A cyclical approach to sales and marketing isn’t a new concept, but it has become increasingly relevant in a sales environment marred by distrust and uncertainty. Conceived in the early 2000s, the idea of using loyal customers to power a never-ending marketing cycle was later popularised by HubSpot in 2018. Not only has the CRM platform brought the idea to the forefront of modern marketing, but it has fully adopted this strategy as a replacement for the traditional sales funnel model.
What Is a Flywheel Strategy?
If you think about the last time you bought a product or service online, what was it that originally caught your eye? A few years ago, it was probably a sponsored Facebook ad with an attractive offer and a well-edited video. However, with the rise of AI and a greater awareness of common marketing practices, potential customers are wise to simple attractions.
In fact, they aren’t just aware of the tactics companies use to get their attention—they’re cautious of them. This is where customer reviews or feedback from friends and family have become invaluable. Even the world’s largest shopping platform, Amazon, markets products on the strength of their reviews. So imagine being able to leverage the loyalty and positive feedback of your existing customers to drive never-ending lead generation. Well, with a flywheel strategy, you can.
A form of inbound marketing, the flywheel model uses the same principles as the flywheel in an engine to attract leads, engage with customers, and drive retention. With your customers at the centre of a flywheel model, they become the momentum that supports continued growth and, ultimately, a more successful business.
The flywheel model is an inbound marketing strategy that uses the momentum of your loyal customers to create a never-ending cycle of lead generation.
How Does the Flywheel Method Work?
As we’ve alluded to, the flywheel method relies on the same principles as the flywheel you’d find in a car engine. First, you need a driving force—your loyal customers. Then, once engaged, they become the momentum that keeps the marketing model spinning. Moving away from the centre are three crucial spokes to keep the momentum going:
- Attract: Encourage lead generation with ad campaigns, social media content, and blog posts. You want to offer customers more of the content they love, without putting obstacles in place.
- Engage: Once customers have discovered your brand or business, they need to stay engaged via personalised email marketing, testimonials, and product recommendations.
- Delight: Keep customers coming back for more with exclusive offers, bespoke marketing campaigns, and loyalty programmes.
The sole focus of a flywheel marketing strategy is prioritising the customer experience above anything else. By applying force in certain areas and removing friction in business operations, you can ensure the flywheel keeps spinning and your existing customers are the catalyst for lead generation, referring new customers to your business. We’ll dive into the specifics of starting or adapting to a flywheel method shortly, but first, let’s take a look at the key differences between a flywheel and a funnel to see how the former provides a host of benefits.
To get the flywheel moving, businesses focus on three key segments: attract, engage, and delight. The goal is then to apply force to these segments and remove friction in your operations to keep the flywheel spinning.
Marketing Flywheel vs Funnel
The marketing funnel model has been a staple of lead generation for decades. And, depending on the business or target audience, it can still prove effective.
With a sales funnel, the goal is to generate as many leads as possible in the hope that they convert to sales. You start by generating awareness of your business/brand, and as a lead progresses through the customer journey, their suitability is assessed and your sales team tries their best to guide them towards a final sale. Once complete, the customer is left to their own devices, and your sales team returns to generating new leads where possible.
However, as shopping habits change and consumers become increasingly cautious of online businesses and ad campaigns, a linear approach to marketing is losing traction. It simply isn’t sustainable to put so much effort into lead generation only for customers to go elsewhere once the sale is complete. A marketing flywheel strategy not only focuses on the customer journey, but it retains an emphasis on conversions by keeping your now-loyal customers on board. After all, it’s far easier (and more cost-effective) to focus on pleasing the customers you have than continuously chasing new ones.
Whereas a sales funnel ends when a lead converts, a flywheel doesn’t. It keeps spinning, even after the sale is complete, and uses that momentum to generate new leads for you—without the need to start from the interest-building stage all over again.
Sales funnels are a traditional marketing model that lose their effectiveness once a sale is complete. The flywheel model focuses on a customer’s entire journey, and uses their loyalty to drive further sales and lead generation.
Benefits of Flywheel Marketing
With the flywheel’s sole focus being the customer experience, you may be wondering how it compares to a highly motivated sales team targeted on conversions. Below are several benefits to the flywheel model, which, combined, far outweigh the perks of a linear sales approach.
- Simplified processes: Under normal circumstances, the focus of a growing business includes closing more deals, reducing the length of the sales cycle, improving efficiency, training the sales team—the list goes on. With a flywheel approach, the focus is simple: remove friction from business operations. By eliminating tertiary goals, automating processes, and aligning values, you simplify the overall process and make it easier for your teams to make decisions that matter.
- Aligned company values: Awareness of company goals and values is integral to a successful business. But if you’re tracking dozens of sales metrics and monitoring just as many processes, how can a team stay motivated? With loyal customers at the core of your marketing strategy, it’s easier to create company values that resonate with entire teams, not just specific individuals or departments.
- Increased growth: Some people assume a focus on the customer journey rather than raw sales is detrimental to progress. However, what they’ll soon release is that a flywheel model not only increases the volume of new leads but does so at a fraction of the effort, thanks to the influence and engagement of loyal customers and brand advocates.
- Improved teamwork: No matter the complexity of your business or the departments involved, it’s far easier getting your teams to work side by side using the principles of the flywheel model. Teams stay engaged, problems in the customer journey can be addressed at pace, and the measures for success are clear at all levels.
From streamlining the customer experience to simplifying in-house processes, the flywheel model has benefits that influence every level of your business operation.
How to Apply the Flywheel Method
With the benefits laid out, it’s time to initiate the most important business decision you can make today—a shift towards the flywheel marketing model. Whether you’re unifying your sales team for the first time or pivoting from an existing sales funnel, the steps outlined below will help transition your business to this modern strategy.
Starting a Business With the Flywheel
The adaptability of the flywheel model means you can make it work whether you’re starting from scratch or updating an existing marketing strategy. To help understand the initial setup, we’ll assume your marketing team is implementing the flywheel model for the first time.
1. Identify Goals and Objectives
All good marketing strategies start with clearly defined goals and objectives. The focus here is ensuring targets are SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. It sounds complicated, but it simply involves breaking down an ambiguous target such as “increase sales” to “increase store sales by 20% before the end of quarter one”, for example. The more specific and measurable the target, the easier it is to track success and make changes that help you get there.
2. Know Your Target Audience
You’ll need to have a detailed understanding of their motivations, values, and shopping habits. An in-depth customer persona is essential, as you can use this information to apply force to the most effective areas. If you’re struggling to get the data you need from your customers, consider customer surveys or social media listening tools to help you understand trends and patterns in behaviour.
3. Craft an Engagement Strategy
Engagement will look slightly different depending on the type of products or services you offer, but it’s all about being personal and providing bespoke offers. Consistency is also king when it comes to engagement, so content calendars, regular team meetings, and scheduled posting will all ensure customers become the loyal advocates your business needs.
4. Create Content for Each Stage
It’s important to remember that not all customers will have the same level of involvement or interest in your business. As such, your content and engagement strategy should reflect this. Consider sending personalised product recommendations, segmenting your mailing list, and harnessing the information from your social media insights. While it isn’t feasible to create a personalised experience for every customer, you should identify key groups and provide content or offers that capture their attention.
5. Regularly Evaluate
Your flywheel can support never-ending lead generation, so it’s essential to match that momentum with continual evaluation. Customer engagement metrics, such as referral rate, customer satisfaction (CSAT) score, and net promoter score (NPS), can all help you identify if your strategy is working. These measures will also help you identify areas of force—parts of the customer journey that didn’t meet or engage your target audience that require your attention.
Shifting From the Sales Funnel to the Flywheel
If you’re an active business but not getting the results you want from a traditional sales funnel, then it’s time to change your approach. Fortunately, nearly all of your resources (blogs, email content, webinars, etc.) are still perfectly viable. They simply need a few amendments to fit the flywheel model.
1. Repurpose Content
The simplest way to repurpose content is to understand where it fits in the sales funnel model, and what needs to change in order for it to meet the parameters of attract, engage, and delight. For example, you might have blog posts or exclusive newsletters gated behind email signups as part of the sales funnel interest stage.
Under the flywheel model, this content can transition to the engagement stage, but without adding obstacles (such as signups) to the customer journey. Remember, the focus is applying force in the right areas so that your customers become the momentum.
2. Identify and Apply Force
Speaking of force, it’s time to identify which areas require effort from your sales and marketing team. This is especially important if your flywheel strategy is just getting started. A flywheel in motion is easy to maintain, but just like the mechanics of a car, you’ll need some initial force to kick-start the process.
For a business lacking in content, this could mean increasing blog posts to create a catalogue that attracts and engages using relevant keywords and topics. If your content strategy is solid, but customers still aren’t returning, then what does your after-sales team need to do to reduce customer churn?
3. Identify and Reduce Friction
Apply force to the correct areas, and you’ll quickly see an uptick in customer satisfaction. However, are there improvements to your internal process that could make applying force more efficient? So far, we’ve focused on external actions, but it’s now time to look at how your teams operate, how they communicate, and whether they have enough resources.
Could automation tools streamline data gathering that currently takes weeks to accumulate? Does your content team need access to better SEO tools to help them create blogs around the topics or keywords that really matter? Or could your sales team benefit from clearer direction? The key is to take a systematic approach, identifying and (ideally) removing friction from your business operations.
4. Regularly Evaluate
The flywheel model always comes back to one critical action—regularly evaluating progress. Even if you already have pages of exciting online content, an ever-growing mail list, and customers singing your praises on social media, where else could you apply force to keep the flywheel spinning? Celebrating success is a must, but the most profitable businesses understand that there is always room for improvement.
The flywheel model is flexible enough to adapt to an existing marketing strategy, but it can also be used by businesses from the outset.
Flywheel Marketing: Your (New) Path to Success
The shopping habits of customers online and on the high street are changing. Once flashy and eye-catching deals no longer have the same appeal, and consumers have become increasingly cautious of offers that seem too good to be true. Not only does it take more effort to attract new leads, but many traditional sales models (such as the funnel) fail to recognise the importance of customer loyalty or the power of brand advocacy.
The flywheel model puts your customers at the heart of your business and leverages their immense power to drive new leads, promote offers, and bolster loyalty. It not only represents a modern approach to marketing, but it is much more closely aligned with current shopping habits. Whether you’re transitioning from an existing sales funnel strategy or starting fresh, the flywheel method can help to drive the sales your company needs to have a bright and prosperous future.
