What is Inbound Marketing and Flywheel Marketing Method?

A comprehensive guide to inbound marketing and flywheel methodology for beginners

If you’re thinking of implementing an inbound marketing system in your marketing campaigns to grow your business but don’t know how and where to start, then you’re not alone. Embracing inbound marketing using flywheel methodology can help your business grow faster than ever if you correctly include it in your marketing process. 

In this article, we’ll learn – 

• What is inbound marketing? 
• What is a flywheel and how does it work? 
• Inbound marketing strategies using flywheel methodology 
• How to use the inbound methodology in marketing 
• Next steps 

What is Inbound Marketing? 

Inbound marketing is a set of marketing practices that can attract potential buyers by creating valuable and useful content tailored to meet their needs. While outbound marketing may interrupt your prospective customers with overwhelmed content they don’t always love to receive, inbound marketing forms relations they are searching for and solves issues they’re already facing. 

The inbound methodology is the process of scaling your business by creating worthy, long-lasting relationships with prospects, customers, and consumers. It’s all about empowering and helping these people to fulfill their purposes at any point in their journey with you. 

But, why should you care about your customers or prospects? 

Because, when they succeed, you will obviously succeed. 

The whole inbound methodology is fundamentally relying on 3 major factors – 

• Attract – attracting the right people with meaningful conversations and content that build your authority as a trusted solution provider with whom they have problems and want to engage. 
• Engage – presenting solutions and advice that align with their problems and purposes so they are more likely to trust you and buy from you if required.  
• Delight – providing all sorts of supports and helps to empower your consumers to achieve success with the products or services they purchased from you. 

When customers or consumers achieve success and share their stories with others, it will attract new prospective customers to your business, making a self-rolling loop. This is exactly how your business may build momentum and this is how the inbound marketing methodology serves as a base foundation of your flywheel. 

Flywheel Marketing Amazon Example

The Amazon Flywheel or Amazon Virtuous Cycle is a strategy that leverages on customer experience to drive traffic to the platform and third-party sellers. That improves the selections of goods, and Amazon further improves its cost structure so it can decrease prices which spins the flywheel.

Source: FourWeekMBA

What is a Flywheel and How Does It Work?

A flywheel is a rotating machine that stores self-rolling energy. It spins automatically with its rotational energy and spins faster while you add more energy. 

In inbound marketing, flywheel methodology is majorly composed of 3 steps – attract, engage, and delight. Businesses and brands use the flywheel methodology in their inbound marketing strategies to build credibility, authority, and momentum. It’s like adding value at each stage of your existing or potential customers’ journey. 

You can build momentum and spin your flywheel by optimizing your strategies that retain and acquire consumers or customers – and this is the force for the flywheel. 

On the other hand, your flywheel may slow down by friction. Anything that slows your customer acquisition and retention process might be considered as a friction in the inbound marketing methodology. 

The most common and fatal friction in the inbound flywheel is miscommunication between teams. So great communication and alignment between teams are the key factors to keep your marketing flywheel continuously spinning. 

When your marketing flywheel is set up based on the inbound methodology, your whole marketing functions such as sales, services may add forces and remove frictions in your marketing flywheel. And of course, all your business functions are also responsible for eliminating frictions from your marketing flywheel.

Inbound Marketing Strategies Using Flywheel Methodology

Implementing flywheel methodology in the inbound marketing strategies can help you grow your business faster in the most possible inbound ways. Now, we’ll discuss the strategies you’ll need to follow into your inbound methods such as attracting, engaging, and delighting phase to create automation of your flywheel spinning which can help your brand grow better. 

Strategies of attracting phase 

At first in your inbound strategies, you’ll need to create and publish content to attract your target audience. Your content could be anything such as images, videos, blog articles, or infographics that provide huge value. For example, you can create customer reviews, promotions and offer details, or a guide on DIY, or detailed information on how your product or service can solve their pain points. 

To attract your potential customers on a deeper level via inbound methods, you’ll need to optimize your content with an in-depth SEO strategy. 

Your SEO strategy will be a combination of – 

• Targeting specific keywords related to your business 
• The pain points you want to provide solutions to your customers 
• The ways how you want to help your potential customers 

This combined strategy will help your content to appear on the search engine result pages (SERPs) organically for the people who are looking for this type of information. 

Strategies of engaging phase

Engaging is nothing but making a long-term relationship. You’ll need to communicate with your existing customers or potential buyers, also known as leads, in such a way that encourages them to build a long-term relationship with you or your business. When using inbound methods, provide information about the value they will get from your business. 

Inbound strategies to engage the target audience may include nurturing leads with valuable emails, managing sales calls, and more. But don’t always pitch, instead provide solutions. Try to become a solution provider rather than a product seller so that your customers can trust you as an essential resource. 

When you’ll be able to solve your customers’ challenges, your deal will create a win-win situation for both your customers as well as your business. It’s very important to create mutually beneficial results so that your customers want to advocate for your business in the coming future. 

Strategies of delighting phase 

The purpose of the delighting phase is to make your customers completely satisfied and happy and to ensure customer support even after a long period of purchase. You’ll need to assist your consumers or customers at any point in time. 

You may incorporate useful and well-timed chatbots, surveys, help, and support, and request feedback from your customers to delight these people. Surveys and chatbots should be used very carefully and efficiently so that your customers get enough value. 

Social media listening is also a great way to delight your customers. You can allow your customers to ask questions, give feedback, and share their experiences and stories with your products or services. Reply to these communications with content that supports, helps, and engages followers – this proves you hear and care about your customers. 

Finally, the sign of an inbound method that’s focused on delighting customers is one that solves customers’ issues in any situation – whether your business gets an immediate benefit or not. Remember, your delighted customers are brand advocates of your business, therefore, handle all the queries both, small or big, with value and care.  

How to Use the Inbound Methodology in Marketing?

When you’re doing inbound marketing, your purpose is to attract new potential buyers to your business, engage with them with a high level of value, and delight each customer with a wow feeling. 

You’ll also need to create a sales and service system to keep your inbound flywheel spinning smoothly and help your business to grow. You might need different tools to perform the whole game. 

Here’re some useful tools you may consider in your inbound flywheel. 

Attracting tools –  

• Images 
• Videos 
• Blogs and articles 
• Content strategy 
• Social media content 

Engaging tools – 

• Follow up emails 
• Leads flow 
• Lead nurturing
• Chatbots 
• Marketing automation 

You can also check out – How to write sales follow-up emails here. 

Delighting tools – 

• Smart content 
• Conversational inbox 
• Email marketing 
• Attribution reporting 
• Marketing automation 

Next steps 

If you’re eager to grow better with the help of inbound marketing using flywheel methodology, our digital marketing team is ready to provide you complete support. 

Adopting our digital marketing service will help you grow your business more effectively and faster. 

Our marketing services include marketing automation, content strategy, customer service management, sales CRM, and many more. 

Our advanced SEO techniques will help you set up an effective inbound marketing strategy using flywheel methodology where you can add force and eliminate friction from your flywheel continuously to get results. 

Connect our team for information.