Historically, marketing was something companies did to drive growth – to get new people to buy what they sold. These days, the more we understand what it takes to make a business thrive, and the more digital companies play a role in the marketplace, the more we see a shift to marketers being called upon to engage existing users (vs. just getting new ones).

Engagement marketing didn’t really used to be a thing. What we used to hear about in that vein was “life cycle” campaigns: messages you would deliver to customers based on where they were in their “life cycle” of using your product. So, if a customer had been using an app for a few months, they would get a “drip” email message with different content than someone who had been using it for just a week or two.

Life cycle campaigns are still in play. Though many companies turn the communications baton over from the Marketing team to Sales or Product once a customer has made a download or purchase, marketers often have much to contribute to the life cycle content that inspires existing users to reengage, give word-of-mouth referrals, or buy again. I predict we’ll see a continued trend of marketers leading the charge to engage existing users, more than ever moving forward.

That said, I want to start another trend: life event marketing. My experience with Transformational Consumers has shown that life cycle marketing is great, but it also poses a grave danger: the danger of thinking that your product’s walled gardens are the landscape for your relationship with your customer. Reality check: people don’t really give a shit about most products, including yours, except to the extent that your product helps them do what they want to do in the much larger, vastly more interesting context of their lives.

So, life event marketing involves (a) understanding your target customer’s journey from the problem your product address to the solution IN REAL LIFE – outside of their experience on your app, or with your service, then (b) delivering content and marketing messages that are relevant and valuable to them in the specific context of those real life events.

For example, at MyFitnessPal, we know that there are specific segments of our users who want to run a race or are trying to lose baby weight from a recent pregnancy. Each of those groups, then, gets content specifically tailored to help them with those life events.

One of the best in class examples of life event marketing, in my opinion, is the Baby Center Baby Development Tracker email series: from the time a woman enters her due date, she will receive highly specific, useful emails every week or month for years. I know people with 7-year-old kids who still open the emails they signed up for on Baby Center while the kidlet was still in utero.

That’s the engaging power of life event marketing.  Now: what life events are your customers facing, relevant to your offerings, that you can help them experience with more ease or less pain with great content?