Things are better when they are moving in a circle, don’t you think? The earth revolves around the sun, the wheels take a car forward, the wheel spins a yarn, the clock hands decide time, and so many more circles that make life easier. The Flywheel Marketing concept is just that.
A better marketing strategy that rotates to bring back your existing customers while attracting your potential ones. You build a long lasting relationship which increases the value of your brand. You can easily turn into a reputable organization by just providing excellent customer service.
Nevertheless, it can be a little puzzling to understand the flywheel marketing concept and introduce it into your company effortlessly. We have compiled a detailed introduction to the Marketing Flywheel that you may like to go through.
Things to Remember
If you want to move the flywheel, there are a few things you will have to keep in mind:
- You must be ready to experiment and watch your experiments fail. Accept each failure and build a new strategy with more zest than before.
- It is like a relationship, you need to invest a lot initially and the growth can be seen much later. This makes your relationship stronger and longer.
- You must try and find the flywheel in “everything” that you do. It can be difficult but it definitely isn’t impossible.
We have tried to resolve the most common doubts with our simplified examples and explanations, so here they go!
How To Figure Out Your Marketing Flywheel
The flywheel concept is fresh in the marketing sphere and it might be a little confusing to understand how to use it. Halligan’s speech can help us out here where he emphasized on creating our own flywheel. This is how he asked us to do it:
- Identify the core flywheel metrics your company tracks
- Find your company’s forces by flywheel stage. Redraw those forces to maximize delight and word of mouth.
- Identify points of friction between your customers and your employees, and points of hand-offs between internal teams, that affect customer experience. Re- align those points of friction to better serve the customer through automation, shared goals, or a reorganization.
Openthrive is an inbound and digital marketing agency that inculcated the flywheel in their regular functioning. We first decided on our metrics for web development, content writing, marketing and sales.
Then we analysed what we were doing before the flywheel- Focusing on driving sales and directly selling the service. We changed that to creating engaging content, developing customer relationships, education and complete transparency. This enabled us to focus on maximizing delight and word of mouth.
Friction in our sales process was identified which was reduced by using the HubSpot Sales automation and workflows.
The new plan has worked out exceedingly well for us, and we even started getting appreciation for the seamless process by our good leads and clients.
How To Use Force In Your Marketing Flywheel?
An actual flywheel relies on an external push which makes it spin eternally. The harder the push the faster the flywheel spins. Also, notice that the push is given at every nook of the flywheel.
Let’s bring the same analogy to flywheel marketing. If sales, marketing and services are pushed equally and with tremendous force, imagine the speed of the business growth.
What exactly is the force? Well, if your ultimate objective is to have happy customers, then the force would be delighting your customers through multiple strategies. If your customers are happy with your service, they will keep coming back. You have to ensure that they receive the same service every single time and hence, keep them happy, always.
How To Measure Your Flywheel Marketing Success?
Once you have successfully incorporated the flywheel in your business model, the next step is to measure your results. How to measure the success of your marketing flywheel while it is still spinning? Simple, check the amount of energy it has stored.
In marketing sense, check the sales it brought in and the lasting customer relationships it built.
- Identify the metric for each activity and notice the conversion rates between each stage. This help you find friction areas too.
- Record how much was added or lost to that metric in comparison to the previous month or year.
- Analyse where you went wrong and refurbish the plan to spin the wheel with a different force. Never reduce the intensity of your push, though.
For example, Openthrive measures its performance based on (number of inbound leads and loyal clients). This helps us understand how our metrics are doing individually rather than a whole. The loophole is caught and rectified when these metrics are put under scrutiny.
How To Increase Customer Delight By Marketing Flywheel?
This is an extremely important factor because the flywheel rotates around customers. Delighting them can be the most challenging stage but it will be worth the effort. You see, retaining customers is what adds momentum to your flywheel. They become your promoters by speaking highly about your brand.
To increase customer delight –
- Shift your focus from selling to delighting customers
- Be available to them 24*7 (use technology to do so)
- Don’t restrict your marketing to a general language or area. Expand your language base and modify your strategy by making it local.
- Be consistent with good service so they trust you. They should know that if they come back you will delight them again.
How To Identify And Reduce Friction In Your Marketing Flywheel?
Nothing is ever perfect but we can sure aim to reach close to perfection. Your flywheel is bound to have certain friction points and you have to work on eliminating them.
Friction in a flywheel means the points which are reducing the speed of rotation and slowing it down. In your Marketing Flywheel, ‘Friction’ can occur in various places like –
- Loading speed of your website
- Wrong message on your website
- No automation workflows set behind your website
- Your unresponsiveness on social media and emails
- Unsatisfactory product quality
- Delay in following up
- Impolite behavior of your sales team or any of your team members
- Delay in product/service delivery
This is a quick list of the most common friction scenarios, but this list can go very long if you really study your current processes. To resolve or reduce these friction issues, you must look at what you ultimately want to achieve in that particular situation. Now, see what’s the ideal option to reach that state, and then do it. Your glitches will be removed gradually.
Train your people to identify the friction points and give possible solutions. It’s a team effort at the end of the day.
How Can You Reduce Friction
- There are many departments created which involve a healthy human interaction. However, since there is human interaction, there is the possibility of friction. For example- departments not working in sync, customers constantly transferred from one specialist to another, argument between customer and representative, etc. You should better your human interaction aspect.
- The other conversation you strike with your customers is through the computer i.e website, chatbot, social media, blog etc. You have to ensure that since there is no one to guide each of your visitors personally, you have made your web presence accessible and user friendly. No technical glitches on the website/app must be left unattended.
- After a period of time, the personal goals of employees come into play and they might forget the ultimate organisational goal. You need to reiterate your objectives and remind them of their role in your organisation. Re-organise the team if it’s absolutely necessary. Conduct team building activities and teach them how to work in coordination.
Conclusion
That’s the list of things you need to know before inculcating the marketing flywheel strategy in your company. If there is any more doubt regarding the flywheel or the inbound marketing dynamic, you can get a free consultation at Openthrive.
We chase brilliance.