Sales and marketing professionals are constantly slinging around new buzzwords, complex terms, and confusing abbreviations. It's what we do.
No blog, video, or sales pitch is complete until the phrase "boost ROI" or "improve your net promoter score" is used.
Well, here's another important term for you to memorize: the marketing flywheel.
The flywheel model was first introduced in 2001, but it's recently experienced a rebirth in the business world and inspired professionals everywhere to re-evaluate the classic sales and marketing funnel.
Keep reading to learn what the marketing flywheel is, why it's a beneficial business methodology, and how to implement it at your organization.
What Is a Marketing Flywheel?
A flywheel is a mechanical device that's designed to store rotational energy in an efficient way. At first, it can be difficult to spin a flywheel. But once momentum is built, this kind of contraption is able to perpetuate its own motion and spin by itself.
The marketing flywheel builds on this concept.
By uniting marketing, sales, and customer success teams, companies are able to better serve their audience, which builds momentum and generates both repeat sales and new customers via word-of-mouth marketing.
This approach to company growth is different than the one most organizations have been using for decades: the standard funnel.
Funnels are designed to take leads on a linear journey, which is often divided into three stages:
- Awareness: A consumer realizes that they have a problem.
- Evaluation: The lead searches for the best way to solve their problem.
- Conversion: The prospect makes a purchase and becomes a customer.
Customers start at the top of the funnel and (hopefully!) reach the bottom of it after a bunch of marketing and sales tactics that include content creation, user testimonials, and product demos.
The problem with the standard funnel approach is that the customer is an afterthought. Every ounce of organizational energy is spent turning leads into buyers, but little effort goes towards delighting customers into repeat purchases and becoming company advocates.
By contrast, the marketing flywheel focuses on the following three stages:
- Attract: Companies attract potential customers using a variety of promotional channels that include content creation, social media marketing, and digital advertising.
- Engage: Companies engage the traffic they generate via chatbots, email marketing, and sales interactions. The goal is to build trust-based relationships.
- Delight: Companies delight their prospects by providing them with relevant and timely content, easy buying processes, and excellent customer service.
The marketing flywheel works to attract new prospects and turn current customers into brand advocates simultaneously, the result of which is sustainable revenue and organizational momentum.
How to Take a Flywheel Approach
The benefits of the flywheel model are clear. The question is, how do you implement this approach into your marketing and sales efforts? If you're already using the funnel methodology, switching to a marketing flywheel is actually pretty straightforward:
1. Shift Your Resources
Chances are you have a huge pile of created content. We're talking about the blog posts, ebooks, case studies, webinars, and email sequences already in your company's archives.
Good news: you don't have to scrap these materials! You simply have to repurpose them.
For example, maybe your case studies are gated. Instead of requiring an email address for access, you might try posting them on the company blog for anyone to read—in other words, reassigning a typical piece of Conversion stage content (in funnel-speak) to the Engage stage of your new flywheel strategy.
Take a look at each page of content that your company owns and assess where it will fit best in your flywheel. But don't stop there. You need to reassign metrics and KPIs, too. For instance, in a funnel, the number of leads generated would fall into the Awareness Stage. When shifting this metric to a flywheel model, it would probably fit best in the Attract Stage. Use this same process to shift all of your funnel KPIs to your new marketing flywheel.
