3 Steps to Jumpstart Customer Activation

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Note: Vyoma Kapur is a Sr. Marketing Programs Manager at Marketo. She’s passionate about tech, marketing and travel. In her free time, she likes hiking, canoeing and immersing in a mystery book or courtroom drama. Vyoma is from Singapore and spent a year in Norway right after college.

To excel in this new model, marketers need to start by building a deep and intricate level of understanding of their customers and how marketing influences that lifecycle.

Understand Your customers

Based on the information available, it is worthwhile to invest time and resources to create customer personas. While demographic data is the backbone in building personas, customer behavior, transactions, needs, and motivations are all crucial in providing an enriched and holistic view of customers. Ask yourself: What channels are they engaging with and what channels are they ignoring? What products are they browsing? But wary of death by data; an information overload can be counterproductive to any exercise on trying to develop an understanding of the customers.

Understand the customers’ lifecycle

After you have identified personas, you have paved the way to the next step of understanding how to activate your customers—mapping out the customer lifecycle in detail. As you do this, think about: What are the current stages of a typical customer lifecycle? How can they be improved? Getting a granular view of the lifecycle, and assessing it at every point helps lay the groundwork for the next step—understanding marketing’s influence. Customers may interact with your brand differently at each stage, so looking at how they are browsing and with what devices can go a long way in charting out the lifecycle in detail.

Understand marketing’s influence on the lifecycle

The next step is to start a discovery process of the impact of marketing on each stage of the lifecycle. What content are your customers consuming at each stage and how are your marketing efforts directly improving their experience? Where can you help accelerate or improve their journey? Questions like these can help determine where you should be focusing your efforts or channeling your budget.

These three pillars are key to creating a foundation for customer activation. To help you assess where you are today with respect to the steps I went through in this post, check out the 25 question worksheet: How to Get Started with Marketing Activation, and see how you fare!