Inbound marketing can be complicated, especially when you are trying to implement it in your workplace. Understanding the Flywheel model is an easy way to remember and understand it all. The flywheel business model should adjust the way that you think about business and gain growth for your career and your business. Whether you are trying to figure out what inbound marketing is all about or explaining it to one of your coworkers in a pitch meeting, understanding the flywheel can be crucial in your career.
Flywheel photo sourced from blog.hubspot.com
What Causes the Wheel to Spin?
The inbound marketing flywheel is not just a marketing ploy or strategy to trick customers. It is a thorough explanation of how growth works regarding your target audience. The wheel is dependent on three things: the speed it spins, the friction against it, and the size of the wheel.
First is the speed. The wheel spins faster when you apply pressure to the areas within that are seeing the most growth and attention from customers. These areas of the largest impact help accelerate your growth.
The second factor that affects the flywheel is friction from the customers. Just like friction naturally slows down a spinning wheel, friction from unhappy customers can slow down your growth. What makes inbound marketing unique is the focus not only on just selling a product, but ensuring that your customers are satisfied afterward. The happier the customer is with your company’s product or service, the more likely they are to tell their friends about it.
The other aspect of slowing down friction from your marketing efforts is to eliminate anything within your company that is slowing down growth. Whether this is miscommunication communication cycles, employee dissatisfaction, or poor customer service, eliminating these issues from within your company will also reduce friction.
The last dependent variable of the flywheel is the size. The larger the organization, the harder it will be to get the wheel turning. Just as a merry-go-round takes longer to pick up speed than a spinning top, a larger organization will require more push from the employees to build momentum.
What is the Inner Circle?
The inner circle is the core of inbound marketing. It falls back to attracting, engaging, and delighting your future, current, and past customers. Attracting begins by putting out good content. Offering valuable thought leadership through blogs and social media can help build trust with strangers and prospective customers.
Then engage with your audience. Engaging refers to excellent customer service, personalization, and anything else that builds a relationship with your customer. Lastly, delight your customer. Delighting your customer after they have made a purchase requires follow-up. Consider social media listening, chatbots, thank you letters, and other ways to continually help the customer in their needs.
Communicating with your customers should not end once they have made a purchase. For more information on attracting, engaging, and delighting, check out our previous blogpost What is Inbound Marketing, Here.
What is the Outer Circle?
The outer circle of the flywheel represents the different types of customers you will be wooing in your business. Each type has different needs and has different levels of investment in the company. Understanding where the customer is at in each stage will help you understand how best to reach them.
The outer circle on the flywheel begins with strangers. These are people who do not know and are unaware of your brand. Before you are able to win the customer, you must first attract them to your brand, which is why attraction falls in this category.
Next is prospects. These are potential customers who are slightly interested in your company but have not committed or purchased from your brand yet. These prospects need to be engaged with in order to sell them on why your business is different from others. This is where you will use your USP most to inform and engage with your new potential customer.
Customers fall after potential customers. Once your potential customer has made a purchase, they are now a customer. Congratulations! This, however, is not the time to quit engaging with your customer. Instead, you should continue to engage with your customer and slowly transition into the delighting phase as the customer stays. This will help boost customer retention and satisfaction.
The last part of the outer circle is the promoters. Hopefully, by attracting, engaging, and beginning to delight your customers, they have now turned into promoters. These promoters should now believe in your brand because of your pull marketing rather than push marketing. As it sounds, promoters should be telling others about your brand. Who are they telling? Strangers. This brings the circle to completion and begins all over again.
For more information on the inbound marketing core concepts, be sure to check out our blog for weekly new content. Like us, let us know! We would love to hear your thoughts on inbound marketing in the comments section below.
About:
Bridge Leadership is a consulting company that exists to bridge the gap between companies and their target audience through inbound marketing thought leadership. Run by Boyce College students Ana Lee, Lara Tanner, Maddie Gardner, and Cassidy Cornett, this company is created by students for a class group project.
Comments