It’s 2024, Are You Using the Right Marketing Strategy?
The business landscape is vastly changing. Companies are relentlessly developing technologies that will become a disruptive force in their respective industries. They’re also looking for various ways to stay ahead of their competition. As such, marketing now plays a more crucial role in the success of a company.
Marketing teams have used the funnel model to guide their strategies in converting leads into customers. For a long time, companies that executed proper marketing strategies through the guidance of the funnel have succeeded well. However, over the past few years, many marketing experts believe that it’s about time to retire the funnel and shift to another—the flywheel marketing strategy. As Hubspot puts it, “Today, customer referrals and word-of-mouth have become the largest influence on the purchase process, which means the funnel has one major flaw: It views customers as an afterthought, not a driving force.”
This has prompted many businesses to take a hard look at their strategies and decide if they need to make a change.
What is the Flywheel?
In a flywheel model, customers are at the center. This means that everything including business processes revolve around the customers and their experience. The customers are the fuel that power the flywheel. They help the business grow. Adding force to the areas that have the biggest positive impact on customer experience increases the speed of the flywheel. Likewise, any inconvenience, also called friction, that negatively impacts the customer experience hinders the flywheel from running smoothly.
No one can say without a doubt that the funnel has no purpose today. In fact, it may still serve a business well if its leader knows the difference between the funnel and the flywheel well and knows when and how to adopt them. However, it’s important for businesses to realize that maybe “widening the funnel” isn’t enough anymore. The proliferation of online review sites, the ubiquity of the internet, and the influence of social media have changed how buyers learn and consider a product, and eventually, complete a purchase.
According to the flywheel model, there are three important things to consider to deliver excellent customer experience: attract, engage, and delight. This means that businesses must provide great advertisements, quality content and marketing, and excellent service every single time.
Steps to Take
There is no surefire way to know if you are choosing the right marketing strategy. Companies have different needs due to various reasons, such as the nature of their business, size, goals and other important factors. Fortunately, however, there are practical steps in ensuring topnotch customer experience and leverage it as a competitive advantage.
So, how do you do it? First, identify the goals of your company. For example, if you are a new ecommerce website, your goal could be to sell 200 pairs of shoes and have 300 likes on Facebook within x number of months. This will allow you to set the metrics for each goal and identify possible friction to hinder reaching the goal. Second, plan ways on how to achieve your goal with your customers in mind. It’s important that you make this process collaborative. Ask your peers, employees, and even your potential customers what they prefer. Third, track your performance and analyze what’s working and what’s not. This will allow you to reassess your strategy and refurbish your plans for success. Lastly, make the necessary adjustments to eliminate friction and fast track reaching your goal. If this does not work, do not fret. You can go back and make further adjustments. You can also reassess your goals. It’s great to aim for the best, but make sure that you’re not shooting for the impossible.
While these steps seem simplistic, many teams aren’t ready to experiment and experience failure multiple times. Marketing is tough work and investing time and effort is necessary to make customer relationships strong and long-lasting.
How to Make It Work
We can look closely at the three stages of the flywheel to identify the ways to execute the right marketing strategy. Like what was already mentioned, focusing on customers is key. If your marketing strategy does not truly prioritize customers, then you’re not going to have much success today. Here are some ways on how to do well in every aspect of the flywheel and apply it to whatever strategy you have planned and designed.
Attract
This is where you need to have engaging and helpful content to attract people to consider your brand. This typically includes:
- Comprehensive and positive write-ups on reputable review sites.
For example, if you’re a security solutions platform, having a four-star review on the top cybersecurity magazine can attract both enterprises and small businesses to consider your service. - Customer testimonials.
If you’re a content marketing firm, a commendation—even just a short praise from a top executive of a reputable company can help establish your reputation and attract successful and struggling businesses to tap you for their digital marketing. - Inbound marketing.
If you’re a phishing training platform, you can publish a blog article on how human error is one of the most overlooked problems in cybersecurity and how training platforms such as yourself can help enterprises plug the skills gap of their employees in spotting phishing scams.
Engage
This is where you need to establish and maintain meaningful relationships with your clients. This can be quite challenging as customers have varying preferences and needs. You must be able to let them feel that they are understood by the brands that they are currently supporting. This usually requires the following:
- Sharing relevant articles.
Engaging customers does not necessarily mean you have to create all your content from scratch. For example, if you’re a vegan restaurant, you can share articles from third-party publications about the benefits of a vegan diet. You can add an engaging caption that ends with a compelling question or an insightful quote from the shared article to encourage readers to comment on your social media channels. You can also reply to particular comments that require your response. - Creating various content of great value.
For example, if you’re a startup that is focused on helping students survive their college life, you can create content for stories and posts on Instagram related to the struggles of a college student. You can also use funny captions and memes to invite discussions and potentially go viral. - Great customer relations through various channels.
Ensure that your employees handle inbound calls and emails well. Make templates if necessary but ensure a personalized experience. This will help you make your customers feel that you listen to their requests and complaints.
Delight
This is perhaps one of the most important stages that will determine the success of your marketing efforts. Delighting customers ensures that customers are happy and satisfied. This means that they can still receive your full service and support even after a long time after they made a purchase. Success in the delight stage will most likely result in your customers promoting your brand and consequently, helping you expand your reach. In order to succeed, you can consider the following:
- Ensure a strong web presence and provide 24/7 customer support.
It’s important that you have web channels that can be easily accessed by customers if they have any questions or complaints. Customers must be able to reach you through various channels such as a website chatbox, social media, or email. Web channels can also help you inform your customers of new products, discounts, and promos that they can avail to address their pain points. This ensures that customers have a way to communicate with you while you have a way to continuously impress and satisfy them. - Maintain a user-friendly and accessible website.
Laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) have been established to ensure that the services and conveniences are equally accessible for everyone. Unfortunately, many businesses still lack accessible websites. Make sure that your website is accessible to people with disabilities. This is not only ethical and helps you avoid web accessibility lawsuits, but it also shows that you care about your users. It also doesn’t hurt that an accessible website means a user-friendly interface. Hence, an overall great user experience. - Use chatbots and surveys for feedback.
You can use a chatbot or a pop-up survey to request feedback from customers. These should be prompted at specific points of the customer journey. For example, if the user just finished a purchase on your online store, your website can have a pop-up that asks to rate the experience on a scale of 1 to 5. You can also send an email months after a purchase to ensure that the product meets the customer’s satisfaction.
Keep in Mind
These are some of the ways that you can execute your marketing strategy plan. Of course, these are not exhaustive. Some of these may not even be apt for the needs of your company. As such, it’s important for you to discern the needs of your company and identify the friction that hinders your flywheel from performing well. Doing so will allow you to stay competitive in your industry and ensure that your marketing strategy will give you the highest possible ROI. There’s no-one-size-fits all solution for the marketing needs of your business.
Technologies and trends are ever evolving and it’s a mistake to remain static and complacent. The best you can do is to keep in mind that your customers are the star and you must place them at the center of all your decisions.
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