Marketing strategies play a key role in the success of your business. Having a well-planned marketing strategy can result in profits and success. Today, with competition between businesses soaring at an alarming rate, marketers need to come up with strategies that will retain their existing customers as well as bring in new customers. This is why businesses today are moving away from the trusted funnel marketing model of growth to the flywheel marketing growth model. With businesses focusing on the repeat earning aspect, there is a further need to adapt to this new model of growth.
In this post, we will take an in-depth look at what flywheel marketing is, how it differs from the sales funnel marketing model, why businesses should adopt this model and some tips for moving toward the flywheel strategy.
Table of Contents
What is Flywheel Marketing?
Flywheel marketing falls under the category of inbound marketing strategy, wherein the crux of the marketing efforts focuses on customers. Inbound marketing strategy can be described as a strategic approach for creating content that is better aligned with what your target audience needs. It helps businesses to make themselves visible to potential customers. In flywheel marketing, the customers act as the major momentum or the mechanical energy that enables the business to grow and succeed. The idea or purpose of using flywheel marketing is to enable customers to offer repeat business and drive referrals.
There are three main stages in flywheel marketing:
- Attract – This stage focuses on attracting the customer’s attention by getting rid of any possible barriers to reaching the intended audience. This can be done by using engaging and useful content in the form of web articles, blog posts, social media content, relevant ads, short videos, guides, etc.
- Engage – This stage focuses on engaging with your audience by making your brand easily navigable, fostering trust, and ultimately nurturing your leads into positive sales. Businesses can opt for several methods to engage with their audience, such as marketing automation, multichannel communication, personalization, easy checkouts, etc. Businesses can also make use of effective strategies like email marketing and conversion rate optimization.
- Delight – This stage focuses on actions that will delight your customers and bring a happy emotional reaction. You can do this by continuing to provide products and services that interest your customers. You can also use various tactics like discounts, customer loyalty programs, customer support, etc.
By keeping the customer’s experience at the heart of every stage, you can combine all your marketing efforts to create a uniform process that results in customers providing repeated business as well as bringing in new referrals.
Flywheel Marketing vs. Sales Funnel Marketing
Most companies use the sale funnel marketing model; however, shifting toward the flywheel model is highly recommended. Although both these models focus on converting prospects to customers, the approach each of these models uses is different.
In the sales funnel strategy, the focus is on moving people down a tunnel using different stages. In the process of moving down through the various stages, the customers may have to communicate with different team members. Sales funnel marketing typically has four stages – awareness, interest, consideration, and action. The problem with this marketing strategy is that there is no direct or straight path to the path, resulting in customers hopping between various stages before making their decision.
The flywheel marketing strategy, on the other hand, places the customer at its center and focuses on converting strangers into prospects to ultimately promoters. It uses the cycle and the momentum of people converting from prospects to customers to bring in new customers. The idea is to make customer happiness one of the key priorities and use those happy customers as a medium to increase the business’s growth. This model enables businesses to focus on loyal customers.
Top 3 Reasons to Use Flywheel Marketing
Here are the top three reasons why you should move away from the sales funnel marketing strategy to the flywheel strategy.
- Earn more qualified leads – As mentioned earlier, flywheel marketing is customer-centric, which means that every marketing strategy that you think of will focus on providing the best experience to your customers. This in turn results in they referring others to the business. Using the flywheel approach can enable your business to generate more qualified leads because majority of the people rely on word-of-mouth experiences and often opt for products and services that their family and friends have endorsed.
- Better collaboration with teams – Unlike the sales funnel approach, where a customer ends up interacting with different teams at different stages, the flywheel approach enables all the teams to interact with the customers at every stage. By presenting a unified team to the customer, you can keep the momentum of the flywheel going, allowing more people to push through the cycle.
- Maintain loyal customers – For every business, retaining loyal customers is very important as it is cost-effective when compared to getting new customers on board. The flywheel strategy allows businesses to maintain loyal customers as well as use their experiences to get new clients. The sales funnel strategy focuses more on getting new clients instead of maintaining loyal customers.
Four Key Tips to Creating and Transforming your Funnel Strategy into Flywheel
In order to turn your funnel into a flywheel, you need to follow a systematic approach. Here are five tips that can help you effectively turn your funnel into flywheel.
- Creating customer personas – Creating customer personas can help you to target your marketing efforts in a more effective manner. Take note of all the purchasing information to create your customer personas. This will also help you determine who are your ideal customers and who are the current ones.
- Creating content to engage with your personas – Once you have discovered what motivates your customer, you can create content to continuously engage and re-engage with them. Make sure to use different types of content, such as personalized emails, newsletters, social media posts, short videos, etc.
- Deciding on your target audience – Once you have your pool of content, you need to decide who is the target audience for that specific content. For example, older people may prefer emails while the younger generation may prefer quick 10-15 second videos. By creating content specific to the target audience, you can increase your chances of a response from them.
- Analyze and adapt – Although the expectation is that you set up your marketing campaigns effectively from the start, there is always scope for adapting them based on the way the audience interacts with the content. You can use various data collection and analyzing tools to find out how well your content is performing and make changes as required.
Conclusion
For every business, customers are the heart and soul. So, if you want to put more focus on what your customers want and how to offer them what they want, we recommend you opt for the flywheel marketing strategy. This is the best way to build trust, turn your leads into sales, and ensure the continued success and growth of your business.
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