The Marketing Funnel is as old as.... well to be honest I have no idea how old that concept is. As I transitioned from my broadcast and digital media storytelling roles to marketing roles, the concept of the Funnel was introduced and delivered as the gospel of Marketing 101. "Develop a good marketing funnel and you will be successful!"
Hero Storytelling at the top to lure people in, knowledge and value propositions in the middle to move people further down the funnel, and then empowerment knowledge at the bottom to convince them your product/service is the best and they buy. Once they buy, you've won.
The thing about a funnel is they are designed to capture a lot of materials at the top and then dump them out at the bottom. Pour a bunch of liquid into the top of a funnel, it comes out in a nice tidy stream at the bottom and then the funnel is empty.
So you capture the attention of a lot of people at the top of the funnel, you move some of them through to the middle and a few of those people move to the bottom of the funnel to make the purchase. The key is that you have to keep the top of that funnel full with lots of potential customers so you're constantly having to run to the well to refill the jugs of water.
That's an awful lot of work and expense to go out and find more water to keep the top of the funnel full.
A wheel, built around support and customer retention in your brand keeps customers in your ecosystem. Keeping them in your ecosystem allows those customers to become your evangelicals on the ground, spreading your message outward and carrying your marketing dollars further.
My Marketing Flywheel has 5 milestones, Pre-Sale, Sale, Post-Sale Retention, Second Sale, Retention Referral.
In the Pre-Sale phase, a customer is on a journey of Discovery. They want to know who the company is, what do they represent, and do they make a good product or provide a good service. This may take 1 minute or multiple weeks depending on the product and how quickly the customer needs the product.
A combination of Paid Advertising and Organic Content serves well for the Pre-Sale, Discovery phase. Organic content can set the stage so that when a paid advertisement appears later in front of the same user it triggers the purchase. Conversely, organic content reinforces paid advertisements by providing more context and information to support what the ad promises. You can do this phase solely with paid or organic, but the combination of the two is much more effective.
After the Sale, the customer wants to be Empowered and Appreciated. They bought the product, they paid for their service and you were very nice and excited to get them to the sale. Now that the sale is complete, they want you to continue to be excited to have them as an ongoing customer. It starts with proper follow-up by your sales team with respectful inquiries to customer satisfaction.
Then organic content that helps the customer get the best out of their product, assists them with maintenance and even repairs when things might go wrong, and offers ways to upgrade, modify and improve the product adds tremendous value in the eyes of a customer. There will be other entities throughout the internet to provide this same information so why bother with the expense and time to create this material? Because your own materials show the customer you appreciate their trust in your brand and you keep the customer in your ecosystem.
Post-Sale Retention validates the customer's purchase and their growing trust in your brand. Organic and paid advertisements reveal the larger community of users for the same product or service. Stories from real customers reinforce that the quality of the product or service is good because 'I'm part of this larger community whom all agree this is a good company. I don't have a reason to look elsewhere for this product or service.'
That fully sets up your Second Sale which leads directly into Retention Referral. See once you get to that second sale, the customer is fully committed to your brand and is ready to refer you to others. That first sale is the 'trial purchase.' They bought your product or service and while they might be happy with the initial purchase, they're generally not going to go out and recommend it right away. They need to see how the company treats them after the sale. But once you get that second sale, that customer is fully in your ecosystem and ready to evangelize your message to their social networks.
As we all know, there is no marketing more powerful than honest, word of mouth referrals.
Organic content that the customer can share to reinforce and validate their experience is key here. This is generally content that spans all aspects of the Customer Journey from Discovery to Empowerment to Validation. The customer's network can see not only how good the product is, but they get the sense that the company takes care of you after the sale. Through data tracking, you can then trigger paid advertisements to trigger that final move to the first sale.
The most important key in a Content Marketing Strategy to create the Flywheel is Engagement. You must, MUST have a dedicated Social Media Director/Manager to monitor all social feeds and engage with the audience. Merely posting all of this content without engaging the audience will have a fraction of the impact as actually engaging. That's further validation of a company that cares about the customers after the sale.
Don't put so much effort into a funnel that you completely ignore the customer once they've gotten through to the sale and you have to start with cold leads all over again. The Marketing Flywheel keeps warm leads feeding through an ever-growing body of retained customers who continually bring new potential customers into your company's orbit. Potential new customers who already have some trust in your brand because they were introduced by someone they knew.
It's more work on the front end to create content and set up a marketing team and strategy for a flywheel to retain customers. But once that wheel starts to spin, the payback and growth for a company can be tremendous.