4 Reasons Why Lifecycle Stages Matter for Inbound Marketing

Do you struggle with leads that get stuck somewhere in your sales process?  Understanding where leads are in the buying process helps marketing and sales better align and provide content to your leads, which will in turn give you more information on what the leads need.  There are different stages of the buying process often referred to as lifecycle stages or the Buyer’s Journey.  

Lifecycle stages can be broke out into the flowing: 

• Awareness: potential customer has a need and realizes your business can potentially help them with that need.
• Consideration: after further investigation of your business, the customer better understands how your business can actually help them.
• Intent: customer realized that his preference of business is indeed yours, which will more than likely lead to the last stage.
• Purchase: the customer orders or buys from your business

All leads can be placed into one of theses stages. Knowing what stage your leads are in is important information.  Depending on their stage, you are going to offer them additional educational content to guide them into the next stage.  This brings me to the first reason why lifecycle stages matter.

1. Open and Conversion Rates will Increase

This is great news for every marketer. What we’re doing is gaining a better understanding of the pain points the prospects have and tailoring the content we offer them based on those pain points.  This will naturally turn into higher open and conversion rates as we are providing content on an individual needs basis rather than by the masses.

2. Lead Nurturing Will Have Greater Success

Lifecycle stages and lead nurturing really do go hand in hand.  When setting up a lead nurturing campaign we should always consider what stage of the buying process we are customizing the messaging for.  When a prospect downloads a piece of content, it’s a signal as to where the buyer is at in the process.  The stages allow us to align the content we leverage during lead nurturing with the unique needs of the prospect.

3. Empower and Align the Sales and Marketing Teams

Another great reason for why lifecycle stages matter is to encourage sales and marketing to understand why people are on your website.  This goes back to understanding pain points, but in this case sales and marketing will work closely on understanding the pain points and figuring out how to solve them. This alignment of sales and marketing is only going to strengthen your inbound marketing practices and also strengthen your brand, and business in its entirety.

4. Close More Sales

Who doesn’t want more sales right? Depending on what stage a prospect resides in they are looking for different things.  Understanding what their problem is, realizing you can solve that problem for them, and being able to leverage this information when you pick up a phone to make a call will increase sales.  You are no longer calling to figure out the pain points of said prospect, rather calling to share information on how you can fix the exact problem you already know they have.

Lifecycle stages, and more so understanding what stage your leads are in can give you that extra boost your marketing may need. Marketing is a continuous battle in this ever-changing world of technology, but understanding the lifecycle stages and the pain points of your prospects will strengthen your marketing efforts as your messaging will focus on the individual problems.

Do you think there is a lifecycle stage that matters more than the others?