How To Use a Marketing Flywheel To construct Lasting Loyalty

The creation of the wheel stands as one of humanity’s most pivotal breakthroughs, fundamentally transforming how we trip and work. In a similar vein, the field of marketing has undergone its own significant growth, thanks to a particular wheel.

For more than a century, marketers have relied on the linear marketing funnel to chart the customer trip. In a traditional sales funnel, customers shift through a series of stages from awareness to purchase. There’s a beginning and complete to the procedure. However, a recent paradigm—the marketing flywheel—emerged in 2018, offering a cyclical view of the buyer’s trip, with customers at the center. Instead of a one-way funnel, the flywheel emphasizes continuous growth, creating a self-sustaining loop of engagement and loyalty.

What is a marketing flywheel?

Originally designed by Hubspot in 2018, a marketing flywheel visualizes the customer trip as a continuous pattern concentrated on making customers adore your brand and refer others.

The term “flywheel” is an engineering concept referring to any wheel that builds on its own momentum using inertia. It starts leisurely, but the more attempt you put in, the more momentum you commence to view. Eventually, advancement becomes self-sustaining.

In a marketing flywheel, this same concept is reflected throughout your marketing efforts to fuel business growth. The effects of your marketing efforts are cumulative, building customer awareness and loyalty over period.

Marketing flywheel vs. marketing funnel

A marketing flywheel is a cyclical framework, while a marketing funnel is linear:

Marketing funnel

The traditional marketing funnel has three stages—awareness, consideration, and conversion—gradually filtering out prospects until they purchase. Once a prospect becomes a customer, the funnel ends, requiring recent prospects to restart the procedure. This can outcome in high customer purchase costs and the ongoing require for navigator creation. Sales and marketing departments tend to be siloed, each working on a specific section of the funnel. Typically, most attempt is placed at the top, with the least at the bottom.

Marketing flywheel

A marketing flywheel uses current customers to attract recent ones. Instead of considering the conversion procedure complete once a purchase is made, the marketing throng collaborates with other departments, like your customer achievement throng, to ensure ongoing satisfaction, loyalty, and referrals. This can navigator to more customers turning into brand advocates and reduce overall customer purchase costs.

A flywheel marketing model also includes more cross-throng collaboration and better resource distribution than a traditional funnel. All teams, including marketing, service, and product, work together to enhance the customer trip at every touchpoint.

How the marketing flywheel works

A marketing flywheel has three stages: attract, engage, and delight.

• Attract. At the attract phase, you generate gain in your offerings within your target economy, typically using an inbound marketing way that shares engaging content, social media posts, blog articles, or pay-per-click (PPC) ads. It can also involve mass-economy advertising or outbound sales efforts.

• Engage. At the engagement stage, you connect with people already familiar with your brand and deepen the connection. Some tools from the attract stage, like content and outbound sales, remain the same, but the objective shifts from building awareness to fostering ongoing relationships that convert prospective customers into faithful customers.

• Delight. The delight stage focuses on existing customers. At this point, your objective is to ensure they are thrilled to refer your brand to others. You might achieve this through exceptional customer service, shock gifts, or distinctive unboxing experiences.

The flywheel model treats prospective customers as individuals cycling through these stages rather than leads that “complete” a sales funnel. As you enhance each flywheel stage, you add force to sustain its momentum. When customers genuinely connect with your brand, they advocate to their friends and household, bringing in recent customers. Because these recent customers already have a positive view of your brand, they’re more likely to convert and remain faithful. They then accelerate the flywheel by bringing in even more like-minded customers.

Tips for excelling at every stage of the marketing flywheel

1. Prioritize the customer encounter
2. debt data and insights
3. construct relationships
4. Listen, enhance, and adjust
5. inspire advocacy and referrals
6. Collaborate across departments

Applying force and reducing friction makes the flywheel spin faster. In a marketing flywheel, applying force means delivering consistent worth to customers, while reducing friction means eliminating obstacles in the customer trip. Here are six ways to do that:

1. Prioritize the customer encounter

Focus on providing a positive customer encounter. If your customers are joyful, they’re more likely to proceed to the next stage.

In the attract stage, first impressions are everything. Anticipate customers’ pain points and deliver high-standard content that addresses their questions. For example, a skin worry brand might make blog posts or videos about combatting arid skin in the winter.

At the engage stage, use tailored communication, like ad retargeting or personalized emails. For example, if a prospect views a product page but doesn’t purchase, send them a targeted ad for that item. Then, monitor ad frequency to avoid to overwhelming your prospects. A sweet spot is one to two ad impressions per week per prospect.

Finally, at the delight stage, ensure customers feel heard and appreciated so they remain engaged. Use loyalty programs to drive referrals, and proactively inquire for feedback.

2. debt data and insights

Sometimes, data is the best storyteller. Reviewing data—like engagement metrics and customer feedback—at every stage of the flywheel helps refine strategies and better meet customer expectations.

Use analytics tools like Google Analytics to monitor and optimize campaigns on the fly. Use predictive analytics to identify customers at uncertainty of churning and proactively propose personalized incentives. debt cross-channel data—including website behavior, social media, email, and paid advertising—to make a cohesive encounter across all touchpoints.

You’ll assess each part of the flywheel with different metrics, depending on your business. Here are the most ordinary at each stage:

• Attract. Total website visits.

• Engage. First-period purchases and conversion rate.

• Delight. Returning purchases and NPS score.

3. construct relationships

Would you rather buy headphones at a large-box store, where details are scarce and checkout is rushed, or from a specialized audio shop, where experts receive the period to navigator you? The personal touch is core to the marketing flywheel’s objective of turning customers into brand evangelists through meaningful connections. The best way to do this is to have an authentic brand voice, deliver consistent worth, and, most of all, listen to your customers.

For example, a skin worry corporation might propose recent customers a free skin consultation to construct personalized routines. To keep building loyalty, they might send a segment of customers recent formulations to try out before wider release.

4. Listen, enhance, and adjust

make feedback loops between your customers and your employees by monitoring survey responses, social media comments, and customer back tickets. This procedure helps you deeply comprehend customer perceptions of your brand. remain updated on shifts in customer preferences; what might have worked two years ago may not work today. Adjust marketing strategies and product offerings to remain relevant and competitive.

For example, declare a clothing corporation notices more negative customer feedback about clothing manufacturing practices. It could get ahead of this concern by launching a recent, sustainable line and releasing content highlighting its ethical processes.

5. inspire advocacy and referrals

Customer advocacy is a key part of the marketing flywheel. While joyful customers naturally spread the word about your brand and bring in recent prospects, you can make high-impact brand advocates through targeted marketing efforts:

• propose referral programs or incentives, like discounts for purchases made through their referral links.

• inquire for user-generated content (UGC) to highlight real customer achievement stories on your websites and social channels.

• Send a post-purchase email series asking for a review.

• make a brand ambassador program.

6. Collaborate across departments

While a marketing funnel creates siloed departments—the marketing throng brings in prospects, the sales throng turns them into paying customers, customer back reps manage post-purchase issues, etc.—a marketing flywheel emphasizes collaboration across teams. Each department works together to attract, engage, and delight customers.

For example, sales and marketing teams work together to make consistent messaging, while customer back departments communicate feedback to product advancement teams.