Attract, engage, delight, and repeat. The marketing flywheel keeps your prospects thinking about you.
The symbol of a sales funnel provides a one-way picture of how prospects start at the top and work their way down their customer journey. But a funnel has limits. A marketing funnel, on the other hand, is fantastic for landing new customers.
But, what about earning repeat business?
Think of your marketing efforts as a flywheel that keeps turning and accelerating. It's in constant motion, always trying to get your repeat prospects to convert. Luckily, you have plenty of marketing automation software choices to help your marketing team implement a flywheel strategy to nurture leads towards a sale.
What is flywheel marketing?
Flywheel marketing helps customers return to you with repeat business or by driving referrals.
Once you set up flywheel marketing, it can turn your customers into brand advocates, which lowers your marketing costs while increasing your loyal customer base.
The marketing flywheel[1] has three stages:
Attract and earn buyers' attention by eliminating barriers to reaching your target audience. You do this through helpful content, such as a short video, complete guide, social media, and/or relevant ads.
Engage with your audience by making it easy for them to navigate through your brand. Marketing automation, easy checkouts, personalization, multichannel communication (email, chat, text), and lead nurturing all offer relevant ways to connect with your audience.
Delight by doing something unexpected that produces a happy emotional reaction. You can delight your customers by offering a discount, customer support, sign-ups with a customer loyalty program, and educational articles about the best ways to accomplish something with a product or service.
Unlike a sales funnel, a marketing flywheel keeps spinning along these three stages. The faster and more efficiently your flywheel spins (using marketing automation, of course), the more effective your ROI can become.
For example, you attract a customer using a form on your website that needs a name and an email address to get a 20% off coupon. Three days later, you send an automated email to that customer saying, "Hey, ready to use that discount?" A week later, if no other action has been taken, you can send another email saying "Hurry! Buy within the next 24 hours to earn an additional 10% off for 30% total."
After they complete the purchase, a week later you can send an email with suggestions for similar products they purchased to keep your brand on the minds of customers you already have.
Even better, repeat customers become advocates by talking to their friends about their experiences. "Hey, I got this great deal on a sweater last week."
5 tips for creating and evolving your funnel strategy into a flywheel
Like all marketing efforts, turning a funnel into a flywheel requires a systematic approach. Once you create this system, automated tools make it easy to manage.
1. Create customer personas
How well do you know your customers? Current customers give you multiple data points when they make purchases, such as contact and financial information. You can infer other information based on what they buy. If someone buys a lot of baby products, you can assume that person is a new parent or grandparent.
From this information, you can create personas based on what motivates them to make a purchase. Was it the discount on newborn baby products? Was it the timing? Was it the complete diaper kits that make a new parent's life more convenient?
Use their purchasing information to derive a psychological or emotional reason for buying your products or service.
Then, take this one step further. Who are your ideal customers? How do you attract them? How do you keep them?
Once you know your current and ideal customers, you can effectively target your marketing efforts.
2. Make content your personas need to engage with
Now that you know what motivates customers, you can create content that engages with them at every stage of the marketing flywheel.
Remember that content is more than just written words. The more varied content you can create, the better. Videos, newsletters, emails, social media posts, ads, and product images can all capture the attention of prospective customers while keeping your current customers engaged. Varied content for all three stages of the flywheel keeps relevant content in front of your target audience.
3. Decide who is the target for what messaging
Now that you've created the content, it's time to decide who receives what. Younger audiences might respond to a quick 10-second video like the ones you see on TikTok. Longer YouTube tutorials are excellent if you have products that could use a knowledge base, whether you sell software, appliances, paints, or art supplies. Older audiences or B2B customers may prefer emails or gated content. A native ad or a social media post would be best for those on Facebook or Instagram.
The more specific your content is to your target audience, the more likely they will respond to it. That’s why you should consider varied forms of content as part of your flywheel marketing.
4. Re-engage regularly with your target audience
The marketing flywheel allows you to re-engage with your target audience using several tactics .
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5. Analyze and adapt
Gather information from each marketing campaign using data collection tools and software.
Google Analytics compiles data about how users interact with your website. UTM codes in advertising allow you to track how many times an ad is clicked. Call tracking software allows you to generate multiple phone numbers for various ads or landing pages so you can tell which assets generated the most phone calls.
Once you have this information, you can adapt and refine campaigns to optimize their effectiveness. The trick is to set up your campaigns correctly from the start.
Capterra can help automate your marketing flywheel efforts
Software compiled by Capterra can make your marketing flywheel effortless by automating much of the process.
Want more info on a practical marketing strategy that can help with your flywheel? Check out our articles below..
How To Reshape Your B2B Sales Strategy Using Persona Targeting and Intent-Powered Data
5 Quick Steps to Create a Content Strategy and Measure Performance