Your guide to the funnel vs. flywheel models

A few years ago, if you asked anyone in marketing about the best way to capture the customer experience, they’d probably proclaim the strengths of the funnel model. Now, though, customers are adapting—and so should your marketing strategy. The marketing flywheel model encourages companies to use the momentum of satisfied customers to propel even more growth. Keep reading to find out exactly what it is and how you can utilize it in your strategy.

What is the marketing flywheel model?

The marketing flywheel model centers around one core: delivering an outstanding customer experience. Physical flywheels are mechanical devices that use the momentum to store and deliver energy, and the marketing flywheel does something similar in the customer journey. With the flywheel model, you can use the momentum of happy customers to increase referrals and repeat sales, leading to even more energy to keep the wheel spinning.

The energy in your flywheel depends on:

• How fast you spin it
• How much friction there is
• How big it is

When you add more energy and time to each area, you can speed up your flywheel. Programs and strategies like inbound marketing, a customer referral program, and paid advertising are all forces that add more energy to the flywheel and make the customer experience a better one for each customer. When those customers have a great experience, they’ll share their happiness with potential customers, adding even more energy to the flywheel.

Funnel vs. flywheel

Want to know the biggest difference in funnel vs. flywheel models? In the funnel, customers are an afterthought of the marketing strategy, but in the flywheel, they’re at the center of the model and the driving force for each internal and external decision.

Why does this new way of thinking matter? When you put customers in the center of each decision and focus on the customer experience, you can deliver greater value and therefore, attract even more customers.

Attract, engage, and delight

So how exactly can you make the flywheel marketing model part of your customer experience strategy? There are three steps that feed into one another:

1. Attract: Attract visitors with useful content and earn their attention with content marketing, search engine optimization, social selling, targeted paid advertising and more. While you work on attracting customers, remove barriers like confusing fees and unclear connection processes for prospects.
2. Engage: Make it easy for buyers to shop with you by allowing them to engage the way they want to. By adding personalization to emails, marketing automation, multichannel communication and sales automation, you’ll show prospects that you value relationship building, not just making sales.
3. Delight: Support your customers to reach their goals through multichannel availability, automated onboarding, loyalty programs and more. When you delight your customers, they’ll want to stay part of the flywheel—and they’ll want to tell others about it, too.

Each stage works with the next. When customers are delighted, they become more than just customers—they become fans who recommend the product to others, leading to attracting others. According to HubSpot, the flywheel model is successful because the business’s growth doesn’t just rely on employees—customers are a part of the growth strategy.

Removing friction in your flywheel for a better customer journey

The flywheel is propelled by the energy and momentum of each customer, but friction can slow down that energy and the flywheel entirely.

Here are areas of friction you can remove to increase each customer’s phase in the journey:

• Inefficient employee structures and unaligned teams
• Cluttered pricing
• Strict processes that discourage prospects from connecting when they want
• Website security
• Difficulty of upgrading, getting support, renewing and billing

By changing these processes to make them align with what each customer wants, you’ll find less friction slowing down the flywheel.

It’s important to make sure everyone in the team is aligned with the flywheel model. Every action by each team at your company impacts the other and impacts the flywheel as a whole. Marketing and digital teams can ensure that prospects have their questions answered quickly, sales teams work to make sure that prospects and current clients are happy, and support and service teams make sure that current customers stay satisfied and promote the company.

Make customers your biggest fans with the flywheel marketing model today

According to HubSpot, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t. When you adopt the flywheel model, you’ll meet your customers where they want to be met and turn customers into your biggest advocates.

To work with a B2B marketing company that understands the flywheel model, contact BRK Marketing today.