HubSpot Flywheel

Want to know whether the HubSpot Flywheel methodology will work for your business or not? This article is for you.

I’ll be covering the HubSpot Flywheel methodology in detail so that you know what it is and how it works.

Not only that, but you’ll also know how you can use it coupled with the inbound methodology to make your customers your brand ambassadors.

HubSpot Flywheel and inbound methodologies work alongside each other to add force to the flywheel and get it moving.

You attract prospects, convert them to customers, and delight them with after-sales services. The “Delight” part fuels the “Attract” part and brings new customers on auto-pilot.

Let’s get started with the HubSpot Flywheel review now.

 

What Is HubSpot Flywheel?

HubSpot Flywheel is a marketing methodology that helps you understand the momentum your business can get by delivering an exceptional customer experience.

The Flywheel methodology was invented by James Watt. It’s a wheel that’s highly energy-efficient.

The energy this Flywheel stores depends on several factors.

• • How fast you spin it?
  • How much friction is there?
  • What’s its size?

The energy that keeps the wheel revolving is obtained from the existing customers to grow your business.

HubSpot flywheel methodology is simply utilizing the momentum of your satisfied customers to attract referrals and keep your business growing.

The concept of HubSpot Flywheel was somewhat transformed from the funnel concept. A funnel attracts, engages, and converts people.

While it may have been effective in the past, people don’t usually purchase stuff without asking their peers about it now.

If not, they’ll go online and look for your brand, find reviews, and make a buying decision based on them.

 

How It Works?

 

 

As mentioned earlier, the energy that your flywheel contains will depend on three things. The speed you spin it with, the friction it encounters, its size

If you want to get the most out of the flywheel methodology, try to incorporate all three steps into your strategy.

Your flywheel’s speed increases when you add forces to it. Forces are those strategies and programs that add momentum to your flywheel.

Examples of forces include inbound marketing, referral program, advertising, and improving your customer service.

If you make your customers satisfied and successful, they’ll be relaying the success to your prospects most likely.

The second part of the methodology is making sure nothing is opposing the forces you are applying to get the flywheel moving.

Friction can be anything that slows down your flywheel. Try and remove friction in your marketing strategy.

These may include poor processes, internal communication problems, organizational misalignment, and more.

You can minimize friction by analyzing the loopholes in your strategy. See at which point your prospects are leaving the flywheel and why. Is your pricing simple and have no strings attached? Do you allow your potential customers to communicate with you the way they want?

Increasing your forces and decreasing friction will move the flywheel faster. And, the higher your flywheel’s speed and the lesser its friction, the more you’ll get promoted by your customers.

This keeps the flywheel moving in the right direction and at the right speed.

 

The Flywheel and HubSpot

The shift from the classic funnel to the flywheel didn’t happen overnight at HubSpot. The company took years to develop this impactful methodology.

Let’s see what the VP of marketing at HubSpot has to say about it.

 

So, when it comes to growth, the biggest challenge to your business/organization isn’t your competitor, it’s the bad customer experience.

That is why you need to put your customers first so that you can grow better. Interacting with your customers in the way they want can help your company’s customer satisfaction rate.

When you put your customers first, your entire business model will revolve around your customers. You won’t value deals but will strive to strengthen the relationship with existing customers.

A growing business should add forces to the flywheel and minimizes friction to increase its speed.

You can help customer retention by offering easy-to-understand, transparent processes that can serve them in the best way possible. Otherwise, they may find another solution and walk out the door.

 

What is Flywheel Strategy?

The hubSpot flywheel strategy works hand in hand with the inbound strategy. Both focus on the same thing: Customer satisfaction.

Delighting the customer helps attract more and more new customers. When your existing customers are satisfied, they’ll fuel the flywheel, bringing more customers to your business.

Word of mouth marketing isn’t a new concept. But, people are starting to trust brands based on the reviews they receive from their peers more.

92% of customers trust friend and family suggestions more than advertising. Not only that, 88% of people take online reviews from other customers as a personal recommendation.

This again brings us to customer satisfaction. When they are satisfied, you’ll get positive reviews, which can then attract new prospects, keeping the flywheel revolving and your business thriving.

 

 

Who Should Use the Flywheel Strategy?

As the concept fits any business scenario, virtually every business can leverage the power of customer satisfaction to keep the business flywheel spinning.

The strategy is ideal for those who are in the long-term game and want their business to keep on growing with minimal friction.

 

HubSpot Flywheel Real-World Example

Let’s take the example of Amazon, the world’s largest eCommerce platform delivering virtually every product to multiple countries.

Amazon has effectively implemented the flywheel model on its eCommerce business. How?

Reduced prices of products on Amazon attracted a large customer base initially. This attracted the sellers as well.

The reach of the company maximized, and it generated a lot of revenue, which was then invested to lower the prices of more products.

Plus, it was able to build solid trust with prospects and customers. The reliability of the company keeps attracting old and new consumers alike.

The great customer service also adds to the momentum of the flywheel, keeping the giant ruling the eCommerce world.

 

Flywheel VS Funnel

 

You must be thinking “what about the funnel?”. Businesses have been using funnels for ages and quite effectively apparently.

But, the funnel hasn’t been providing the one thing that fuels businesses like nothing else: Word of mouth marketing.

Sure, a funnel can bring in leads and convert them into customers. But, will those customers play any part in taking your business further? Unlikely!

Your customers should be the driving force for your business. Because the funnel doesn’t leverage existing customers for the new ones, the flywheel has become so much important.

The marketing efforts of your team will determine whether or not someone will engage with your brand. Your sales team can make sure that a lead captured through marketing efforts is converted to a conversion/sale.

And, your customer support puts in the effort to make customers happy and, in turn, drive new customers through word-of-mouth marketing.

So, a business mustn’t ignore the customer service department when it comes to allocating resources. It’s the one that can bring new customers on autopilot and keep the flywheel moving.

Funnels are used to educate people about products, engage them, and guide them through salespersons to convert them. Which used to be quite effective.

But, the scenario has changed now. People try to learn about the product they are going to invest in from their friends and family.

If not, they’ll search the internet and look for the relevant information about that product. They’re now reading reviews from third-party sites to make confident purchase decisions.

Traditional funnels don’t work that way. They are linear. They are focused on conversions through marketing efforts. They don’t tell you how your product and customer experience bring sales.

The importance of delivering a great customer experience is revealed when you couple the flywheel methodology with the inbound strategy.

The “delight” stage gives momentum to the attract stage of the flywheel marketing strategy.

This is because the way you treat customers will determine what potential customers hear about you.

While the HubSpot flywheel model is a more comprehensive look at how businesses use marketing these days, funnels haven’t gone anywhere.

Look at both this way: You can view a marketing process as a funnel, but it will remain a part of the broader HubSpot flywheel strategy.

 

How it works: HubSpot Inbound Marketing?

Before getting into inbound marketing, let’s first see what’s outbound marketing. Outbound marketing consists of marketing tactics that target prospects with paid advertisement and unsolicited messages.

It’s also termed “interruption marketing”, a name that speaks for itself. In this, you put your business in front of people mainly through advertisement.

 

What is Inbound Marketing?

“Inbound marketing” on the other hand, focuses on providing valuable content to the prospects, solving their pain points, and bringing them closer to your business.

You don’t have to interrupt their online activities to get traction. They come to you on their own.

Inbound marketing builds a meaningful relationship with the customers, prospects, and consumers. It helps them to get to their goals no matter the journey stage they are in with you.

The success of your customers eventually leads to your success.

 

3 Stages of the Inbound Marketing Strategy

Inbound marketing strategy has three major parts.

 

Attract

Finding the right people and attracting them to your business using high-quality content that they value is the first step to an effective inbound marketing strategy.

 

Engage

Then, as a business, you present to them the solutions you are willing to provide them against their pain points. This would entice them to engage with you, allowing you to convert them.

Delight

The third and probably the most prominent part of the flywheel concept is providing support and helping your existing customers. You help your customers in achieving their goals, which fuels the first part “attract” as in the flywheel strategy.

The customers that find value in your services/products act as promoters by recommending your business to their peers or submitting positive reviews online.

This is where the inbound strategy acts as a potent foundation for the flywheel.

 

Flywheel Based on Inbound Strategy

A flywheel model based on the inbound strategy adds force to all three stages of the inbound strategy.

The marketing, sales, and customer service operations of your business will add forces and minimize friction throughout the three phases.

For instance, in the initial “attract” stage, marketing will be playing the key role in “attracting” potential customers.

The second stage “engage” will majorly depend on the role the sales processes play.

While, third state, “delight” is fueled by the customer service and “after-sales” service of a business.

There will come a time when you won’t have to invest that much in acquiring new customers. Your existing customers will bring in enough leads and sales, adding force to the flywheel.

 

Inbound Marketing Strategies

In this section, we’ll discuss some key strategies that you can use to grow your business through the Flywheel and inbound marketing methodologies.

 

Strategies to Attract Prospects: You won’t find a variety of strategies to attract your potential customers with inbound marketing. Because whatever you come up with, it’s going to be centered around user-friendly content creation.

How do you do that? Create and publish high-quality content. It could be blog posts, social media content, or anything that adds value to your prospects’ journey.

For instance, producing how-to guides about your products, presenting solutions to their problems that your products can solve, customer reviews, and more.

You can also tell them about any promotions and discounts you are running, however, keep away from being pushy. Let them know how your business can help them ease their pains or achieve their desires.

But, that shouldn’t be it. Attracting a relevant audience takes a little more than just producing content around your products.

You need to find out what people are searching online. What are their pain points? What do they desire?

Finding profitable phrases that your prospects are searching for is called keyword research.

A great free way to find those keywords is the Google search. Type in the keyword you have in mind, it will show a list of related ones.

To be able to have an effective inbound marketing strategy in place, an SEO strategy is almost necessary.

Find out phrases and keywords related to your business and optimize your blog posts and social media content around them.

This will allow you to appear before your target audience on the search engine result pages against relevant keywords.

Targeting the right keywords not only increases your business’ visibility but also increases the chances of conversions.

 

Strategies for Engaging Prospects: Once you manage to attract your prospects, it’s time for your sales team to start building a long-term relationship with them.

Deal with them so that they want to create a relationship that lasts. Your interaction with the prospects should be based on how your business will add value to their lives.

Probably the most important part of prospect engagement is handling sales calls and answering queries effectively.

In addition to that, make sure you are selling solutions and not products. This way, you’ll be building a mutually beneficial relationship with your prospects.

 

Strategies for Delighting Customers: This is where you can maximize your return on investment (ROI). As previously mentioned, delighting your customers even long after they have gone through the purchase can win you free customers.

Many businesses neglect this part and keep on focusing on attaining new customers by implementing marketing strategies.

While effective marketing strategies can attract new customers, that would exhaust a chunk of your budget. With investment into the customer satisfaction part, you can not only keep your existing customer base loyal but also fuel customer acquisition for free.

Incorporating chatbots into customer interaction and asking them for surveys are great ways to provide support and get constructive feedback.

A great free tool is HubSpot’s own chatbot builder software.

Let’s say you have launched a new program and want your customers to be aware of all the steps involved in using it.

You create a custom chatbot to assist your customers every step of the way.

And, feedbacks help you get valuable insight from your customers. They can tell you best what areas of your product or service need improvement.

You can analyze your business through customer feedback surveys every 6 months and get better along the way.

You can use HubSpot’s feedback software to do that.

Another impactful strategy that fuels the “delight” stage is social media listening. Social media provides an excellent opportunity for businesses and customers to engage in a mutually beneficial relationship.

Your customers can ask about your brand, your products, offer feedback, and share experiences on your social media business accounts.

Try to engage with them and help them solve their issues. This shows that you care about your customers.

Last but not least, keep every interaction customer-focused. Even if it doesn’t add any value to your business.

It’s now established that happy customers can act as your brand promoters without charging you a fee for it.

 

Flywheel Methodology: How to Use it effectively?

Now you know what’s the HubSpot flywheel strategy and how it works with inbound to achieve the same objective: Delighted customers.

But, how can you use it effectively for your business?

Simple, use the impactful all-in-one HubSpot software. There is a whole list of tools that HubSpot offers.

 

Attract

You don’t want to target anyone to your business. You have a chance of converting only those people that are interested in what you are offering. Only they can become your promoters eventually.  

In order to attract the right audience to your website or social media channels, you need to do some research.

Thankfully, HubSpot offers effective content marketing tools that you can use to get in front of the right audience.

Using them, it would be easier for you to create content that resonates with your potential customers, attracting them to your business.

Another benefit of using these tools is that you can create and manage your content in one place. The powerful analytics tool of HubSpot will tell you where you are going wrong, helping you improve your strategies.

 

Engage

After attracting your prospects, it’s time to get conversational with them. Try to build a long-lasting relationship with your prospects by using an effective conversation automation tool.

Make sure to interact with them through the channels they want you to. For instance, it could be emails, live chat, chatbots, or an app.

Use the tools to save the information of people visiting your site or social media. Personalize their experience based on the journey using that information.

You can also integrate other useful applications with HubSpot if they can help customer engagement.  

 

Delight

If you have read this far, you won’t take the “delight” part of the HubSpot flywheel methodology lightly.

The great thing is, HubSpot’s service hub is specifically designed to delight your customers, helping the flywheel move faster.

So, if you intend to use HubSpot as a customer relationship management software, make sure to leverage its automation tools effectively.

If the HubSpot flywheel strategy appeals to you, HubSpot’s CRM would probably be the best investment you can make in leveraging it.

It allows businesses to unify the marketing, sales, and customer service aspects, keeping everything trackable and easily accessible.

With HubSpot tools like the marketing hub, sales hub, and service hub, you can add force to the flywheel and minimize friction.

 

Conclusion

Before the flywheel concept was developed, funnels used to work great. Then marketers realized that it doesn’t have any mechanism to bring automated sales.

The flywheel fills that gap. With the HubSpot flywheel methodology in place, you leverage customer satisfaction to bring new customers.

When you look at the trend, people now tend to get recommendations from their peers before buying something. If not that, they look at online reviews and consider them equal to personal recommendations.

So, you must focus your efforts on delivering top-notch customer service. And, HubSpot’s suite of automation software will help you do exactly that.