The Marketing Flywheel was conceived on the benign and thoughtful ideology of delighting and providing an experience.
Get all your answers here:
Introduction to Marketing Flywheel
How to Use the Marketing Flywheel
Customer at Centre of Marketing Flywheel
What is the Ideology of Marketing Flywheel
Why should you shift from Funnel to Flywheel
It has been only a while since the marketing flywheel has come into picture. And, much like the analogy of the it rotating faster with each push, it has already swept us off with its tumultuous wind.
Let us understand what the flywheel is and how does it’s ideology makes sense.
Introduction to Marketing Flywheel
The actual flywheel is a machine that is known to store rotational energy. With an external push, it starts to move and needs a few more pushes to finally get going. As the force of push increases, it moves faster and is able to store more energy. There are varied materials that are used in the making of the flywheel like lead, iron, steel or aluminium.
When we apply this to marketing, it looks something like this:
External push: The customer-centered inbound strategy
Momentum: The effect of the strategy in terms of leads and customers
Materials: People and Processes involved in Marketing, Sales and Service
Release of Stored Energy: The decision making power of customers
You can read more about it in one of our blog posts named – Marketing Flywheel- What happened to the Marketing Funnel
How to Use the Marketing Flywheel
To introduce the marketing flywheel in your company successfully can be a difficult task and it can also be very confusing. So, before you do that, brace your people about what would be expected from them.
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 compiled a guide that you can go through – How to Use the Marketing Flywheel.
Customer At The Centre Of The Marketing Flywheel
The Inbound strategy of building relationships with customers rather than just selling is the foundation of the Marketing Flywheel.
Your company should work towards securing the customer by showing them that you care about their needs and appreciate their presence.
The one thing you should definitely be aware of is that if you choose to use the marketing flywheel, you will have to listen to what your customer says and base your functions around that.
You can understand it better here – Keeping Customer at the centre of your flywheel
What Is The Ideology Of Marketing Flywheel?
Like the flicker of bulb before its stable gleam, every idea is a flicker before it becomes a fully formed concept. That tiny flicker is what has set stage for the concept and therefore, it has the biggest role to play.
The concept of Marketing Flywheel is derived from certain principles which can be safely known as the Ideologies of the Marketing Flywheel now.
When you ask the Question – “What do you want to achieve out of this?”, that’s when your ideology develops and acts like blood passing through all your functions for the rest of your business life.
Let’s get started on what ideology started the Marketing Flywheel:
1. Focus on Customer Service
A brilliant experience given to your customers will build your brand image and generate goodwill.
You are completely dependent on customer perception so you should always work on your interaction tactics and modes of communication. For example- Be available and approachable to them at all times so they are comforted knowing that their problem or requirement will be resolved.
Unlike the funnel, flywheel ideology encourages you to bring back the same customer time and again to your brand and let their word of mouth bring in potential customers.
2. The Effort should be genuine
This is the crux of the ideology, you should be willing to put in a lot of effort. There is no concept of aggressive marketing here, so you have to genuinely give your customer what they want and be a credible source of information.
Since the flywheel needs several pushes to get going, what are your pushes? How much content are you publishing? What are the channels you are considering? What is the frequency of your posts? How are you ranking on the search results? How much research are you doing to get the right knowledge?
Your content and research must be impressive and informational so your customer gets the most of the deal.
3. Alignment Of All Your Functions
The objective is to achieve excellent cohesive work environment which will automatically make it easy for the customer to interact with your business.
The alignment can be in terms of communication, cooperation and coordination. For example, you are having a great success at sales but your marketing team starts producing content that is irrelevant to what you do, then you might lose your sales as it is a misalignment.
Another example could be that if a customer calls the administration department to speak about an ongoing offer, the admin transfers the call to marketing department, this can frustrate the customer. The marketing department must prep everyone in the organisation of their campaigns so they are able to handle customer calls well.
Your services should be in coordination with the sales you’re generating and the marketing that is accelerating these sales.
4. Keeping Patience
The flywheel model is shaped in a way that aims to achieve long term goals of trust and efficiency. You cannot expect this model to show you instant results.
Your due patience is the major need of this marketing flywheel model as it will benefit you greatly once you have established your credibility and proficiency in the market. Your customers will first need to acquaint themselves with you well enough so that when the need arises to buy your product, they don’t need to see your advertisement.
The core of this strategy is to create quality content and not market aggressively. You will not be forcing your client to buy the product or service. You will only build a brand image by writing informative blog posts, email courses, engaging social media content etc so the customer builds a relationship with you before needing your product/service.
Why Should You Consider Moving from Funnel to Flywheel
The marketing flywheel is revolutionized version of the funnel. So if you are letting go of the funnel to adopt the flywheel model, you aren’t really letting go of the funnel.
The one major drawback of the funnel was it’s approach to customers. Once the conversion was done, the funnel fell flat on retaining customers and bringing them back to the start. The Marketing Flywheel just corrects that.
With the flywheel, you are facilitating the movement of your functions so that maximum energy will be stored at the centre – where your customer is. Your focus is shifted from aggressively writing ads to selling an experience rather than a product/service.
You become more human and conversational with the marketing flywheel. You build a relationship with your customer that is beyond just a buyer-seller equation. You give them engaging content so they feel enlightened and delighted for approaching your brand.
The ideology behind the Marketing Flywheel is benevolent and graceful. The transition to the flywheel from the funnel might take time considering we have spent an entire lifetime depending on the funnel. However, once the transition is done smoothly, you will see a new age of marketing surface right before your eyes. So, be a part of the revolution.