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 various amounts of energy, depending on its size, how fast it spins and how much friction it encounters. This wheel inspires the marketing flywheel as it uses inbound marketing to create promoters or advocates and will reuse some of the energy invested in acquiring these customers to attract new prospects through various channels such as favourable reviews and word-of-mouth. HubSpot has adapted the marketing flywheel model to explain how aligning your business around creating and delivering fantastic customer experiences generates momentum for the company.
The traditional funnel model views customers as the final result of a company's activity; thus, all of the energy invested into acquiring the customer is wasted, needing to start all over again with the next customer. Contrastingly, the flywheel model uses the momentum gained from happy customers to drive forward referrals and repeat sales, storing and releasing energy just like a flywheel, keeping the business spinning and generating growth. The flywheel's generated energy, or momentum, depends on its size, speed and how much friction there is. Thus, businesses must apply force, such as programs and strategies, to areas with the most significant impact to generate speed, but they must also reduce friction from its system; any elements that slow down the wheel must be solved or eliminated.
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 optimization (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, by applying forces such as website and email personalization, 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.
Therefore, 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. Thus, applying the flywheel model helps companies recycle invested energy and frequent high-impact channels for prospect acquisition.