Marketing Flywheel: The Effective Way to Drive Business Growth and Customer Delight.

If you've never heard of it, the marketing flywheel model was brought up as the anti-thesis to the marketing funnel. Means, the marketing funnel obsolete? Well, kind of. Though the marketing funnel isn't completely dead, there has been a shift in the way marketers work within their company to best serve the customers.

While the marketing funnel is a helpful guide through the buyer’s journey and an effective approach for lead generation, it focuses too much on closing a sale rather than delighting the customers. On the other hand, the marketing flywheel puts customer experience at heart, emphasis on the relationships between the company and customers as a cycle. It’s an endless loop where customers can keep interacting with the company even after their deal has over. It keeps customers happy, letting them drive referrals, and helping the company to generate more sales.

Through this post, I attempt to answer why the Marketing Flywheel model is worth abandoning your old marketing funnel and how to use it to create the best customer experience while growing and generating more revenue for your business.

1. 📌What Is Marketing Flywheel?

The marketing flywheel is an elevation to the traditional marketing funnel that we all are familiar with. While the marketing funnel is a straight line from sales strategy, the marketing flywheel is a “circular process where customers feed business growth” as described by Jon Dick of HubSpot.

The Marketing Flywheel model aligns your entire organization’s operations around providing a remarkable customer experience. Other marketing models think customers as an outcome, but the flywheel model thinks about how customers can help your business grow, thus, marketing flywheel is pretty important when thinking about your business strategy. 

When you treat your business as a flywheel, you need to make diverse decisions and adjust your business's marketing strategy. To show you what I mean, let me first explain how the marketing flywheel works.

2. 📌How Does Marketing Flywheel Work?

🎯 There are three main stages in the marketing flywheel:

✅ Attract - Providing genuine value to your target audience that helps you to inbound leads for your business.

✅ Engage - A constant relationship with the customer through the sales funnel, which consists of providing solutions, education, and personalized customer service for the customer throughout a customer’s buying journey.

✅ Delight - Offering such a positive experience to your customers with an aim to building strong relationships with your customers that they ultimately become the promoters for your business, which will help your marketing flywheel to spin right back to the attract stage.

Here you can clearly see that the marketing flywheel is built to keep spinning on its own, the longer the wheel gains its momentum and strength, the longer it works effectively.

🎯 Let's break it down a bit more and learn what each of this stage in the flywheel means.

1)💁🏻Attract Stage

This stage in the marketing flywheel is all about bringing people in. When you're crafting your inbound marketing strategy, just remember your key goal is to satisfy your customers. So, ensure that all your actions are done with the prospect’s best interest in mind and you're driving the right type of traffic to your website.

The attract stage's main goal is to encourage the customer to begin the buyer’s journey on their own. If your inbound marketing techniques are focused with those specific target audiences in mind and you're providing all the helpful (free) content that will be convincing them to act upon your CTAs and reach out for more information, your potential customers can easily determine whether they’re keen to work with your company.

🔊 Strategies to Attract Stage

⚡ Content marketing and blog posts

⚡ Social media presence

⚡ On/off-page SEO and keyword strategy

⚡ PPC ads

2) 🗣 Engage Stage

After customers are brought in, the next step is to provide them with even more content and information that will help you to convince them to move forward with your product or service. 

Engaging a customer can mean a lot of things that depend on a particular customer's end goal and their needs from the company.

You can automate some of the processes in the engage stages, such as your content creation and email strategy. But, it's necessary to maintain open communication with your sales and customer service teams to ensure you understand what your potential customers are saying, asking, or having trouble with. This way, you will be able to create more personalized content for each target audience. Simply, engage stage techniques to give direct answers to problems customers are bringing to your customer service team.

🔊 Strategies for Engage Stage

⚡ Gated content like downloadable eBooks, templates, and white papers

⚡ Elevated free content like in-depth explainer webinars/videos

⚡ Offering a free trial of your product or service

⚡ Segmented email campaigns

⚡ One-on-one interactions like initial phone calls or offering demos

3) 🚩 Delight Stage

This delight stage is what sets the marketing flywheel apart from the marketing funnel. Usually, the old-school marketing teams would lead the potential customer to a salesperson and hands-off from there. Then, salesperson closes the deal and boom, the customer would be out of the door. What’s now? Everything back to square one and the marketing process would start all over again.

Unlike, the marketing funnel, the marketing flywheel approach sees this delight stage as a medium between a completed deal and the next group of potential leads with the existing customers playing the key role. If you've been successful in the flywheel up to this point and helped your customers to find a solution for their specific needs, while providing them with the out-of-the-ordinary customer service, then definitely you should have a happy customer on your hands which is more precious than gold.

These delight customers are the ones with whom you can work on creating case studies, product/service review videos, and other user-generated content that you can use for your promotion.

Just think of a brand-new customer's POV. Who do you trust more: A company selling their product/service or a customer giving their honest opinion about the product/service? Obviously the customer, right? 

Therefore, nurturing good relationships with your delight customers and keep them driving your marketing flywheel will lead to more sales opportunities for your business.

🔊 Strategies for Delight Stage

⚡ Personalized tailor-made email campaigns

⚡ Hosting in-person programs for your customers to network and continue their education

⚡ Offering exclusive "members-only content, like webinars and eBooks

⚡ Making a referral program

⚡ Try out invitations to a new product, service, or features

3. 📌The Marketing Flywheel VS The Marketing Funnel

I know what's going on in your mind: For years, businesses have structured their business strategies around the marketing funnel — and it worked well for many of them. But, in today's digital world, third-party site reviews, peer-to-peer recommendations, and word-of-mouth play a bigger role in customer's buying decisions than ever before. You know what? 81% of buyers trust their friends’ and families’ recommendations more than companies’ business advice, and 55% of buyers report that they trust the businesses they buy from less than they used to. At the same time, 57% of B2B buying processes are done before buyers ever reach out to vendors. 

That's the reason, the traditional marketing funnel failed many marketers, salespeople, and business leaders alike. The marketing funnel has one major flaw: It views customers as an outcome of marketing strategy, not a driving force. Besides, marketing funnels bring customers but don't consider how those customers can help your business to grow. That's why marketing flywheel is so important for your business growth. As the marketing flywheel is an all-inclusive and unified way of signifying the forces that affecting your business’s growth.

4. 📌Examples of Marketing Flywheels

Great marketing flywheels power nearly every scaling internet property out there. Almost all businesses employ the philosophy of flywheel. Let's check out some of the examples of effective marketing flywheels.

☑️ Content and SEO Flywheel

The below flywheel was built on content and SEO, with a consistently-repeatable tactic and a system for reaching a larger audience, you can achieve success in your content and SEO efforts.

☑️ Social, Influencer, & Advertising Flywheel

If your product well-resonates with your target audience and the margins are decent, this flywheel can start spinning fast. Lots of consumer-focused products that are popular on social media use similar types of marketing flywheel models.

☑️ Freemium Product Flywheel

This flywheel model works well in combination with other marketing channels. Thousands of software companies and online platforms leverage this marketing flywheel model to grow their user base from thousands to millions of users.

☑️ Press & Word-of-Mouth Flywheel

Getting the press to write vividly about your product or service typically needs great efforts that hit into a media zeitgeist. By using this flywheel model you can create lots of publications and make people cover with a feel-good story in a unique way.

Not only these examples, but I've seen many companies and businesses use flywheels for cold outreach, events, conferences, webinars, and email newsletters with success. In a nutshell, what matters is that the combination of tactics you use in your flywheel.

🔔 Conclusion

You don't need to build a marketing flywheel by merging all your marketing channels and tactics. Start small. Begin with one tactic and distribute it to the few channels that make sense. When you got some good traction, move with your next strategy. In case, if it’s not working, pull back and double your flywheel efforts until you’ve got the desired conversion rates and audience for your business.💰

📝 The Marketing Flywheel Model can be the most significant marketing model in the modern-day businesses, as they put customers at the heart of each business operation that thrusts the company forward. While it may take great time and effort, it’s worth it. As with the flywheel process, you can enjoy continuous business growth that’s driven by your business's customers and raving fans.💌