The Integrated Marketing Flywheel: Media Mix
Integrated marketing involves more than just a media mix. It has everything to do with how you think about your customers, your overall marketing approach, and getting everyone on the same page. In the past, visualization was the preferred marketing funnel. The Marketing Flywheel presents an entirely new way to carry out integrated marketing.
What Is the Flywheel?
The flywheel model is designed to deliver a remarkable customer experience by aligning the entire organization to build unstoppable marketing momentum. When James Watt invented flywheel marketing, he intended it to act as an energy-efficient way of driving a company’s marketing efforts. It helps a business think about effective growth strategies. The marketing flywheel deviates from other models that waste too much energy chasing customers.
With the flywheel, a business builds happy customers which drives more sales through repeat sales and referrals. Once a business switches to the marketing flywheel, it will keep spinning, gaining more customers and generating more sales. Thinking of a business as a flywheel leads to completely different decisions and strategies.
How Does the Flywheel Model Work?
The flywheel model works in tandem with the inbound methodology as a foundation for attracting, engaging, and delighting customers. During the attract phase, a business pulls in customers by eliminating barriers and posting engaging and informative content. But that only works when a company seeks to earn the customer’s attention, not force it. Key strategies include content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, targeted paid advertising, conversion rate optimization, and social selling.
The engage phases come in second. Businesses work to make it easy for buyers to shop, buy, and engage with them on preferred timelines and channels during this phase. To interact with their audience, companies use forces like email and website personalization, marketing automation, database segmentation, sales automation, multichannel communication, lead nurturing lead scoring, and try-before-buying programs. In the process, they open up relationships with their customers instead of just closing deals.
A business helps, supports, and empowers customers to attain their goals at the final delight stage. As customers succeed, the firm also succeeds. A company may use proactive customer service, self-service, automated onboarding, ticketing systems, multichannel availability, loyalty programs, and customer feedback surveys.
Flywheel Versus Funnel
For many years, businesses have used the funnel as the primary driver of their marketing strategy. While there have been mixed levels of success, business leaders, marketers, and salespeople have found the funnel rather frustrating. The funnel views customers as an afterthought and not the driving force behind the business. With this, the business ignores the growing influence of referrals on the purchase process. Funnels produce customers without considering how they can help a business grow. That makes the flywheel the best mix.
Flywheel marketing is more comprehensive and capable of representing the forces behind a more unified business’s growth. The actions of one team in a company impact all other operations. A company can use flywheel marketing to determine how fast prospects move through the sales process. With the sales motion, firms push prospects towards having happy, successful customers. Firms may also use service and support activities to convert customers into business promoters by recommending the business to their family and friends.
Switch to the Flywheel
Sticking to the funnel might not be the right strategy to push modern businesses to the next level of success. That’s why it’s recommendable to implement the flywheel model to integrate all the forces that drive sales and customer satisfaction. The model gives managers a better way to evaluate business operations and seek opportunities for future growth. Can anyone afford to ignore the flywheel anymore?
