There’s been plenty of buzz about flywheels in marketing circles, especially among funnel fans. While the basic sales funnel is a marketing method, the flywheel is a sales growth strategy that can become the base of your long-term marketing plan. It’s been designed and refined based on expert experience and extensive testing in the field.
The marketing flywheel places the happy customer firmly in the centre of all that you do, including service, marketing and sales. It’s no secret that happy consumers refer more customers to you. The differentiating factor is how it integrates the entire customer experience and turns it into a well-oiled wheel.
- Systematically remove everything that interferes with the customer experience, such as inadequate content marketing and misaligned sales & marketing efforts.
- Add anything that will improve the customer experience, such as exceptional content marketing and excellent customer service.
When everything is functioning in its place, your wheel will spin smoothly and bring consistent results.
As online sales have evolved, many marketers have tried and adopted the same strategies that the flywheel promotes. The customer-focused concepts that make it work aren’t new. The brilliance of it lies in its design, and the fact that it can be used by virtually anyone to build a highly effective marketing strategy.
I’ve been testing it for five months. It isn’t much different than what I’d already been doing, but it is more structured and I was eager to follow it more rigidly to see if it made a difference. I haven’t seen consistent patterns to indicate our new sales are increasing. However, we experienced an increase of about 11 percent in repeat customers so far and everyone knows those are worth their weight in gold. If you’ve only been using basic funnels, the effect will be more obvious.
How the Marketing Flywheel Can Grow Your Business
There’s a lot more to it than the below infographic outline might lead you to believe. The size of the learning curve will depend on how much you already know about each recommendation. However, even if you’re starting with no knowledge, the learning curve is very manageable for most. The logic behind it is so easy to follow.
This infographic suggests the following ways to turn your flywheel into a sales generation machine:
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- Focus on customer retention.
- Develop a centralized customer communication strategy.
- Ask customers for reviews.
- Open multiple conversion paths for the customer through meetings, calls or lead generation forms.
- Invest in live chat solutions.
- Invest in localized marketing through content & support in multiple languages (starting with French in Canada).
- Decide sales commissions, taking revenue churn into account.
- Allow lead rotation, even in cases of unassigned leads.
- Survey your audience to understand the needs of customers.
- Increase investment in user experience.
- Foster the customer community by allowing them to answer each other’s questions.
- Optimize customer education by enabling them to learn at their own pace.
- Offer free trials to better attract leads with no company communication required.
- Consolidate service and sales teams so customers get the right response as soon as possible.
- Revamp your company’s analytic metrics with retaining customers in mind.
- Unify the sales team so customers don’t have to speak to multiple sales teams to buy multiple products.
Infographic provided by Outgrow.
Learn more from the Hubspot experts who made it a science, but don’t be afraid to play with it if some aspects require customization to better suit your business.
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Marie has an M.Sc. in Marketing and a certificate from the Ryerson Digital Media program. She's enrolled in one course or another most of the time and is always in the middle of a new business book (or three). Marie enjoys writing, traveling and volunteering at local events & trade shows.
Interesting..it’s more complicated but it makes a lot of sense. I’m curious what motivated them to mess with the mighty funnel in the first place? Someones thinking outside the box.