The marketing flywheel model puts the customers at the centre of a business, valuing relationships and acquiring new customers by turning current ones into promoters who attract new prospects via referrals and word-of-mouth.
The flywheel, invented by James Watt, is an energy-efficient wheel that stores and recycles energy depending on its size, how fast it spins, and how much friction it encounters. This concept inspired the marketing flywheel, which uses inbound marketing to create promoters or advocates and reuses some of the energy invested in acquiring customers to attract new prospects- through channels such as favourable reviews and word of mouth. HubSpot has adapted the flywheel model to demonstrate how aligning your organisation around creating and delivering fantastic customer experiences generates long-term momentum for growth.
The traditional funnel model views customers as the final result of a company’s activity. As a result, all of the energy invested in acquiring a customer is lost, and the process must begin again with each new prospect. In contrast, the flywheel model harnesses the momentum created by happy customers to generate referrals and repeat sales. Like a physical flywheel, it stores and releases energy- keeping the business spinning and driving growth. The energy, or momentum, generated by the flywheel depends on its size, speed, and the amount of friction it encounters. To keep the wheel spinning faster, businesses must apply force (through programmes and strategies) where it will have the greatest impact, while also reducing friction by identifying and removing anything that slows the system down.
HubSpot has realigned their company around the flywheel model, redesigning their inbound methodology as a circle with 3 phases: attract, engage and delight.
- Attract: In this phase, you attract visitors with helpful content and eliminate barriers as they try to learn more about your company. The main objective of this phase is to earn people's attention, not force it, by applying forces such as content marketing, search engine optimisation (SEO), social media marketing or social selling.
- Engage: In this phase, you must make it easy to shop and buy from you by enabling buyers to engage with your company on their preferred timeline and channels. The main objective of this phase is to build relationships, not just to close deals. Achieve this by applying forces such as website and email personalisation, database segmentation, marketing automation, lead nurturing or sales automation.
- Delight: In this phase, you must help, support and empower customers to reach their goals, seeing their success as your own. The main objective of this phase is to achieve customer success by applying forces such as self-service, multichannel availability, ticketing systems, automated onboarding, customer feedback surveys or loyalty programs.
The flywheel model is a comprehensive and unified way of showcasing the forces that affect your company's growth, as every action taken by each department and team impact each other. For example, marketing inputs affect how quickly prospects progress through the sales process. The sales motion affects the probability of prospects becoming happy and successful customers. The support and service activities decide if a customer becomes a promoter or a detractor. People make decisions by consulting their networks, asking for advice and searching for mentions about your company on social media and review sites, not by consulting marketing material from the company. Applying the flywheel model helps companies recycle invested energy and frequent high-impact channels for prospect acquisition.