The Marketing Cycle — Turning “Hey There, Stranger” into a “Loyal Customer”
Continuing our series on “the 4U in marketing and how to apply it,” we’ve already covered U1, “Understanding Customers,” through “7 Common Types of Customers in Marketing and Sales.”
Alongside that, on my TikTok channel, I’ve covered some customer pain points across different industries that The Fool has had the chance to work in and draw lessons from:
See also:
- Customer Pain Points in the Fashion Industry
- Customer Pain Points in the Cosmetics Industry
In this article, let’s move on to U2, “Understanding Yourself,” and U3, “Understanding Your Competitors,” through the lesson on the “Marketing Cycle” applied within the “Customer Journey.”
At this point you might think: “Wait, how does Understanding Yourself and Understanding Your Competitors connect to the Customer Journey?”
Stay calm and read through to the end to get The Fool’s answer!
Alright, let’s learn about the Marketing Cycle with The Fool!
If you’ve worked in marketing, you’re surely already familiar with the “Customer Journey.” Put briefly, it’s the journey of a “stranger” turning into a “loyal customer (an advocate customer)” for a business.
So what is the “Marketing Cycle”?
Now let’s look at the checkpoints from “Stranger” => “Potential Customer” => “Customer” => “Returning Customer,” and finally, the largest cycle that closes out the customer journey: “Loyal Customer” — like the gears of a machine, spinning steadily and growing larger and larger.
If those gears spin in the right direction, a business grows stronger and moves forward. On the other hand, if those gears spin the wrong way, or worse, stop spinning altogether, the business falls behind, stalls, or, worse still, goes bankrupt.
So the key to resolving the bottleneck called “customer decisions,” to keep those gears spinning in the right direction, is running the right “marketing campaigns” for each stage within the business’s overall “marketing strategy.”
What’s more, throughout a business’s growth, these gears need to keep spinning steadily and in the same direction, forming cycles so the business can scale up and grow further.
From there, we can define it as:
The Marketing Cycle is a chain of recurring activities within a business’s “marketing campaigns” that turns a “stranger” into a “loyal customer (an advocate customer),” through 4 gradually growing gears that resolve the 5 stages along the customer journey.
How to apply the Marketing Cycle within the 4U
As The Fool mentioned above, the Marketing Cycle is applied in the process of “Understanding Yourself (Self-Understanding)” and “Understanding Your Competitors,” after already uncovering customer insight, so you can craft the most sensible “marketing campaigns” for…
- A business SWOT analysis based on 9 elements from the Business Model Canvas, including:
Download the Business Model Canvas analysis here.
- The business’s and its product/service’s strengths compared to the market
- The business’s and its product/service’s weaknesses compared to the market
- Opportunities to grow the business’s product/service in the market
- Challenges to growing the business’s product/service in the market
- Setting growth KPIs for both brand-building and supporting the sales team in closing deals, matching each “Marketing Cycle” along the Customer Journey
- Most importantly, allocating budget and appropriate communication channels for each stage to fit the KPIs set beforehand.
- The example below is typically used for campaigns The Fool has had the chance to run for SMEs or pre-seed startups without investor funding yet, and may differ for some larger businesses or corporations.
- Owned Media: frequently used due to limited budget — free shared articles, ebooks, and knowledge videos to educate the market, addressing questions about user experience, building a community, and resolving the bottleneck of “customer decisions” at the…
- Earned Media: usually used alongside Owned Media to build connections with the previously built community, resolving the bottleneck of “customer decisions” at the “Purchase” stage and turning them into “Repeat Purchase” and, eventually, “Loyal Customer,” by boosting brand awareness.
- Paid Media: usually used to directly promote a product or service straight to users at the “Awareness” to “Consideration” stages, alongside Owned Media (with a limited budget, requiring constant monitoring to avoid overspending and to shut off ineffective spending in time).
A real-life example: how The Fool applied this to Big E Gear
If you’ve watched episode 3 of my “One Cigarette” series, later “One Journey” — The Fool’s own — you’ll know about a huge turning point in my startup journey: building my “gaming gear components” sales page starting with just…
Back then, as a Business Administration student, I immediately applied what I’d learned to this second business venture, doing it more methodically than before, and bringing on a friend to invest alongside me. At the time, we sat down together and carefully drafted a business plan chart:
- A capital-use plan,
- A marketing plan,
- And assumptions for the worst-case scenarios that could happen to this business venture.
You can watch episode 3 again in the video below:
In the marketing plan, I went over a very detailed SWOT analysis of this business’s strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and challenges, after thoroughly researching customer insight at the time, including wholesale customers:
- Mainly internet café owners in Ho Chi Minh City and nearby provinces,
- Who usually researched buying and selling info through wholesale marketplaces like Thitruongsi.com, or wholesale markets like Nhật Tảo,
- Buying mid-range gaming mice and keyboards, from 150,000 to 300,000 VND per unit, usually ordering 30+ units at a time (for a roughly 30-seat internet café, and sometimes as replacement units since café customers tend to wear gear out quickly 😀).
Back then, my strengths were:
- Adopting technology fairly early and catching onto the e-commerce trend right as marketplaces started aggressively spending to attract Vietnamese users. At that point, opening a store on a marketplace was still fairly simple, and with the digital marketing background I’d already picked up, I immediately opened…
- My next strength came from the fact that my supply source was very close to where I lived, and buying even a single item there still got me the wholesale price. This was also a weakness, since best-selling products often ran out of stock as soon as my supplier ran out too.
- And my final strength was the Finance knowledge I’d learned (a module within the Business Administration major) at school, which helped me a lot in calculating a marketing budget of only around 8 million VND for my communication channels. Capital was also…
Understanding these financial weaknesses, I allocated budget and resources across communication channels as follows:
- Focusing resources on building Owned Media through website SEO as well as on e-commerce marketplaces (the results are covered in episode 3 of my “One Cigarette” series, later “One Journey,” mentioned above) — 70% of effort, but only under 10% of the budget for that…
- Alongside that, building a good image in consumers’ eyes through Earned Media, with “thank-you notes or mouse pads,” encouraging them to leave a review on the Fanpage or marketplaces and sending a voucher after their review (for retail customers). Then, using those reviews…
- Using the remaining money for extra discounts and perks for wholesale customers (usually: buy 10 mice/keyboards/gaming headsets, get 1 free) and additional advertising on Facebook (where the most potential retail customers were concentrated), driving traffic to…
Of course, I hit some of the KPIs I’d set beforehand:
- After 12 months, keywords for my best-selling products ranked at the top of marketplace search, selling 1,000 orders/month.
- Sold to over 24 internet café owners across Ho Chi Minh City, Long An, Bình Dương, and more (reaching 2 new ones per month, who then ordered continuously).
Here are the SEO results and product sales figures from that time, for The Fool himself.
Early SEO results for a product on the Sendo marketplace.
SEO results that brought in 1,000 sales/month from Lazada.
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