Don’t reinvent the wheel!
The idiom said this, but Hubspot is still using this tactic and it’s creating viral buzz recently.
Most experienced digital marketers (especially people who are working for retail chains, O2O businesses), all know Customer Buying Journey is a repeated circle. This circle usually starts from Aware, then Consider – Attend/Engage – Book/Pay – Experience Product/Service – Repeat – Refer. Finally, it will return to connect the tail with the start at the Aware step for a potential customer. Or for the same customer but with a higher level of Aware, aware of another product or service (Upsale, cross-sale), to start another round of Customer Buying Journey again.
Besides this, another concept is mixed in Flywheel, but very few people aware. It’s Omni Channel (OC). The heart of OC is to create a seamless customer experience at multi-channels from offline to online, from desktop/laptop to mobile or smart devices. This means Customer Experience is also the main focus of OC, like Flywheel. There is a key issue of OC that many OC marketers easily forget: OC is not only about improving channels’ experience, touch points’ performance but also about connecting. It’s about connecting all these channels together to generate the whole combined power. We can see OC’s channels as spokes. These spokes if scatters everywhere, of course, can’t form a wheel to move your firm business forward as if they’re plugged into one center cap bore, together with a rim lip.
Hubspot wisely combines the unclear Customer Buying Journey (as the rim lip) with Omni Channel’s spokes together to create one Flywheel with Customer Experience playing a role of center hub. Moreover, they linked the movement of the wheel with Growth to create a perfect FlyWheel. This flywheel will create the momentum to move your firm car business quickly if you can speed up the rotations. In this case, your customers or potential customers can experience your products/services/touch points more times, repeatedly at different channels.
Another point, we should ask why Hubspot selected the image of Flywheel but not another type of wheel? The definition of a flywheel is not a normal wheel as we know. Flywheel is a storage wheel to accumulate energy created from rolling rotations to create momentum for the whole system. This energy is proportional with the rotations and the size of the wheel. The more rolling the wheel is, the bigger size the wheel is, the more energy the Flywheel can generate and store (leads, customers, revenue). The Flywheel effect was first coined in Good to Great book of Jim Collins. This wheel’s rotation image can be also linked with a cash-flow c
ycle which is loved by most CEO/CFO.
ycle which is loved by most CEO/CFO. However, there is a warning for startups or corporates with new products/services. Your flywheel should be good enough before being speeded up with more rotations. If this wheel has only two spokes, doesn’t even meet a minimum of three spokes, or tires don’t have enough air. Then the more you speed up, the more you’re getting into troubles. The more customers experience your product/service, the more negative energy your system stores. Until one point the wheel will be broken or the whole car will be out of balance, run into the swamp and get stuck there, sometimes forever.
In a nutshell, having a wheel is not enough, even this is a flywheel. Every company needs a business car with safety and stable design with a speed up ability to reach the final destination. So we always need good drivers and also remember to fuel petrol and lubricant. Should also not forget to do maintenance work frequently to avoid the case where only a screw was not tightened enough, the car goes out of the highway.
* Hubspot: for those who don’t know about Hubspot, it’s a company providing automation tools for sales, marketing and CRM. Hubspot is known for it’s infamous blog blog.hubspot.com with content marketing. This blog has tons of good posts about sales and marketing guides, tips and tricks… The blog is also the main sales driver of Hubspot with millions of visits from salesmen, marketers and decision makers.
* Inbound Marketing: a concept is “invented” by Hubspot. Inbound is also my favorite type of marketing to use basically to grow-hack in the online space. Inbound Marketing is all about the way to do marketing by sitting in one place and try to attract customers to run into your owned marketing channels (website, app, blog, email, fb…). Inbound marketing is totally opposite with advertising which is burning money at external channels, such as Google Adwords, Facebook Ads.