements. It’s one of the default channel groupings in Google Analytics.

If you advertise on Google Ads or Bing Ads, traffic coming from those ads count towards your paid traffic. You can use this, along with goals, to determine the ROI of your ads.

Important Reminders on Paid Traffic

Just remember that not all paid advertisements show up in paid traffic. To be more specific, only those with the medium parameter with “ppc,”
“cpc,” or “paidsearch” appear here.

If you’re not familiar with that, read this article on UTM tags. Also, this might be a good chance to browse up on Google’s default channel groupings.

One example where an ad might not show up under paid traffic is when you advertise on Facebook.

Most of the time, marketers use the “boost” option to promote on Facebook. While there is no one right way to do things, this option is definitely not effective if left to itself (but that’s for another article).

When you boost or promote a post with a link to your website, when people come from this traffic, they’re attributed to social/referral traffic, not paid ads.

If you advertise heavily on social, it’s recommended to separate this kind of traffic to segment your reporting. This will allow you to see which channels are bringing you better ROI.

Some use “paid social” as a new custom channel grouping in Google Analytics. This can be customized in the admin view of your account.

Go to Admin > Custom Channel Grouping

How to create a custom channel grouping in Google Analytics

Paid traffic is a great way to meet your goals in the short-run.

It’s a great way to test the market without spending too much time and effort on a new campaign or product launch.

It can also supplement your other campaigns by streamlining your customer experience across all channels.

Just remember to track them properly so you know which ads are bringing you in results, and which are wasting your money.

Online Conversion Path

December 6, 2018November 22, 2018 by Ariel Lim

The online conversion path is a series of steps your potential customer takes on your website before they become a lead. While there are many variations of conversion paths, it generally has the same flow.

What Is An Online Conversion Path

Think about your own behavior for a moment.

What do you do when you want to buy a new laptop or phone?

I figure you’d do something like this:

Open a browser and type the brand & model (e.g. MacBook Pro)
Read several articles that talks about what you were looking for
Refine your search to something more specific to your needs (e.g. Can the MacBook Pro handle Photoshop)

That process is most likely the same process your customers do when they want to buy something.

The Importance of the Online Conversion Path

If you look closely at the path I described above, people aren’t looking for prices and discounts.

When people start their buying journey, they care about getting answers to their questions. They care about solving their problems.

This is where a lot of businesses go wrong.

In digital marketing, it’s important to remember that people’s buying behavior have changed. In some cases, people are already 80% through their buying journey when they reach out to businesses.

If you are not present in that early part of their research process, you will most likely not be their top choice.

And that’s where the online conversion path comes in.

Focus on the Customer, Not Yourself

Most of the time, businesses produce content that only talks about themselves. Promos. Discounts. How awesome their products and employees are. That they care about their customers.

But do all that content help prospects who are looking to buy something during the early part of their journey?

A big no!

The 5 stages of awareness tells us that if you focus on creating content about yourself, you’re alienating a lot of people.

What you should do is start creating content that solves your industry’s problems. Focus on your customers’ needs first, before your own.

Commandment 9: Design Matters Too

November 5, 2020November 8, 2018 by Ariel Lim

Don’t judge a book by its cover.

This is a phrase we’ve heard over and over that we don’t give it much thought when we see, hear, or read about it.

Swipe left. Swipe right. Scroll down. Ignore. Double tap. Like. ❤️.

All these actions somehow reinforces the fact that what we see, matters. A lot.

Today, we judge someone by their Instagram profile. Is it consistent? Do they have a lot of followers? Does it look cool?

And even if we keep telling ourselves that aesthetics don’t matter, our actions say otherwise.

People try to compensate for this by actively telling themselves or simply being mindful about it.

But it is so ingrained in our culture that we can’t help but wonder, can we escape this?

Can we really be objective and stop judging people/companies/brands based on their outward appearance?

The Problem: Digital Marketing Is Visual

When it comes to digital marketing, websites and social media accounts are the first ones to get judged by people. And even if that’s something we don’t want other people to do to us, we can’t change what people think and do.

Changing other people’s behavior, much more their beliefs and value system, is very difficult to do.

A lot of people would say, and I agree with them, that only you can change your own behavior. Trying to force other people to conform to what you want will only result in unnecessary conflict and stress.

Others claim that content is king. That content is all that matters. Yes, that is true. And design matters too. You simply cannot neglect it.

What do you do instead?

Change what you can so you don’t get judged negatively.

When people visit your website or blog, before they get to “read” your content, they “see” your website first. That’s the first thing they experience.

Make your website (and social media accounts) look awesome! Even if you don’t have any background in design (hey, I’m the worst when it comes to stuff like this; I’m more of a numbers kind of guy), you can still avoid getting judged negatively.

Let me show you how.

Solution: Focus on User Experience

For most people, design is how it looks on the outside — graphic or visual design. This is a very limited view of design.

I’m no authority in this topic so I’m not going to even try. But, one message that stood out for me is how Steve Jobs described it.

Design is not just how it looks, but how it works.
-Steve Jobs

He was one of the biggest proponents of great design. If you look at Apple products, it doesn’t just look good on the outside. It also looks great on the inside. It is easy to use and intuitive. And what’s what contributed to Apple’s $1B success.

It just works.

Jobs’ tenacity for great design was well-documented by people and even included a ton of stories in his biography. Which brings us back to design in digital marketing…

Great design isn’t about you. It’s about your website’s visitors and their experience with your website (and with your entire brand for that matter).

Most people worry too much about how their website look. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a good-looking website. Aesthetics do matter. But that shouldn’t be your end goal.

In digital marketing, having a great design means a great user experience across the entire buyer’s journey. And that’s what I’ll focus on in this post.

Step 1: Map your customer journey

It’s not about what you think. It’s about what your customers think. Focus on their experience with your brand.

Imagine with me for a minute here.

Let’s say you have an awesome website. It looks great. It has all these fancy animations and videos. When you scroll down, images and text appear like magic. Kind of like how some portions of Apple’s product pages look like.

But the difference is that yours load slowly. Does this qualify as having great design?

User needs to research about the best X in town
User searches Google for X
Finds your website among others
Opens top 5 results in background
Go through search #1
Browses quickly
Moves to search #2 (your website)
Page still doesn’t load
Closes the browser
Moves to search #3…

What if you’re an eCommerce site? If the photos of your products loads after 15 seconds, do you think your customers will hang around your site?

This is even worse as there are a lot of options in the market. So if your website fails to “impress” now, you’d have no way of getting them back to your website again.

Step 2: Understand these statistics

47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

The best way to really understand your customers is to look at your own behavior. Chances are, you’re not that different from them.

How did you feel when you encountered these situations before?

A website loads too slowly or not at all.
The website loads all the ads first before you get to find the content that really matters to you
Looking for the FAQ section of a product on their website, but is no where to be found

A problem a lot of websites don’t realize (or accept) is that having a ton of ads loading on your page slows it down.

It ruins the user experience.

These are the reasons why ad blockers are so popular these days.

It’s these same reasons why browsers have a read-only mode or why people use Pocket — because they don’t want to be distracted from what they see and focus on the content. But if your site doesn’t have all these distracting elements, there’s no reason for your visitors to go out of their way just to be able to find the content they are looking for.

Great design supplements your content. If people can’t get your page to load, they’d most likely not try at all. If people can’t find the answers from you, especially your customers, they’ll look for it elsewhere.

This behavior is true for me as well, just like you.

When I try browsing a site and it doesn’t load, I either check again later or not bother at all. I only check later again if it’s the only choice I have. But most likely, I’ll close the browser and search for another site that can answer my questions/problems.

Step 3: Get objective user experience data

Does your website meet customer expectations?

The only way to know if your website meets your customer’s expectations is to ask them yourself. This is easy if your site already have thousands of unique visitors a month. You setup a survey and look the results.

But what if you’re like most websites who only get a few hundred visits a month? You’d get 1-2 responses a month. This won’t provide you with any insights.

So, what can you do instead?

Step 4: Improve your website’s speed

One of the things you can do is improve your site speed. Use this free tool from Google where it can provide you a lot of actionable items to make your site faster.

What’s even better is that once you go through this list, you’d be on the good side of Google. That means you’ll have better chances of ranking on it.

You can use other tools like Pingdom, etc. to give you a different perspective on how you can further improve your site’s performance.

Step 5: Make your content flow coherently

One of the things that frustrates me when viewing a website is when I don’t understand what I’m looking at.

I’ve come across sites where the marketer simply puts EVERYTHING on the website.

But there’s no story being told. It jumps from one place to another.

In one page it talks about a product X, then on the next section it talks about the company, then the next it talks about a features of product X. Then the next section talks about the founders. Then you’d see a video about the history of the company.

Focus on sharing one thing at a time on a single page.

This way, you’ll hit two birds with one stone. You’ll get a better user experience and improve your SEO.

The best way to start with this is outlining what you want to share. For example, here’s what mine looks like. Note that I’m a consultant so the way I structured my website is different from how you would structure yours.

Homepage
- Value proposition
- About me
- Social proof
- Case studies
- Call-to-action
- Thought leadership articles
- Social media
- Contact form
- Newsletter subscription

If you’d notice, the structure for this is all about building me as an authority on what I do. I didn’t include any information that is not contributing to that goal.

On another page, Email Marketing, here’s what my outline looks like:

Email Marketing page
- 3 pillars of email marketing
  - Lead generation
  - Lead management
  - Email execution
- Why use email marketing
- Essential features and capabilities of an email marketing software
- 12 different types of marketing emails
- Email malpractices you should stop doing now
- Examples of ineffective email marketing and how to improve them

Everything in this page contributes to the objective of the page — which is to provide an answer to people searching for information about email marketing. And in case you’re wondering, this page is a type of a cornerstone content.

Outline the content you want to place on your website or blog posts. Put a structure around it. Make sure you always put yourself in the shoes of your customers (or potential customers).

Step 6: Use headers, sections, and images to break your content

After you have your outline, use them as headers or sections in your content. Add a couple of images to make it easy to read as well.

These are rules of thumb that you can follow, but in no means dictate the way you create your content.

h1 —> title of the page
- h2 —> section 1
  - h3 —> point 1 / step 1
  - h3 —> point 2 / step 2
  - h3 —> point 3 / step 3
- h2 —> section 2
  - h3 —> point 1 / step 1
  - h3 —> point 2 / step 2
  - h3 —> point 3 / step 3

You get the idea. For example, in this post, here’s how it looks like:

h1 —> Commandment 9: Design Matters Too
- h2 —> The Problem: Digital Marketing is Visual
- h2 —> The Solution: Focus on User Experience
  - h3 —> Step 1: Map your customer journey
  - h3 —> Step 2: Understand these statistics
  - h3 —> Step 3: Get objective user experience data
  - h3 —> Step 4: Improve your website’s speed
  - h5 —> Step 5: Make your content flow coherently
  - h6 —> Step 6: Use headers, sections, and images to break your content

So, what are you going to do now?

Design in digital marketing is all about the user experience and how everything flows from one to the other. It’s not limited to visual or graphic design.

Make sure your site loads fast, has a coherent message, and easy to read and understand. Use data to guide you in your decisions. Stop relying on assumptions.

Does your website have a great design? Let me know in the comments below!

What Is Google Tag Manager

July 3, 2020November 5, 2018 by Ariel Lim

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a tag management software — a tool that allows you to add/delete/modify code on your website (or app) without the need for programming knowledge.

The current trend in digital marketing is to install a piece of code (or snippets of code or tracking pixels) from the different software that you use. For example, if you want to track your website’s traffic and user’s behaviors, you can install Google Analytics.

To do so, you need to install a code that looks like this:

<! – Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-12345678-9"></script>
<script>
  window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
  function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
  gtag('js', new Date());

  gtag('config', 'UA-12345678-9');
</script>

This comes with an instruction to add it to all pages on your site at the start of the <head> section of your website. But most often, a business will want to use several of these tools.

Problems of Not Using Google Tag Manager

Let’s say you want to capture visits and target those audiences on Facebook, you install the Facebook Pixel. Then you heard about the new feature in your CRM software that allows you to track your contacts’ website visits as well. That way, you know which pages interest them. What about your email marketing software? Or that shiny new live caht or chat bot software

You need to install several lines of code for each of these tools to make them work.

Traditionally, these sets of code is added by programmers/developers manually.

Marketers give the code to be added and where to add it. Then, the programmer/developer comes back to you in 1-3 weeks to say that they’ve added it.

Using GTM to manage all these code implementation/changes makes it simple.

Main Benefit of Using Google Tag Manager

Using Google Tag Manager eliminates all these unnecessary steps.

Instead of going through a lot of time and effort coordinating with 3rd parties, you can easily implement and manage the changes on your website quickly. You can also test whether the app or software is working properly without going back and forth.

To get started, all you need to do is give them the GTM code to install. Once that is installed, you can use GTM to handle all additions/deletions/changes of code inside it.

How to Add a Tag in Google Tag Manager

Let’s say you want to install the Facebook Pixel on your website. Once you have Google Tag Manager installed on your WordPress site already, here’s a quick overview for adding a new tag on GTM:

Add a New Tag
Change the Name
Choose Custom HTML
Paste the code
Use All Pages as the Trigger
Save

You can set the code to be added on the page by a simple copy-paste from your tool or software you want to implement. In our example above, that’s the Facebook Pixel.

You can easily apply the rules or firing conditions in which they appear.

If you need to create edits or modifications, you simply choose the tag and edit it directly.

Once you hit submit, all the changes will be live. You will be asked to add some details so you can remember what the changes are about.

No need to send it off to your programmers/developers. No need to wait for weeks for a single change or implementation.

I also shared that this is the ideal way to install Google Analytics as well.

Of course, there are a lot more you can do with GTM like using it to create events that you push to Google Analytics, or use the Data Layer to gather more information to your reports. But that’s for another time.

Are you using GTM on your website? Does implementing new software take you so long because your developers and programmers take a while to get back to you?

Let me know in the comments below!