|
|
If we asked you to name your best marketing asset, what would it be? Your website? Your pricing? Your email marketing campaigns? While these elements all contribute to business success, your most promising marketing asset is actually your customers .
Your customers support your business with every purchase, making them key to Albania WhatsApp Number List successful growth. With this in mind, marketing leaders need to ensure that everything they do keeps customers satisfied with their buying experience. When you increase the number of satisfied customers, you also accelerate business growth.
To do this, we recommend following the flywheel marketing model.
Flywheel Marketing 101
A flywheel is a mechanical device that uses momentum to spin, known as the flywheel effect. While marketers have known about the flywheel model since the early 2000s, HubSpot revived the concept in 2018. The company explained the idea of taking a flywheel and applying it to sales and marketing strategies. Since then, HubSpot has adopted the flywheel model and adjusted its inbound marketing strategy accordingly.
At its core, flywheel marketing is centered around the customer. The other stages of inbound marketing—attract, engage, and delight—revolve around the customer. Because the flywheel is a never-ending cycle, the marketing lifecycle has no clear beginning or end. A satisfied customer creates momentum and keeps the flywheel spinning by referring others to your business.
This video from HubSpot provides a visual overview of the flywheel marketing model and how it can help businesses accelerate growth:
How Customers Impact Your Flywheel
Flywheel marketing breaks away from the traditional approach of viewing customers as objects to be converted. Instead, it empowers marketers to view customers as assets and make them part of the brand's growth. While the traditional marketing funnel focuses primarily on customer acquisition, the key goal of flywheel marketing is to use customers to drive expansion. While other models view customers as an afterthought, the flywheel model views customers as accelerators - making them a key part of your marketing strategy.
That is, a bad customer experience or hiccups in the buyer's journey can cause friction in the flywheel. Customer inconveniences — such as long wait times or disappointment with the final product delivery — can lead to frustration. As a negative force, friction naturally reduces the momentum of the flywheel and stunts business growth.
However, following the flywheel marketing model allows you to monitor declines in momentum and identify areas of friction. From there, you can take the necessary actions:
Determine the cause of the customer inconvenience.
Create a plan to minimize friction.
Create a seamless customer experience.
The practice of flywheel marketing model
Once Flywheel Marketing was launched, HubSpot redesigned its inbound approach to fit the new model, laying the foundation for a flywheel marketing strategy. You can apply the 3 stages of inbound marketing to every step of the flywheel model to create an unparalleled customer experience for your brand.
Flywheel Model
Attraction Phase
As a marketer, you need to create helpful and valuable content to attract new visitors to your brand. When visitors interact with the content, they learn more about your company. The type of content you create depends on your target audience and what resonates with them most. You can develop content marketing materials such as blogs, eBooks, video tutorials, and social media campaigns to attract new visitors.
Ongoing stage
Once you’ve attracted new prospects, it’s time to build relationships with them. To drive sales, your content marketing strategy should include segmenting your visitors based on common characteristics. You’ll then send these segments personalized promotions or content to meet their needs.
Tip: Don’t think of this process as converting leads into sales. Instead, you should work on building ongoing relationships with your leads. The momentum from these relationships will play a key role in driving your flywheel and increasing business growth.
Happy is the phase
The Happiness stage is all about your customers’ success. Your goal is to do everything you can to help your customers achieve their goals. You can do this by:
Send out post-purchase customer feedback surveys.
Make UX design changes to the website based on customer feedback.
Add a self-service customer service chatbot to your website.
Create a loyalty program.
Design an automated or more streamlined onboarding process.
Does Flywheel Marketing Work? Let’s Ask Amazon
In 2001, Stanford professor Jim Collins approached his former student Jeff Bezos. In his book, Good to Great , Collins explains how he helped Bezos accelerate Amazon's growth by introducing the concept of flywheel marketing to Amazon's management team. It's said that Bezos even sketched a flywheel model on a napkin. From that point on, Bezos focused Amazon on creating a positive customer experience. He felt that if he did that, he could increase traffic to the site and inspire more brands to sell their products through the site.
Is it useful? Well, we certainly think so, as the IoB reports that Amazon is currently the second most valuable company in the world after Apple, with a stock market capitalization of over $760 billion.
Breaking down the funnel vs. flywheel debate
The introduction of flywheel marketing sparked a debate: flywheel or funnel ? Traditionally, marketers have imagined the buyer's journey as a funnel. Your focus is on investing in strategies that allow you to widen the top of the funnel, attract as many customers as possible, and maintain a decent conversion rate. Once you've captured a prospect's interest, you can nurture them through the funnel and ultimately lead to a sale.
The marketing funnel model focuses on how many customers you can get out. But the problem is that sales and marketing teams end up investing a lot of time, money, and energy to convert sales. This leads to high customer acquisition costs. In addition, this model is so focused on converting leads to sales that it doesn’t give marketers enough time and resources to build ongoing relationships and turn buyers into repeat customers.
In contrast, flywheel models are centered around the customer experience; they generate energy, which keeps the flywheel moving forward . Flywheel marketing establishes a more comprehensive and unified way to attract prospects, generate sales, and develop lifelong customers.
This video from HubSpot explains why it’s time for marketers to start replacing their sales funnels with flywheels:
Flywheel Marketing Lets Customers Drive Business Growth
Customer trust in businesses is starting to decline, which means the shift from funnel marketing to flywheel marketing has never been more critical. HubSpot’s research found that:
81% of consumers trust the advice of friends and family over professional business advice.
65% of consumers do not trust paid advertising, and 71% say they do not trust sponsored social media ads.
55% of consumers agree that they don’t trust businesses as much as they used to.
Bottom line: Satisfied customers who support your brand have a huge influence on sales. Think of all the different places you go to learn about a brand or specific product from people rather than the sales team. The list includes:
Third-party sites: These include review platforms like Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Glassdoor.
TikTok: People can use the hashtag #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt — which has more than 4 billion views — to see thousands of product reviews.
Facebook: Not only can consumers post about their experiences with brands on Facebook, but the social media platform also has a feature that allows users to ask their networks for product recommendations .
Friends and Family: Semrush reports that 88% of people trust a brand more if a friend or family member recommended it .
The bottom line is that customers can—and will—influence future purchasing decisions . By transitioning from a funnel marketing approach to a flywheel marketing approach, you can put your customers at the center of your strategy. The more customers are satisfied with your service and the more they trust your brand, the easier it will be for you to attract new prospects and accelerate business growth.
|
|
發表於 14:26:55