What is the Flywheel marketing model?
Recent trends have shown smart, dynamic companies have transitioned from the traditional “funnel” model of selling to the Flywheel model. This concept focuses on the customer experience as a pathway to sales, whereas the “funnel” model depends on marketing & sales effort to drive sales. Brian Halligan (Co-founder HubSpot) endorses the flywheel model as the new age buyer’s way of finding “You.”
Source: tmcdigitalmedia.com
This model is all about the customer experience, making it the ultimate “human touch” marketing model. In the previous funnel, marketing efforts were made to create awareness and interest, leading to conversion by the sales effort. In the Flywheel model, your customer becomes your promoter, and everything revolves around the customer. The customer needs to be delighted in their journey. Every touchpoint in their journey plays a crucial role; if you can delight your customer, you are likely to increase your sales by 5X more!
The reason the Internet has proven to be so valuable for new products and services is the power of word of mouth via social media, which increases trust in new products, services, and startups. There was a time when the buyer bought the product based on “brand value” alone. In today’s world, the product is purchased based on community recommendations, online reviews, and recommendations from your friends and family. After much research on consumer behavior, it is established that the traditional buyer behaviors in today’s WEB 2.0 era are changed. The trust is now shifted in a consumer’s hand, and whether you like it or not, the research suggests that to sustain in today’s market, the Most Important factor is to “Delight” Your customer.
Let’s consider more research for the impact of Word of mouth on sales:
- According to a study (Published by Ana Babić Rosario, Francesca Sotgiu, Kristine De Valck, Tammo H.A. Bijmolt), the authors conducted a meta-analysis of 1,532 effect sizes across 96 studies covering 40 platforms and 26 product categories. On average, eWOM(Electronic word of mouth) is positively correlated with sales (.091)
- EWOM (Electronic word of mouth) has a powerful impact on the sales of tangible goods.
- According to “Contagious – Why Things Catch On” by Jonah Berger, “The book Marketing Warfare says that up to 50% of all purchases are made based on recommendations from family, friends, and colleagues…and yet…only 8% of companies measure the impact of their advertising on these influencers.” (p. 6. Berger argues that it is therefore essential for all companies to have a “war room” where they track all mentions of their brand by word-of-mouth and use this information to improve the quality of their marketing and sales efforts.
How do we achieve “customer delight” as a growth strategy?
Create an Excellent Inbound Marketing Experience
We’re all aware of the importance of social media. Ubiquitous internet access has elevated social media as a top priority of a well-advised marketing strategy. Here’s a few idea to increase your company’s appeal:
- Content + Feedback =Excellence!
Without great content, your plan will never be EWOMchieved, and without excellent customer feedback, you’ll never know if what you are doing is working or not. That’s why it’s so important to make sure your content is excellent and that you are getting quality feedback from your customers.
- Good review & Rating + Same Customer/Life Journey = Instant Sale
The importance of feedback on the tangible product is vital! For instance, I offer the custom journey of my dear co-worker Raj. He wanted to buy boxing gloves, and so started his search via Amazon. He was rather confused about which brand to buy, so to narrow down the field, he filtered boxing gloves by their ratings and sifted through reviews. Whether he was conscious of the act, Raj was basically scanning reviews for buyers who were going through a similar customer/life journey as he was. The “delight” was achieved when Raj came across a pair of boxing gloves with a buyer review that read, “It’s best for beginners…” Sold. Raj purchased those boxing gloves immediately.
Maintaining “the delight” in the Post-Sale Phase
Word of mouth has always been the most powerful force in marketing for the following reasons:
- Convert your customers into promoters and advocate for your business and brand by delighting them with a fantastic product or service coupled with unmatched customer service.
- Creating a more decisive reference point (a promoter) around your brand creates a more robust “pull of attraction” for your prospects by having tons of positive reviews and testimonials for the rest of the internet to see.
- These reviews will help others come to you because most consumers will trust verified online reviews over a salesperson.
Why is this the right time to switch to the ”Ultimate growth strategy: Flywheel Model”?
If you want to know how to beat your competition, just look at their reviews. This will tell what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong. Competitors with the most reviews get the upper hand because customers tend to trust more those who have lots of positive reviews. The sheer quantity of reviews will only get you so far. Meaningful and consistent increases in sales will be better achieved when the quantity and quality of reviews create a synergy of solid market presence and customer relatability.
At Bizratings, our CSAT surveys/review conversion cultivate and nurture the “delight,” represented in the online marketplace. Our Business Intelligence empowers you to ask crucial questions of your customer, and with 3x the return rate compared to competitors, we get more reviews from your happy customers out to the world, thereby increasing your net promoter score. We have reinvented the feedback cycle in order to get your amazing reputation out to the world.
