Figuring out the right marketing strategy begins with staying on top of the latest models to understand the typical customer’s journey. Today, many B2B companies are still relying on traditional funnel models. While the funnel model worked well for many years, relying on this method tends to lead to high acquisition costs and customer churn.
Deciding to switch to the flywheel model allows SaaS businesses to benefit from greater momentum that comes from letting the customer experience drive decisions. Flywheels prioritizes retention, engagement, and advocacy for sustainable growth that allows your company to stand out from the competition.
Working with a marketing agency can help you bridge the gap left behind by the funnel model by adopting and optimizing a flywheel strategy.
Why Funnels Fall Short In B2B
One of the biggest issues with the old funnel method is that its primary focus is on attracting customers while accepting that some might not return for future transactions. For B2B companies, repeat business is just as important as new customers. The one-time conversions that funnels encourage simply don’t maximize customer lifetime value.
Our marketing pros often find that sticking to the funnel method causes companies to misalign their sales and promotional materials which leads to inconsistent messaging. When you combine this with the poor on-boarding and engagement that poorly aligned marketing messages encourage, your company could face weakened customer retention numbers along with limited opportunities for up-selling.
The Flywheel Approach: How Agencies Can Help
Working with a marketing agency can help you accelerate the transition to using flywheels by optimizing these three critical stages:
1. Attract: Demand Generation & Thought Leadership
At this early stage in the flywheel model, our marketing agency can help you begin using SEO and content strategies to position your brand as an industry leader that provides high-value information.
Our team may also recommend using paid acquisition strategies such as targeted LinkedIn and Google Ad campaigns that bring in more qualified leads. Product-led growth (PLG) support during this stage may include marketing assets for free trials, using premium models and viral loops.
Your company will also want to focus on community building strategies. Planning webinars, setting up LinkedIn groups and encouraging social media engagement all work together to help drive more organic referrals to your business.
2. Engage: Nurturing & Conversion Optimization
The primary goal at this stage of the flywheel model is to focus on optimizing every customer interaction to nurture new leads and existing relationships. Lead scoring and automation come into play now by using CRM-driven workflows to qualify and interact with high-intent prospects.
Audience segmentation has become more important now, and your company can use personalized email sequences to retarget customers based on their user behavior and product interactions. You can also implement AI and chatbot strategies to enhance customer engagement with automated support in real time.
Marketing agencies can help your B2B company avoid common pitfalls at this stage of the flywheel model by ensuring that consistent messaging occurs across all customer touchpoints. Aligning sales and marketing strategies to fit your company’s mission and professional reputation ensures that every customer achieves the information they need for effective decision-making.
3. Delight & Retain: Customer Success and Advocacy
As the momentum of the flywheel model takes off, your marketing efforts pay off as customers experience delight and satisfaction with your company’s products and services. But, that doesn’t mean that you need to stop now.
Instead, the main goal to aim for now is to increase customer success to improve retention rates. Marketing agencies can assist you with planning for video tutorials, drop campaigns, interactive walkthroughs, and other types of on boarding and customer education experiences.
Our team can help with developing and structuring incentive-based loyalty and referral programs that turn users into advocates for your company’s products. Planning for continuous A/B testing allows your company to use data-driven optimization at this stage to refine messaging and future experiences with established users.
Real-World Examples of Flywheels In Action
Marketing agencies are naturally flocking toward using the flywheel model, and you can see the results in real-world case studies of customer retention. One example is the Notion Mastery course that currently serves thousands of students.
Notion pro, Marie Poulin, uses flywheel marketing strategies that include hosting webinars and online summits that attract people to landing pages that prompt them to join the email list. For students who are currently enrolled, the program also includes on-boarding email sequences that increase the overall lifetime value for the customers and extend their delight.
How An Established Marketing Agency Can Implement the Flywheel Model For You
Our team can walk your company through each step of implementing the most effective marketing model we’re using today. After analyzing your current strategy’s performance, we’ll take these steps to begin using flywheels to help your sales take off.
•Audit the current funnel performance and identify common churn points
•Develop a new content strategy that fuels demand generation and organic growth
•Optimize lead nurturing workflows along with automation to skyrocket engagement rates
•Build retention-driven campaigns that increase up-sells and advocacy
•Monitor all key metrics and refine the flywheel for continuous improvement
Take the Next Step Toward Driving SaaS Growth for Your Company
The future of SaaS growth isn’t just about attracting new customers and waiting to see what happens. Instead, a marketing agency can help you take control of the customer journey by helping your company transition from the funnel to the flywheel using proven strategies.
Let’s start your next marketing plan off right by building a sustainable growth engine for your B2B business. Start with a flywheel audit today and discover just how much growth the future holds for your company.
