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Date of Publication: 27 Mar 2023
Flywheel Marketing to Rev UP Your Sales
Are you tired of the traditional sales funnel approach that focuses solely on acquiring new customers? Have you been searching for a more customer-centric approach that can help you increase your revenue and grow your business? Look no further than flywheel marketing. This innovative self-sustaining marketing model is changing the game for businesses of all sizes, and it can do the same for yours. Get a steady stream of leads and prospects for your brand.
Anirban Guha
Digital Marketing Expert | Media Strategist | Entrepreneur
Table of Contents
• These days, people make decisions by asking their friends for advice, searching for mentions of your company on social media, and reading third-party reviews.
• With the flywheel, you use happy customers’ momentum to drive referrals and repeat sales.
• Flywheel helps to find and eliminate friction and get you to rev up you sales by making promoters out of delighted customers.
Boost Your Sales with Flywheel Marketing
Flywheel marketing is a customer-centric approach that focuses on delighting customers and turning them into advocates who help drive new leads and customers for business. By putting the customer at the center of everything you do, you can create a virtuous cycle that drives growth and increases revenue. With flywheel marketing, you can rev up your sales and achieve sustainable, long-term growth.
There’s no marketing ploy here. It’s not a jargon debate. There is no rebranding here.
By thinking of your business as a flywheel, you can make different decisions and adjust your strategy accordingly to use the momentum of your happy customers to drive referrals and repeat sales.
Let us first explain how the flywheel works so you can understand what I mean.
The three basic phases of flywheel marketing model are,
Attract → Engage → Delight
In the flywheel marketing model it is not just you who is working towards your business goal. Your delighted clients become your promoters and help you get your business going.
So, how does it work?
Flywheel uses the momentum generated by your delighted cusmoters. The emtire framework depend son three aspects,
• How fast you can spin it
• How much is the friction
• How big is the flywheel
The companies which have successfully implemented the flywheel model for their business have built their strategies to address all three phases.
How can you spin it fasters?
To increase the speed of the flywheel you need to identify which are the areas of impact. You add force to those areas. These forces are,
- Inbound Marketing
- Customer Referal Program
- Paid Advertising
- Customer Services
By making your customer successful, you are more likely to relay the success to other potential customers.
Since you want to spin it faster you need to identify and eliminate friction.
The areas of friction could be,
The areas of friction could be,
- Poor Internal Process
- Hierarchical Delays
- Lack of Communication between Departments
- Misalignment between your Team and Customers
The team structure is a vital cog in this wheel. You need to realign the internal structure to best suit the framework. Understand the various aspects of why customers are getting stuck at different levels of their journey cycle. You need to understand a few areas with clarity,
- How is the relationship between departments and teams?
- Is the pricing competitive? Is the pricing easy to understand? Is the cost less than or equal to the perceived value?
- Do you have an active mechanism for customers to interact at different levels of their journey, be it product inquiry or after sales?
When you minimize friction, you increase the speed of the wheel and create more promoters and advocates for your brand. The combined efforts of you and these delighted customers turned promoters will be a combined force that will make the wheel spin on its own.
When you start with a bigger flywheel, it takes much more time to gain top speed. But Once it gains that heavy momentum, it is really hard to stop.
As I have mentioned earlier, the flywheel marketing model given above has three very important phases or spokes. Let us understand them in detail.
Attract:
In this phase, you attract visitors with useful content and make yourself more available for your customers to know you. The trick here is not to be too assertive to get attention. The forces that you can apply here are
- Content Marketing – blogs, articles, social media content
- SEO
- Targeted Online Advertising – Pay Per Click Ads, Social Media Ads, Video Ads, etc.
Engage:
In this phase, you engage and nurture your leads to develop a relationship of trust and convert them to customers. The trick here is not to focus on building relationships and not on closing the deal. The forces you can apply here are,
- Website – having regular updates, offers, and engagement elements that encourage customers to repeat visits.
- Personalized eMails – Keep your customer informed of the latest developments through personalized emails.
- Database Segmentation
- Marketing Automation
- Lead Nurturing
- MultiChannel Communication – Chats, phone, messaging, emails etc.
- Free Trials / Trial Period
- Sales Automation
Delight:
During my days at B-School, one thing was taught hard – Customer is the King. The king can be your biggest ally when delighted. And if you can get him to do your bidding you become unstoppable.
The success of your customers is your success. At this phase, you help, support and empower your customers. Some forces that can be applied are,
- Omnichannel Customer Service
- Loyalty Programs
- Automated Onboarding
- Ticketing System
Our data shows that customers are, on average, 37% of the way through a purchase process by the time they reach the solution-definition stage, and 57% of the way through the process before they engage with supplier sales reps.
How is Flywheel Marketing different from the Sales Funnel
The basic difference between Flywheel Marketing and a Sales Funnel is in their structures. A flywheel marketing model is an ever-rotating circular model, while a funnel is a vertical seeping structure. The flywheel marketing aims to minimize friction between internal structures reducing clumsy handoffs between teams to smoothen customer experience. While in the funnel customer often shuffled from marketing to sales to customer service which could leave the customer irritated and unpleasant. Flywheel marketing is a holistic approach whose sole aim is to improve customer experience.
As per research, referrals and word of mouth superseded everything in the purchase process. A sales funnel does not account for this. A funnel can help you get customers but does not tell you how these converted customers can be delighted to get you more customers.
As per Havard Business Review, in the B2B segment, 57% of purchases are completed before buyers reach out to the vendors. The buyers are no longer looking to first-party information before making a purchase decision. They rely on third-party information, peer-to-peer recommendations, and word of mouth.
As per Micheal Redboard, of Hubspot,
- 81% trust their friends and family’s advice over advice from a business.
- 65% do not trust company press releases
- 55% no longer trust the company they use to buy from
The previous buyer generations used to trust salespeople, check out company case studies, and ask companies to send their customer references. But that does not work anymore, because the buyer generation has changed.
To know more about this, read > Don’t Generalize Buyer Generations – Understand the Defining Traits and Communication Strategy
For the younger generations, the decision-making process has become more involved and research-oriented.
Flywheel being a much-involved customer-focused model, prioritizes the happiness of the customers and sees customers as a channel to help businesses grow.
How to convert your Sales Funnel into a Flywheel Marketing Model
You can turn your sales funnel into a flywheel in a few simple steps by switching the existing framework. Improving the customer experience will lead to long-term relationships and self-qualified leads.
Here are 3 steps to change:
Define your flywheel
Your business can be converted to a flywheel marketing model without putting in too much extra effort. You must relook at your existing sales funnel with these elements:
- Find the basic KPIs you are already tracking and see if you can use them in your flywheel marketing model.
- See which existing strategies, platforms, and content types can be used to attract, engage, and delight customers.
- Comb for friction points where the buyer bounces or leaves the process. Understand if it’s content, handovers between stages, or internal friction points.
From your current processes, check
- Is this process in place for your convenience or that of your customer?
- Does this discovery apply to the attraction, engagement, or delight phases of the flywheel?
- How can you update the existing processes to accommodate the flywheel marketing models?
Keep what works and tweak it to fit your needs. Don’t be afraid to drop forces that don’t fit the flywheel or reshuffle for fitment.
So you need to,
Activate Flywheel → Adopt to the model → Adore Existing Customers
Focus on customer delight with appropriate touchpoints
Provide quality experiences to customers, delight them, and they will spin the wheel.
Inbound marketing is customer-centric at its core, and what better way to keep the flywheel moving forward than by delivering superior experiences?
Create touchpoints, especially, at the delight phase tailored to what makes your customers happy.
For example, you can add chats staffed by live agents, you can also have well-trained AI chatbots maybe with 24 X 7 support. You can even create a branded community for your customers.
These small changes can make a big difference to the customer.
So you need to,
Activate Flywheel → Adopt to the model → Adore Existing Customers → Create Advocates out of delight customers
Find and drop friction points
Examine your entire process from beginning to end and analyze the areas of friction. Here’s how to get started:
- Build your inbound strategy focused on value-based content for the right buyer stage at the right time
- A dedicated onboarding team to ensure a smooth transition at the point of sale.
- Refine communication with customers to one contact person (or one contact team).
- Give customers omnichannel access – e.g. email, book an appointment, call live agents, or fill out a form – instead of just one way to opt-in to buy. Say, for example, you have an e-commerce portal. But the customers may not like to buy it from your website directly for whatever reason. But they are comfortable buying from marketplaces of their choice. So have links to multiple marketplace products pages.
Let us check out the ways you can drop friction,
- Activate
- Optimize remarketing campaigns
- Improve website security
- Align your internal team
- Adopt:
- Improve and have quality content across your web pages, blogs, and knowledge bases
- Update your onboarding and demo files
- Provide easy switching options for upgrading (eg. from a Basic to a Premium Plan to a Professional Plan)
- Adore
- Personalize your content to existing customers and inbound communications.
- Provide ease of access for support (live chats or ticket features)
- Make renewals and billings easy
- Communicate new product benefits based on surveys and feedback forms
- Advocate:
- Make sharing your product or content that promotes your product easy.
- Incentivize reviews and sharing for existing customers
- Recruiting, onboarding, and management of product affiliates and ambassadors
It’s a good idea to do this part last because a lot can change as you replace your current processes and insert new touchpoints. Any change could cause friction if it’s not 100% correct, so in the end, look for sources of friction again.
Conduct tests and experiments to optimize conversion rate
Conversion rate optimization will be a continuous process for your business to improve the efficiency of your flywheel. There are a couple of essential components that fall under this so you’ll constantly be looking, trying, and tweaking them as you go.
Make unique CRO tests at relative frequency. See which missions really do best to empower deals or support existing customers or even drive them to refer your business or at least leave happy feedback.
You need to keep a constant watch on different phases of your flywheel and focus on those KPIs and areas of friction that you’ve assessed previously. Try different things with various processes and campaigns that could further give you better results for each stage.
Some model CRO tests for each stage include:
Activate: try testing different touchpoints, viz, landing pages, social media content, etc., and analyze which ones give you more purchases and sign-ups
Adopt: try highlighting different areas so as to get an upsell. e.g you can upsell based on value offering commonly used by hosting providers.
Adore: Experiment with different surveys and feedback from your customers and team.
Advocate: Try different incentive and loyalty programs
Basically, you need to keep up with the improvement game to keep delighting your customers to reach efficiency to add more force to the spinning flywheel.
Evaluate and keep track of your results
You must continuously monitor and assess your Flywheel Marketing Model, just like you would with a normal marketing and sales funnel. Take a regular look at the strategies and measurements you established at the start of your campaign(s) and make changes if needed.
The Flywheel Marketing Model has the additional benefit of ensuring a continuous process of acquiring clients, nurturing them, and creating advocates for referrals, which further adds momentum and sustainably increases conversions.
Since momentum is everything, it’s critical to perform a quick litmus test to determine whether you’re achieving your goals and expanding more quickly than before. Ensure client happiness, monitor customer recommendations, examine up-sells and cross-sells, and look for any gaps (i.e, the difference between what you deliver and the expectation of your customers) that can have an impact on your company.
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About the Author - Anirban Guha
Anirban Guha is an MBA graduate from Amity University, Noida. Starting his career with The Times of India Group, he has spent over 16 years in advertising and has been the founder-director of an award-winning digital marketing agency, Tejom Digital for over 6 years. He has worked with some of the top brands in India and beyond. He is an expert in creative design and digital marketing. He is passionate about helping businesses reach their goals. Beside his professional life, Anirban is an avid reader, a movie buff, a passionate gardener, an art enthusiast, and a foodie.