Designing a customer life cycle can be daunting. After all, sourcing people who are totally new to your brand and turning them into loyal customers, and even brand advocates, is no easy feat.
However, with a customer cycle jam-packed with visual content and engaging challenges, disseminated via Facebook and Google ads, customers can be won-over.
To attract new clients to my digital marketing agency, I move customers through the following five key stages:
- Awareness
- Acquisition
- Conversion
- Retention
- Loyalty
In this article, I’ll share how I deliver this five stage customer life cycle, with the assistance of Facebook ads, Google Ads, and MindMeister.
The 5 Stages of a Customer Life Cycle
As mentioned, the most popular customer life cycle journeys include a variation of Awareness, Acquisition, Conversion, Retention, and Loyalty.
I’m going to start by creating a mind map in MindMeister, mapping out the five main stages of my customer life cycle:
For each of the topics, I’m going to develop the creatives, goals, and targeting specs for both Google and Facebook.
With MindMeister, you can embed your campaign collaterals directly into the mind map. For example, you can attach a campaign creative to the relevant topic, or link directly to a Google Sheet, where you document the results of each cycle stage:
For now, let’s return to the five steps:
1. Awareness
After I’ve installed retargeting pixels for both Google Adwords and Facebook to my site, I’m going to set up two ads. These ads feature a video introducing myself, explaining how I serve the clientele in my defined demographic.
- Tip: You can check FB audience insights to grab this data on the best demographics to target. Access it in your FB business manager at business.facebook.com
The reason I want to employ Google Ads, specifically video ads, is that I’m not attempting to send people to my website or make a purchase. At this Awareness stage, I’m simply using ads for outreach. I want people to know that my agency exists and become accustomed to the brand.
As a result, I’ve created a YouTube ad that will run before videos with a similar target audience, enabling me to access their viewers. Additionally, this ad will show up as a sponsored link when people search for keywords related to the video, extending my reach.
I’ll also install a tracking code on my website, to collect the data from these YouTube ads and Google traffic. This means that if people are on YouTube, but not yet in my realm of Facebook targeting, I can use the data to form my Website Custom Audience traffic on Facebook.
Using this tactic, I’ve developed two potential touch points for introducing new customers to my brand.
Step 1 – Awareness: Implement a YouTube ad on channels with a similar target audience, in order to outreach to new customers and develop brand awareness. Then, collate leads to retarget with Facebook ads.
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2. Acquisition
In the acquisition stage, I’ll be using my Out There October challenge to acquire clients. This lead-generation campaign invites potential customers to sign-up free and download the #outtherechallenge activity chart.
The chart helps businesses position themselves for new clients, opportunities, and profits, so the challenge is aimed at engaging business owners. By offering free expert advice with the chart, I can prove myself as an expert, while collecting client leads from the sign-up forms.
Building on the awareness and traffic from the previous stage, where I focused on YouTube publishers related to my brand and developing Facebook leads, I’ve been able to create two ads for my Out There October campaign:
- For Facebook, I’m going to show the Out There October advertisement to people who viewed my Facebook ads in the previous week.
- On YouTube, I’ll place my Out There October ads on related YouTube channels, and as a sponsored result for a specific search.
My goal for doing this is to take people who have seen the ads and move them into a challenge, allowing them to engage a little deeper with my brand.
This step is not quite conversion, but moving through this step helps to build the know and like factor. It’s warming them up to trust me and priming them for a purchase that I’d like them to make in a later step.
Step 2 – Acquisition: Create a challenge that offers quality, expert advice and encourages your audience to engage. Then, promote the challenge to your target audience and generate leads.
3. Conversion
For conversions, I wanted to show my ads to folks that have:
- already engaged with my page
- visited my website
- engaged with my ads to the point that they’ve watched 75% of the video ad
- or have opted into my challenge.
At this point, I want to convert them into clients by signing them up for a webinar that will nurture them with valuable marketing tips.
The webinar will also announce an offer for a course that they can purchase at a special BETA price, exclusively for webinar attendees.
Step 3 – Conversion: Invite your acquired leads to an informative free webinar and offer an exclusive discount on a service related to the webinar topic.
4. Retention
My retention stage involves promoting former case studies to:
- people who engaged in the previous opt-in steps
- and people who have made a purchase.
For those who already purchased the course, the case studies help to ensure they won’t feel buyers remorse. Additionally, the targeted case studies provide social proof to people who have expressed interest, by engaging in the former opt-in steps, but haven’t yet made a purchase.
Even if customers don’t make a purchase at this stage, they can still be ‘retained’ and retargeted with ads for future product launches.
Step 4 – Retention: Promote customer success stories to keep previous customers interested and provide social proof to those yet to purchase.
5. Loyalty
At this level, we want people to love us. We want to be thought of as a household brand and for customers to become ecstatic advocates.
Perks help, so I’m going to roll out an affiliate program to get those who’ve purchased the course, or who are at least fans or subscribers, to share my products with their friends.
I’ll share this opportunity with customers who have engaged with my brand in some way over the previous four steps, and with my marketing email list.
Hopefully, as loyal customers share their stories, this will bring new people into the awareness phase, helping to create a new loop for people coming into contact with my brand.
Step 5 – Loyalty: Launch an affiliate program to turn happy customers into advocates, creating a new customer life cycle.
Here’s how my five-stage customer life cycle mind map turned out, as I worked through the final steps of my Facebook and Google Ads:
What’s great is that at each level, I have the opportunity to A/B test ads. This enables me to see whether my assumptions about how ads move people through my customer life cycle are true.
As a result, I now have a plan to create a pipeline of leads, sales and returning customers, all through the effective use of paid ads and MindMeister.
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At MeisterLabs, we’re always excited to hear about the positive impact that MindMeister and MeisterTask are having on businesses.
If you have a story to share about how you’re using MindMeister and/or MeisterTask, we’d love to hear from you!
To get in touch about being featured on our blog, drop Olivia an email at olivia (at) meisterlabs (dot) com