Goodbye Marketing Funnel, Hello Marketing Flywheel

Creating happy customers is, and always will be, your best marketing strategy. Which is why HubSpot has transformed the marketing funnel into a marketing flywheel.

Image Credit: HubSpot

The marketing flywheel offers a similar concept, but a different approach to inbound marketing. Where the funnel illustrated the inbound process as more linear, a flywheel emphasizes the cyclical nature of it. There's still an order-of-operations, but it's based around the customer, not the actual sale.

Using the flywheel, you’ll see that customers are at the center of your marketing strategy. Instead of ending the customer journey after the first purchase, the customer is incorporated into every part of your strategy. Regardless of whether you’re trying to attract leads or help your existing customers solve a problem, the marketing flywheel ensures that their needs are seen and met.

Why Are Customers Becoming More Important?

Customers have become, and perhaps have always been, the biggest growth opportunity. Customer promotion is one of the best ways to grow a successful company. When you focus on prioritizing the customer during the entire buyer's journey, you'll be nurturing prospects into lead, leads into paying customers, and customers into advocates for your brand.

Every stage is important when it comes to customer satisfaction. You can’t just stop after you’ve closed your deal. You have to continue delighting your customer even after they’ve purchased your product or service. Since customers are in control, you have to continue to deliver value throughout the customer’s life cycle.

HubSpot’s development of the marketing flywheel promotes and supports a customer-centric marketing strategy, which makes the flywheel a smart addition to the inbound methodology.

In order to fully understand the customer flywheel, let’s dive into the inbound service framework.

What is the Inbound Service Framework?

The inbound service framework compliments the tools that HubSpot offers through Service Hub. This framework goes hand-in-hand with the principles of the inbound methodology, but expands on customer importance.

The framework consists of three core ideas: Engage, Guide, and Grow. Each idea pertains to one of the important aspects of customer service and ensures that your company is getting the most out of its customers. The goal is to engage your customers, guide them to success, and eventually grow them into promoters.

1. Engage

Engage focuses on matching the way your customers communicate with your company. It’s the foundation of your company’s growth engine. You want to make sure that you are communicating with your customers and providing reactive customer support based on their needs. As such, the communication channels you set up will determine how you engage with your customers.

In a multi-channel world, Service Hub’s communication tool allows you to put all of your communication channels in one spot, whether you’re communicating through email, social media, or HubSpot’s ticket system. This will allow all members of your service team to collaborate on customer support.

2. Guide

You want to be proactively guiding your customers in ways that you know will help them. Information you learn from customer conversations and feedback can be helpful in shaping the way your company helps customers in the future. Using this information will also help your company build best practices for guiding customers toward success.

Use Service Hub’s knowledge base tool to point your customers toward blogs, content offers, and case studies that answer the questions they have. The knowledge base tool will also generate data that shows how successful your articles are at helping your customers, which you can use to alter your customer service approach.

3. Grow

By growing your relationship with your customers, you’ll be able to figure out which customers would make the best promoters for your company. You want to find customers that have earned so much value from your product that they want to promote your products to other people. Customer promotion allows your business to grow alongside of your customers.

You can use the customer feedback tool in HubSpot Service Hub to grow your relationship between your company and your customers. Use the data created to find customers who would best promote your brand.

Why You Should Use a Marketing Flywheel

The problem with the marketing funnel was that the customers weren’t at the forefront. In truth, they weren’t even a part of the funnel at all. However, in 2018, customers have become central to your strategy because they have complete control of how successful your company will be.

Even before people decide to buy your product, they're going search for good reviews. Prospective customers want to know that they can trust your company, and the first place they go for information is other customers.

Any interaction your company has with prospects and customers will affect how they view your brand and talk about your company. It’s essential to make sure your customers are happy with not only your product but with your entire company.

The marketing flywheel places customers in the center of your marketing strategy. Everything else, from marketing to sales and services, is designed so it revolves around your customers.

This ensures that your company isn’t just focused on closing deals, but rather, is dedicated to creating real relationships with your customers. You want to continue to nurture that relationship with your customer no matter what stage of the buyer’s journey they are on.

Using the inbound service framework alongside the newly developed customer-centric marketing flywheel will ensure that your company is growing through its interactions with its customers. By using Service Hub’s new tools, you’ll be able to gather data that will help you shape the a marketing strategy that will engage, guide, and grow your customers.