How to Boost Your Marketing Flywheel With Interactive Content

This blog focuses on how to boost your marketing flywheel with interactive content. It details the problems with the existing model of funnels and how to flywheel-ize your business model.

We have already discussed the importance of interactive content in optimizing your funnels. In fact, we followed Hubspot’s Inbound strategy and created our business around it. Turns out, it is time for us to move on. Funnels just don’t do it for us.

We know. This is saying a lot.

However, we only say this because Hubspot just came up with something more evolved: The Flywheel Model.

Let’s dive in.

P.S. If you already have the rundown on The Marketing Flywheel, head over to the section that explains how to boost your marketing flywheel with interactive content

What is Marketing Flywheel?

Before we go into the specifics of how to boost marketing flywheel with interactive content, let’s understand what a flywheel really is. In Hubspot’s words, “With the flywheel, you use the momentum of your happy customers to drive referrals and repeat sales. Basically, your business keeps spinning.

Let’s dive a bit deeper. The funnels model emphasizes on capturing leads, engaging them and finally converting them into customers. However, this strategy can be less effective in the long term. At least when compared to the flywheel. In fact, it has a ‘linear’ approach to measuring growth. On the other hand, flywheel provides you with a more holistic approach by putting the customer at the center. In fact, the customer becomes the driving force of the business as they refer your business to their friends.

Is this seeming like the same old marketing jargon to you?

Let us explain why it is anything but that.

The Flywheel vs the Funnel

As we stated before, the Funnel approach can be considered ‘linear’ as compared to the flywheel. It focuses on the company’s short term goals of getting qualified leads, closing deals and retaining those customers as much as possible. However, this approach is not as efficient in the present scenario. The customer trust is at an all-time low and social media ads do not provide as much return as they used to. Funnels produce customers but they do not use them to grow their business.

In fact, overlooking a happy customer’s potential to grow your business is forgoing a major part of the company’s success.

Instead of spending a lot of time and resources in following up with unqualified leads, companies should put those resources in delighting customers from the start. Moreover, it is important to note that almost every prospect conducts a lot of preliminary research before showing interest in a company. In such a situation, word of mouth marketing takes center stage.

Furthermore, funnels lose the energy you put into them once you reach the bottom, but flywheels are remarkable at storing and releasing energy. Why do we say that?

Well, when you follow the funnel model, you put all your energy in gaining, nurturing and closing leads. This model puts the customer as an afterthought. Due to this, all the energy put in by you prior to closing the deals vanished. Wasted. Poof!

Things operate a bit differently in the flywheel model. You attract, engage, and delight your customers by solely focusing on their needs. The energy utilized in gaining those customers do not go to waste because they become your best salesman. They keep the flywheel spinning by recommending your product to their friends. Why? Because your company is just so damn good at taking care of its customers!

The Structure Of The Flywheel

The circular structure of the flywheel is meant to represent a process where the customer drives the force. We still follow the Attract-Engage-Delight policy. However, the defining difference is that the customer is put at the center. All of your efforts that keep your business running (aka that spin your flywheel) are termed as the ‘force’. The force can be anything that grows your company. For instance, your customer service team or your content marketing efforts.

On the other hand, friction is anything that stops ‘the force’ from growing your business. Basically, it is anything that keeps your flywheel from spinning. It could be untargeted content marketing efforts, un-synced marketing, and sales teams, or even a disgruntled customer spreading bad rep about your company.

As a business, your aim is to find out the biggest drivers of growth for your company (the force) and optimize. Additionally, you have to eliminate friction from your business strategy to ensure maximum growth. In this section, we will explain how you can achieve both of these goals with the help of interactive content.

How to Boost Your Marketing Flywheel With Interactive Content

1) Personalize

Focusing on your customers always translates into ‘providing individual attention’ to them. If you want your customers to stick around, you have to make them feel valued. Personalization of content does exactly that. It increases customer engagement because it gives the impression of a brand that pays attention.

Moreover, personalized content sells. In fact, research shows that 84 percent of customers prefer receiving content that is personalized and allows them to be treated like a human and not another number in a queue. 

Therefore, personalization of content is a necessity if you want to delight your customers and increase the force of your flywheel.

Interactive content is inherently personalized. The main idea is that customers will engage with the content and be provided with personalized results on the basis of their answers. Just have a look at this interactive experience to understand this better.

This is a quiz titled ‘Which wristwatch you should buy’. It asks 5 simple questions from the potential lead. It includes questions that one would ask before buying a new wristwatch, like what’s your budget, what is the purpose of your wristwatch, and what’s your favorite color. The potential leads get a wristwatch suited specifically to their needs in the results.

Later, the information about the lead’s preference can be used to send them retargeting ads and emails with offers on similar products. As more qualified leads and happy customers remain loyal to your brand, the flywheel gains momentum.

2) Provide Real Value

How do you ensure that your leads and customers stay with your brand and refer it to others as well? You provide them with real value time and again. If you do your job right, they are going to keep coming back for more. But how can interactive content help you with this?

In the ‘Attract’ stage, offer something of value to the prospects. This ensures their engagement as well as builds their trust.

After all, who said lead magnets can’t be focused solely on the customer. Through interactive content, the prospects receive an important piece of information suited specifically for their needs. Allow us to explain that with an example

Suppose you own a car company. You see that a lot of people are interested in buying your product but are confused as to how much it would cost them. (Loans included)

In such a situation, you can build an effortless Auto Loan Calculator like this one. Your leads will find this helpful, increasing your chances of a sale. Moreover, interactive experiences like this might even encourage the lead to refer it to someone else.

How can you provide value to your existing customers, you ask? Well, if they are already using your product, you can help them optimize it. Suppose you are a marketing company that provides email marketing solutions. Here, you can create an interactive experience that helps them gauge their ROI. Furthermore, you can provide relevant solutions and advice to customers that have a low ROI or medium level ROI.

Finally, these results have a higher chance of being shared by the prospects/customers. Interactive content is inherently viral and tends to be shared more on social media. Companies can use this to their advantage and add more force to their flywheel and hence, gain more leads.

3) Leverage Exclusivity

What else can make your customers feel special? The idea of exclusivity.

If your customers feel like they are given more importance than others, they are bound to be delighted. Furthermore, they are bound to share the love by referring your product/services to someone else.

To generate exclusivity, you can create an interactive experience specifically for your loyal customers. Maybe this quiz by UncapBeauty will help you understand our point better.

After completing the survey, the customer has to enter their email to get the $10 Amazon voucher! However, to ensure that all the participants are customers, they have to attach the product bill. So, what do you think? Will the customers happily refer your product now?

Well, they have 10$ to gain and absolutely nothing to lose! So, we vote ‘Yes!’

Related Read: To know more about exclusivity, head over here.

4) Respond Instantly

As a marketer, you must understand the importance of time. You need to be very spontaneous with your response while dealing with customers. Customers will not wait on your website for too long. Being unattended, they may feel that you don’t care about them and they simply may go to your competitors for further business.

Interactive content can help you here as well.

An interactive chatbot is a tool that allows the company to conduct conversations with a user without the need for human personnel. Basically, it handles all the grunt work so the employees can use their time for more productive purposes. Moreover, this experience can be seamlessly integrated into a pop-up, a chat or any custom embed.

Just have a look at this chatbot below. A chatbot like this promptly takes the order of your customers so you can focus on more important tasks.

No waiting= Happy customers!

5) Reward Loyal Customers

“If you liked it then you should have put a ring on it”

Well, Beyonce’s not wrong. If you want your customers to stay, you have to appreciate them. Social media shoutouts to loyal customers is one thing. However, rewarding them with something tangible seals the deal. Moreover, it might result in free advertising for you. You see, happy customers tend to share their brand stories on social media.

Let us explain how interactive content can help you do that.

Interactive content lets you experiment with how you chose to offer rewards to your loyal customer. You can think beyond the usual sweepstakes way and build your rewards program around a graded quiz. Ask your customers to take a quiz related to your brand or product/services and then attach incentives to the grade they score in the quiz. For instance, if on a scale of 0 to 10, they score between 1 to 5 you can offer them a 5% discount and if they score between 6 to 10 you can give a 10% discount.

This way the loyal customers receive the attention they deserve and the flywheel receives the force it needs.

6) Customer Education

If your customers feel connected to the brand, they are more likely to turn into loyal customers. Consequently, they are more likely to refer your brand to others. To get them invested in the brand, educate them in your product. Tell them about features that are novel or different from the industry standard.

You may send out regular email newsletters, create white papers and ebooks, or send out product releases. However, these methods of customer engagement aren’t enough. These pieces don’t facilitate two-way communication with your client and are ignored/abandoned easily.

Thus, interactive content. It not only educates the customers but also gets their feedback for you. It opens a channel for communication, which makes the customers feel more involved with the brand. What’s more? It provides instant gratification, which puts the users in control. They can derive value whenever they want, without having to wait for your email updates or reading long-form whitepapers.

Cloud Sherpas created a quiz called ‘How Mature is Your Service Instance?’ which let the users test their knowledge about service instance. The results were followed by recommendations on how people can improve their score. The quiz was a perfect way to target both prospects and existing customers. While Cloud Sherpa gets 3-4 qualified leads from the quiz every day , it helps the existing customers know more about the brand and their service offerings.

Initiatives like these invest the customer in the brand to the point that they start associating themselves with it. They encourage other people to associate with the brand. Consequently, the flywheel gets heavier and spins faster, growing your business in the process.

There! We have spilled all the tea on how to boost your marketing flywheel with interactive content. We could give you some parting advice but we believe this will suffice. Don’t forget to post in the comments below on what you think of this new marketing buzzword!.