Business growth is a challenge that all business owners face. It’s tough to stay ahead of the competition and even more challenging to maintain customer loyalty in an age where customers are inundated with choices.
So how do you tackle business growth and keep your customers happy? The answer is the flywheel model. According to experts, this simple yet powerful model can help drive business growth and create customer delight.
What is the flywheel model, and how can you put it to work for your business? Read on to find out!
What is the flywheel model?
It is a way of seeing your business and developing a durable business strategy.
It has the same principles as an industrial flywheel. The larger the wheel, the more energy you can store in it. The amount of speed is also an essential factor.
Most models see customers as a result; for example, in the funnel, you throw leads in at the top, and when it reaches the bottom, leads convert to customers, and you are back to square one.
The flywheel wants to use these satisfied customers to generate referrals and, through good experiences, attract new ones.
You will first try to attract customers with relevant content, then you will try to create a relationship by engaging with them. Lastly, you will try to delight them by creating an incredible experience.
Your customers will become promoters, and promoters will attract new business!
How it works
We have talked about what keeps a flywheel spinning, but let’s put these factors into a small list:
- The size of the wheel.
- The speed of the wheel.
We want a smooth and fast flywheel, which means eliminating the things that cause it to slow down! But first things first, let us create some speed!
You can increase the speed by applying force. These forces are your marketing strategies to speed up the flywheel, such as inbound marketing, paid advertising & referral programs. If you focus on making your customers successful, they are more likely to spread that success to potential customers!
But to apply force consistently without wasting energy, you need to make sure nothing slows the flywheel down; this is also called friction. There are many ways to reduce friction. One way is by looking at your team structure, customer churn rates and where prospects get stuck in the buyer’s journey; do all of these aspects align with each other?
The more force you apply and friction you eliminate, the more customers you convert into promoters, and promotors are the jet fuel of business growth.
The inbound focused approach
The three stages in the flywheel model are well designed for the inbound marketing approach.
The attract phase is all about earning your audience’s attention. You can use content marketing, search engine optimisation or social media to do this–but don’t force it! It doesn’t work if people feel like they’re being marketed instead of educated on what you have for them. More things you could do are:
- Social selling
- Targeted paid advertising
- Conversion rate optimisation
The engage phase is about opening up relationships with your customers. Making it easy for them to shop and buy from you, enabling buyers to engage themselves on their preferred timeline without any difficulties or hassles! To make things simple, you could implement these strategies:
- (website/ email) personalisation
- Marketing automation
- Communication through various channels (Phone, chat, mail etc.)
- Sales automation
The last phase is the delight phase. In this phase, you want to help your customers reach their goals. A customer relationship is a two-way street where both party’s wish to profit from each other. To apply force on this phase, you could use:
- Loyalty programs
- Customer services
- Feedback surveys
The ones listed above are just a handful of strategies you can use to get the flywheel spinning, but get creative!
There are many more exciting ways to attract customers, engage them and delight them to create an extraordinary customer experience with your business.
As you can see, the flywheel approach is entirely centred around customer experience. By creating such an experience, customers become promoters, and eventually, you will attract growth!
Why should you use the flywheel?
Consumer buying habits have changed! For example, the funnel shows a basic pattern of how consumers discover and learn about products, but nowadays, we primarily don’t use the marketing materials that companies provide us!
Consumers use their environment, ask their friends, and search online for testimonials (Google, Instagram, and other social media).
A funnel does not consider that, while the flywheel is perfectly outfitted for such situations. Since it takes the user experience into account!
Another reason to use the flywheel is that it is built for acceleration. A funnel is linear. It has a beginning and an end. While the flywheel is focused on continuing that momentum with loyal customers. Also, a funnel sees customers as a final result. It is by default not outfitted to continue the relationship with customers to achieve loyal customers and create growth.
What we think
The flywheel is the perfect model for attracting growth instead of throwing hundreds of leads into a funnel. When combined with proper branding and performance ratio, a business will have many prosperities! If you want to know more about branding, check out our blog about long-term branding strategies.
At CroudX, we also use the flywheel because it creates an uninterrupted marketing campaign flow that concentrates more on customer experience than anything else–we value these things highly at CroudX.
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Till next time!
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