In this first of a seven-part series, we’ll define Lifecycle Marketing and explore the first step: Attract Interest.

Maybe you already have a well-defined sales and marketing strategy. You have regular meetings with your team, set goals, and measure your progress as you go along.

But is your focus on these carefully-defined objectives or on the individuals and businesses you serve? Lifecycle Marketing is customer-centric. It’s based on seven common-sense steps – a natural progression of strategies and tactics — that can flow automatically through your ongoing relationships with your customers.

We’ll explore each of these seven steps individually to show you how this approach can help you cultivate customer relationships in a way that will keep them coming back.

Getting Their Attention

When your customers succeed, you succeed.

That’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? Providing solutions to your customers’ problems. You have more communication and educational tools available now than have ever existed. You just need to employ them in an effective fashion where one step leads naturally to the next.

The first step of Lifecycle Marketing is just what you’d expect it to be. You must Attract Interest. How are you doing that now, and how’s it working for you? Are you drawing prospects to your products and services by helping them:

• Avoid mistakes?
• Sidestep the problems that competitors’ solutions have caused?
• Meet their personal and professional goals?
• Learn, or simply satisfy their curiosity?

These are some of the primary reasons that people read blogs, browse through Facebook and Twitter streams, and pore over websites. Yes, they’re looking for entertainment and enlightenment and personal connections, but there has to be some tangible return from all of those hours spent glued to the screen. You need to let them know that you can be a good source for that.

Compelling Content Can Eventually Convert

To attract interest, you’re going to need lead magnets. You probably already know what these are, but are you putting a lot of effort into this critical first step? Are you giving your prospects tools that can teach or overcome a dilemma or answer a question that they may not even know to ask?

Give your all to creating these magnets. Companies who have enjoyed tremendous success by implementing Lifecycle Marketing have developed top-notch informational vehicles like ebooks, infographics, webinars, white papers, newsletters and how-to blog posts and videos to grab the attention of visitors.

A Two-Way Street

You can give your audience something for nothing. People love getting free stuff, and such generosity may keep them coming back. But don’t you feel more of a connection to people and companies when the exchange is two-way? If an offer has value for you, aren’t you willing to share some of your personal information to attain it?

That’s the final stage of the first step. It’s the most time-consuming and challenging of the seven, but the other steps won’t matter if you don’t succeed here.

Next Up: Capture Leads