Marketing involves into customer lifecycle | Lindsay Britt (Fractional CMO)
If you think marketing ends when you drive traffic or a user becomes paying customer, then you might be wrong. In fact, it goes into complete customer experience.
Welcome to the 1st newsletter for 2024 and 58th edition.
Customer lifecycle tells you a lot about their buying behaviours and as much as the sales team is involved in it, marketing will bring clear context and value to nurture those top 5% of leads which will further help bring high-quality leads and experience.
In the b2b Marketing, context builds awareness to reach out-of-market buyers so that if not today but after a week, a month or a few years later they might become customers.
I had the pleasure talking with Lindsay Britt (Fractional CMO - The Rocket CMO) and our conversation was packed with things you need to consider next time working on a marketing strategy and how it’s tied around complete customer experience and doesn’t just end at checkout.
But before here’s what you need to know about her:
She initially worked at UPS under small business segments with go-to-market and new product development teams.
After working at UPS she started her own company - a subscription toy box for infants and toddlers - it was a great experience and learned many lessons but she soon realised that she loved working with teams.
Her next role was Director of Marketing at a restate tech company, grew it from 2 people to 6 people and was there till its successful exist.
Then she joined a Makeup company & led marketing, influencer strategy and after COVID hit pivoted from wholesale to e-commerce channel to help out people with makeup when they couldn’t do it in person.
Having a strong hold on eCommerce, she joined a logistic startup, developed account-based marketing and a complete sales structure which they didn’t have before.
This journey gave her an opportunity to go into the Fractional world.
Let’s start with how you begin working with a B2B company as a marketer and make sure things go smoothly from the beginning.
The first thing I do is understand the goals of the company - for example, 2x revenue growth and focus on improving the conversion rate of the customers that come to the site.
One of the companies that I’m currently working with has a marketplace that wants to focus on conversion rate optimisation for the eCommerce side.
Here’s how I begin with understanding the core data:
How do they drive traffic to the site?
Who are they targeting?
What messaging looks like on the website and how the brand story is tied around so that people keep moving through to the funnel to get converted?
Understand the CRO & revenue.
What is the experience of customers?
Use HotJar to look at where people are clicking, and where they get stuck - is it at the cart, is it they aren’t getting to the product page, or something with the checkout experience?
Identify where the holdups are on the website so that you can know where you have to make the changes for improvement.
What would be the best next step, to keep things rolling?
The next thing I need to check is the customer roadmap, check if the channels are bringing in the right customers and how much they are converting.
Before you consider spending money on paid networks or any channel, you have to analyse what is the actual conversion rate and what revenue are they bringing in from each of the following channels.
“Are we spending the money in the right places? If we are spending money and it’s driving traffic but they aren’t converting then they are the wrong type of customers we are attracting.”
You have to also look at how long it takes the customer to convert and look at the frequency of the orders.
The overall value of the product for the customer.
Are we giving them the right messaging to bring in more people who want to keep purchasing versus buying one time and not coming back?
Based on all the research and understanding of the product and customer, then I recommend what email marketing looks like, and how can we keep on getting revenue from these customers.
If you have to take on a strategy - long-term and short-term - how do you plan things?
It’s not advisable to focus only on one form of strategy, so doing a long-term strategy alone doesn’t help.
As a fractional marketer you have to figure out how to bring quick wins in the first 60 days to keep on the right pace.
There’s so much pressure to meet revenue goals that we can’t only focus on one type of strategy.
The best thing you can do is bring the balance on both sides - long-term and short-term - and give them recommendations on what channel will bring what value, plus help them with the overall growth.
You can always go through the historical data and show the touch point when someone actually converted and all the content that brought the conversion.
If you don’t have the data, run 2-3 campaigns with high and low conversion rates and check which channel brings in customers with high LTV or AOV or they stay longer or they churn less quickly.
E-commerce is becoming more like a subscription model because they want to keep bringing in recurring revenue, so it’s also a metric that’s top of my head.
When you say go-to-market isn’t all about marketing but also about revenue-driven aligned with sales, what do you mean by that?
I’m noticing a shift happening in sales and marketing where you actually have specialisation in go-to-market which is also very revenue-driven aligned with sales, customer experience and customer service.
Think of it this way when you bring on a customer through marketing and hand it over to the sales, you think the job is done but it isn’t.
When it comes to customer experience and customer support, it’s still very much tied to the kind of value marketing brings in. So, it’s the full lifecycle of a customer that marketing is involved with.
It doesn’t end when a customer pays, but we need to know if we are bringing the right person based on the lifetime value, what their onboarding process looks like, what their post-onboarding looks like as an account, whether are they growing and are we able to upsell them.
If you focus only on growth marketing, it’s tied to a specific part of the funnel and it’s so much more than that.
Same for product marketing, it goes in the lifecycle too, because if they don’t have the product that solves their problem, all the efforts you did to bring them in go to waste.
It’s a holistic approach to bring in the right customers and build the customer experience.
What are the challenges you see in building a customer lifecycle or framework?
I think the biggest challenge, particularly in startups, is that there aren’t necessarily any owners of each of the phases of the conversions and customer lifecycle.
So being able to capture that data or get anecdotal pieces of information on how customers travel or even have the ability to track what that customer lifecycle looks like. Because even if they become customers do we even know what happens afterwards, what the onboarding looks like and not having any of this information means you have to build that yourself.
That also happens with customer representatives. Is there any way to track the feedback or have someone who owns the customer service?
Is the customer support team well trained about the product and understands when and how to upsell - if they don’t that means a lot of lost opportunities. Because any conversation with the customer can bring valuable information.
So, it’s a lot about different gaps outside marketing which helps a marketer.
Thanks for reading! Until next time!
Ritika 👋
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